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today we're talking with Wharton professor drew carton about his new research titled I'm not mopping the
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floors I'm putting a man on the moon how NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness
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of work by changing the meaning of work thanks for joining us drew thanks for having me so what led you to study
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meaningfulness of work so I had a long-standing interest in a problem related to how leaders tend to
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communicate about the organization's ultimate goals it's been well subscribed
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at this point that that one of the most inexpensive and effective ways that leaders can motivate employees is by
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articulating a compelling depiction of where the organization's ultimately trying to go yet the empirical evidence
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on that particular tactic is actually surprisingly mixed on some occasions it's worked quite well it's yielded the
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expected effects it's motivated employees led them to transcendent achievements that they wouldn't
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otherwise be able to attain but in other contexts it hasn't had that intended
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effect and in fact sometimes it's actually backfired because employees oftentimes will hear lofty rhetoric
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that's used by leaders and will think to themselves that you know the work I'm
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doing right now doesn't actually seem to be very aligned or connected to these
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grant conquests that you are reporting it to serve and so actually ends up leading to a form of cynicism and
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pessimism and actually can end up demotivating them so so I became interested in and what was going on with
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that the this this tactic that was rhetorical tactic that we would expect to work effectively yet wasn't working
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effectively at least as consistently as we would so you think so I started to probe the literature in
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this area a bit more and it dawned on me that it could relate to a fairly interesting paradox that ties to
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cognitive psychology or so cognitive psychological findings specifically if you think about the type of work that
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you're doing every day most people do every day it tends to be fairly circumscribed and clearly defined
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concrete small and scale and usually is is very time constraint and time delimited so you might have something to
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do by 5:00 p.m. or by 11 p.m. a deadline or something by the end of the week and it also tends to be
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it also tends to be done in small groups or people working alone yet the types of
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purposes the types of organizational missions that people find most inspiring tend to be quite grand in scale so they
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tend to be timeless or if not send a set on an indefinite time scale it tend to be quite abstract in the sense that they
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they focus on the essential central merits of what the organization is trying to achieve rather than any
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specific concrete situation that an employee might find him or herself in so for example one company has has the
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vision of becoming a world's most customer centric company another company health care company has a vision of of
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spreading care compassion and well-being across the world so these these these visions are very grand in scale and
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they're they're lofty and they're timeless but they don't have a clear
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connection to the type of work that I do every day and so I think what what really struck me was this paradox that
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as as a purpose and as a mission becomes inherently in and of itself more meaningful it actually starts to feel
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more disconnected from the kind of work that I do every day as an employee in a given organization and so that's when I
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decided to delve into this case at NASA which was a period of time where there were many reports of employees who said
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that that that period in their lives was included were involved more meaningful work than I had ever experienced before
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and whatever experience again regardless of what they were doing yeah it's interesting because even even people who
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were quite far removed from the the you know the the famous goal of landing a man on the moon people who are far
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removed from that for example electrical engineers and then of course this very famous legend that that is in the title
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of the paper of a custodian mopping the floors even they felt reported feeling an incredible connection to this
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ultimate goal and would often actually define their work everyday in terms of that ultimate goal rather than talking
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about unfixing electrical wiring or I'm stitching spacesuits or I'm mopping
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the floors they would actually identify their work as I'm putting a man on the
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moon and so it was it was a strikingly unique period of time where many people is a 400,000 person organization many
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people across the entire organization had these kinds of perceptions and it was also a period where there was a lot
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of very rich information that was available in terms of leader communication tactics and and then how
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employees were experiencing their work a lot of internal memos and documents that
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allowed me to dive into to get a really rich sense of what was going on at that point in time so it's an inductive study
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yeah so it was an inductive study in the sense that most most research that we do
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here at Wharton it and that I do involves crafting a set of hypotheses and then collecting data to test them
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this was diving into a rich very detailed analysis of a single case and then and then trying to induce or get a
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sense of what some key relationships are between how leaders communicate about the organization's ultimate purpose and
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how employees perceived their work it's a little bit of a little bit of a departure from the norm at least from
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type of research that's that's done around here but it allows you to get a
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rich sense of the the process and how employees perceptions shift across time so when you're dough into all this
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information what did you find so I'd say the core takeaway that I found most
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striking and unites a lot of the core findings is that and this is a also a bit of a departure from conventional
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wisdom so the conventional wisdom around what how leaders should orient themselves when communicating about the
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organization's ultimate goals is that they should be visionaries so they should paint a grand picture of what it
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is that we're all trying to achieve this this destination that we're all trying
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to strive to reach and what I found is that's absolutely essential it's critical that leaders do to picked a
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compelling picture of where ultimately we want to go but just as important and also more time-consuming and requiring
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even more investment is that they communicate about how each employee and the organization can get a sense of how
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their work connects organization's mission or vision in that connection that process of connection
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building took more steps and was more time-intensive and more complex than the process of just selling somebody about
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the importance and the and the beauty of this ultimate goal that we're trying to
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achieve together in some senses that was the easy part the hard part is helping people see a connection between their
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work and the organization's mission so what surprised you the most when you dug
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into all of this yeah I think there were a few surprises and they mostly revolved
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around the specific communication tactics that leaders used to help employees see that connection one that I
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found quite remarkable was was you know it's it's pretty well known at this
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point that that articulating a common goal or a common purpose has powerful implications especially for groups
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collectives and organizations because it galvanizes collective energy it gives people a sense of a rallying point a
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common cause that they can all rally around that the coalesce is their energy and effort and in some senses can build
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what are called social contagion effects where people one person's excitement
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spreads to another person and also is a boon for coordination because it gives us a sense of what we're trying to
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achieve as an organization but what I found it was also interesting was Kennedy's ability to articulate a common
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purpose was highly useful for individuals working alone because it allowed them to get a better sense of
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how their work connected to the organization's ultimate aims and the reason is again drawing from cognitive
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psychology is actually fairly straightforward when you think about it you know the kind of work that we're
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doing every day a lot of times we might look down the hall at what our colleagues are doing or maybe working
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with somebody across the country on the same project and what we'll often do is
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we'll look to see what other people are doing and we'll piece together what
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they're doing visa vie what I'm doing and when it turns out that that without
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exception every time I look to what my coworkers doing I recognize that they're channeling
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their effort toward the same end goal that I am then it leads this process of mental dissemble II and assembly where I
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get a sense that there's this broader pause and we're all working on a critical
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piece of that puzzle so I'm working on a small piece but an irreplaceable and
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essential piece of that puzzle and I can see how it fits in within this broader organizational system and because of
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that I can see how my work connects to the organization's aims if you have just
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two or more purposes even if you just have two organizational purposes this starts to break down because oftentimes
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we'll look to what our coworkers are doing our colleagues are doing and we won't do that process of disentangling
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what we're doing relative to them and then and then putting it back together
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seeing this this puzzle in this puzzle metaphor actually was used by some NASA employees to as an illustration of how
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they made sense of their work so the surprise here is that articulating a common goal was not just effective for a
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galvanizing collective energy but also for helping individuals see how they were connected to the organization's
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Ames and Kennedy did this by initially NASA had three overarching missions to to establish superior technology in
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space to attest to establish preeminence in space relative to the Soviet Union and
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to advance science by exploring a solar system and he decided on his own once he
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became president NASA was founded in 1958 but he came present in the early 60s he decided on his own to restrict
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all of NASA's attention just to that third ultimate aspiration of advancing science by exploring the solar system
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and then of course we all know what he did after that where he made an announcement to Congress in one of the
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most famous speeches to date in which he he talked about how we're gonna actually
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refocus our energy on a specific incarnation of that broader goal which is to land a man on the moon before the
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decade is out and return him safely to earth so if you had to distill this down just a list of or some key takeaways for
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leaders what would you say sure so well one is the as I just mentioned the criticality of
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articulating a common goal not just to galvanize collective energy but also to help people build a connection between
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their work in the organization's highest names another critical piece of the
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puzzle again always keeping in mind the the importance of not only selling a grand vision but helping people see a
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connection between their work in that vision the usage of sub-goals so Kennedy had a
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very unique way of using sub-goals that was pretty surprising so usually sub-goals are thought of as ways to
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break down a broader goal that could be daunting or intimidating and on a scale that is not it's not tractable to try to
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pursue this goal in and of itself it's it's to break that goal down into
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smaller bite-sized pieces what Karl Weick would call small wins and to focus on each increment one at a time in
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piecemeal fashion and what Kennedy did is he actually took a completely different approach rather than thinking
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about having sub goals be a way to divert your attention away from this broader goal just focus on one bit at a
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time he thought of sub goals as a way to actually let people focus even more of their attention and effort on the
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ultimate goal in this case the the goal of landing on the moon and he did this by by appending conventional wisdom at
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that time and even to date most people tend to set and tend to think of sub goals as better as they increase in
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numbers so a greater number of sub goals is good because it allows us to monitor
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progress more effectively it makes the the problems that were tackling more manageable Kennedy took the opposite
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approach he articulated at first just three sub goals to put a person into orbit to perform rendezvous and docking
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missions in space and then to ultimately reach lunar orbit prior to landing on the moon and these these sub goals ended
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up being the objectives of the three space programs first the Gemini program in the early 60s then the sorry the
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mercury program in the early 60s then the Gemini program in the mid-60s then the Apollo program in the late 60s and
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what happened was employees would they saw a plausible path to the goal to the goal of landing on a moon at first they
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thought it was impossible even Neil Armstrong the first person to walk on the moon in the early 60s said that he
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thought this was an impossible goal and they would never achieve it so it helped
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them realize or at least think that the goal was plausibly achievable but it was
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simple enough of a pathway that they didn't get completely diverted away from
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the goal landing on the moon and so it remained in the forefront of their minds and it retained its motivational power
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people didn't lose sight of what they were ultimately trying to achieve and so
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they continued to be invigorated by it and so this is an example of how to think about a
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conventional idea setting sub goals we all do it we do at work we do it oftentimes in our own lives for example
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let's say I'm trying to run a marathon I'm going to set a series of incremental
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goals number of miles I'll run each week and so we all make use of sub goals but
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this is a very different way of thinking about the uses of sub goals it's to pave
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the path to focus our attention on the end goal rather than to divert our attention away from it great it seems
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like a vast area to study are you working on anything that's related to this yeah so right now I have a
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concurrent line of research that that speaks to a a an exercise that Kennedy engaged in that was also quite effective
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which is translating the the abstract mission of advancing science by exploring the solar system to this
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concrete goal this time delimited goal of landing a man on the moon before the decade is out that that kind of twist
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where leaders focus on redirect their attention and redirect everyone's attention from an abstract overarching
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mission to a more concrete instantiation of the mission is extraordinarily difficult in my research I found that
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that vast majority of leaders actually don't do that they tend to communicate
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abstractly and this was very useful because what it does is it is it makes people feel as if the goal that they're
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striving to achieve is closer it's more proximal it literally is it's it's more
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proximal in time because it's going to elapse at some point and it's also in
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this case of the moon it was a tangible palpable goal it's a concrete goal you
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walk outside of your door at night and look in the night sky and see the moon and as deke Slayton said you know it was
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hard not to stay motivated when every time you looked up in the sky you had a reminder of what it is that you're
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striving to achieve so so this kind of transformation of an abstract principle into a concrete manifestation in reality
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is extraordinarily difficult and so I have a line of research that that can help identify a what we call a nudge
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which is just a way of tweaking the way that we tend to think about the goals that were articulating and so that we
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can think about a slightly too anyway so that our our first instinct is to articulate a concrete organizational
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objective that we can all rally around rather than an abstract general principle one caveat though and this was
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something else that Kennedy did remarkably well is that he he focused everybody's attention on a concrete goal
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but it was a concrete goal that that retained a sense of gravity and challenge and ambition that could then
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allow people to cast it as a symbol that embodied the organization's ultimate
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grand abstract ideals and so in this sense and people didn't think that they
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were just striving to land on the moon they also felt like just just by landing on the moon that they actually were were
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realizing these abstract ideals and Kennedy very carefully crafted his rhetoric to make people feel this way so
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he would he would actually talk about abstract principles as if they existed in the physical world so for example he
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would say he would say we want to go to the moon because knowledge and peace are
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there and if you think about the literal phrasing of it's pretty fascinating
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knowledge and peace are on the moon it's something that of course is impossible
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an abstract idea existing in a physical location but what it did when he and other NASA leaders continually
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reinforced the the idea that these two concepts were inextricably linked the physical and the abstract it allowed
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them to cast the the moon as a symbol of what they were trying to achieve in the
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abstract sense rather than just an impressive physical feat of Engineering and so in think about one of the most
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famous one-liners of all time Neil Armstrong talking about you know it's just not just one small step for a man
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it's one giant leap for mankind right there he's actually connecting one
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very in some senses trivial human action of just taking one step to this broader
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idea of advancing science one giant leap for mankind so so that's the twist is is
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getting leaders to to articulate more concrete objectives yet without those objectives living the losing the
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gravitas that allows them to be Rican Street gang the organization's ultimate
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aspiration great well thanks so much for joining us today yeah thanks so much for having me
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thank you you [Music]