The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

by Seth Godin

This is what happens when you race to the bottom. It requires that you see humans as resources, not as people, and that the factory (in whatever form) use that resource for maximum short-term efficiency.

44. How Do I Get People to Do What I Want? Perhaps the better question is: How do I create the conditions for other people to do work that matters? Management is the practice of using power and authority to get what we want. To get the burgers flipped, the packages delivered, the phones answered. Leadership is the art of creating something significant.

The leader understands that a commitment to significance is a generous act, but it also brings apparent risk and real fear to everyone involved. Fear that’s wily and subtle, clever and persistent. When we embrace the mutual commitments of significance, we create the conditions for a shared understanding that our work, our actual work, is to dance with the fear. And dancing with fear requires significance, tension, and the belief that we’re doing something that matters.

47. Searching for Kokoro Like most important words, translating a concept like the Japanese term kokoro is difficult. It means heart, spirit, mind, and self. It’s the inner and outer expression of who we are and what we’re capable of. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, the word is likely to resonate. It’s an expression of our personhood, the dignity and connection we seek in the things we do and the way we’re understood. To be able to find kokoro in the way we spend our days is magical, and to give someone the opportunity to bring their self to work is generous and powerful. In this moment, kokoro isn’t simply what we want. It’s also what our organizations need.

Rising Tide doesn’t exist to wash cars. Washing cars is merely an opportunity to make a difference for their employees and their customers. Rising Tide spends far more time and energy on training, on customer service, and on their employees than any other car wash I know of. And as a result, the customers return and the business thrives. Their retention is five times the industry average, and each location washes more cars and makes more money than most of its (industrial) competitors.

The people on the front lines are people. They are your brand. And they are the point.

Service, for me, for us, is not a transactional act. It’s not a trick we undertake to get people to give us their money. Yes, of course, great service has strategic value. Every day we go out with the belief that we need to re-earn our customer’s trust and make it worthwhile for people to want to spend time and money with us. But really, service is a way of being in the world. Ari Weinzweig, cofounder, Zingermans

Find the nerds, the motivated, and the overlooked, and figure out what they need to thrive. That exploration will reveal what others have needed as well but didn’t care enough to speak up about. When Rising Tide optimizes the workflow for autistic employees, they help their neurotypical employees thrive as well. When d.light builds a product for some of the poorest families in the world, they get better at serving people who are more privileged. When By the Way Bakery focuses on people who don’t eat wheat or dairy, they end up building a kitchen and production operation that is more accessible and appealing to all of their customers.

Part of the challenge of leading a significant organization is getting clear about the right proxies.

Significant work requires us to make commitments and to keep them. To create change. To explore the liminal space on our way from here to there. This is difficult, and when the song of safety is hard to hear, it can be challenging to move forward.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s a willingness to do things that are so important they’re worth doing even (especially) when we’re feeling the fear. Vulnerability in conversation is the power of speaking about what you see and believe, even when you’re afraid. This is the opposite of weakness.

52. Fear Is Easy Fear is an easy tool, but it rarely builds a resilient organization. That’s because fear is most useful as a tool for compliance: “The best way to avoid being fired is to do what I say.” All the boss needs to do is fire a few people to make that really clear. The problem is that doing what the boss says doesn’t scale very well, and it doesn’t work in a complex, fast-changing world. All of us are smarter than any of us. In any field where skills are valuable and switching jobs is possible, the employees you need the most have options. That’s why creating a culture of fear and compliance is a dead end. Great work creates more value than compliant work.

The decision becomes much easier when we realize that leaders aren’t managers with a fancy title. Leaders are planting the seeds for generations of impact to come, regardless of whether those people work for your organization or another one. What happens in that conference room today will change the people who were there. Or it won’t. It depends on who called the meeting.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that humans have three ways to spend their time. The labor required to feed ourselves and survive. The work of doing a craft that we are proud of. And the action of organization and possibility.

Milton Friedman argued that every organization must be profit-centric. That its only job is to maximize shareholder value. Others have argued that it’s possible to be customer-centric, using customer service as a proxy for profits. By delighting customers, they contend, we make it more likely that we’ll increase profits. The hustle behind this is revealed when some companies trade customer delight for short-term profit as soon as they hit a certain size. Significant organizations are team-centric. Their goal is to make a change happen, and to do that with and for a group of people who care about making an impact. That’s why the smallest viable audience is the engine of marketing in our modern world, and why enrollment from the team is so much more valuable than being a convenient place to work.

We can reclaim our nature, human nature, and seek to reconnect and to make things better.

Enrollment, mutual connection, federation, recognized dignity, and the journey of increase: together these create the conditions for a powerful, resilient way forward. And yet we fail to see that creating these conditions is up to us, and that if we fall short in prioritizing this work, we will ultimately revert to top-down management and the cynical low expectations it brings with it.

We’ve reached a point where we’re shifting from How do I get my employees to do what I want? to How do I create the conditions where the team can make the impact it desires?

59. What People Want Safety is first. It’s impossible to grow, to connect, or to lead if we are under threat or feel the ground shifting beneath us. Next come affiliation and status, an alternating dance of vaguely related emotions. Affiliation is being part of something, fitting in, being connected. And status is simply who eats lunch first. Our place in the order of things. But the real desire is significance. To do something that matters. To be missed if we’re gone. The universal desire to achieve dignity and be seen.

When confronting the possibility of change, tension arises. Tension is the feeling of wanting to be in two places at once. Often that’s the place of safety, where we know everything will be as it was, versus the place of significance, where we can increase our affiliation and increase or maintain our status. Tension is not something to avoid. You can’t walk outside on a sunny day without casting a shadow, and you cannot create significance without encountering tension. The partner of tension is enrollment. The desire to be right here, right now. Voluntary enlistment in the cause, not for money but for emotional and cultural benefit.

Money doesn’t motivate us enough to create the magic a team needs. That sort of work comes from intrinsic, not extrinsic forces.

Cookie cutters are great for cookies, not for people.

It’s our boat, not my boat. If we come together and hold hands and support each other, we’ll be much stronger. Todd Labrador, master canoe builder

Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, reminds us, “There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking.”

If anything but HERE is seen as incorrect, dangerous, or momentary, it’s difficult to build an organization set on significance. Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were yesterday. In fact, the uncertainty and dislocation are the point, not a temporary inconvenience.

A significant job requires us to be in two places at once. Our work is to acknowledge the present situation while working hard to change the cir...

“Everything will be okay once we get through this” is a common enough sentiment. But perhaps it’s more useful to remind ourselves “everything is okay now.” If we define that liminal state as normal, and normal as okay, well, here we are.

What are we asking folks to do? At Netflix, Reed Hastings didn’t ask each employee to reinvent how the entire film industry would work. Instead, he and his team broke the problem into many smaller components, and then different groups claimed responsibility for each piece. Each element of the project was insanely difficult, challenging the structure of a sclerotic industry, happily stuck in its ways, and also the laws of physics, the structure of the internet, and the giants of telecom. No one could have built the Netflix streaming system alone. But together, as you can see any night of the week, it was a doable project. The leader doesn’t have to be able to do every element of the project; they simply need to figure out how to assemble a team that does.

66. Significant Work Is Project Work A job that is repetitive, easily measured, and consistent lends itself to industrialization. The pressure is on to make it cheap. But when we think of the important moments in our work life, we think of projects. A beginning, filled with possibility. A middle, with challenges and insights. And an ending, bittersweet, with thoughts of what we did and who we did it with, along with ideas on how to do it better next time. This can be treating a patient, putting a new dish on the menu, or launching a new company. The scale isn’t as important as the rhythm. We need the stability that day-to-day consistency can bring. But we find significance in the projects, large and small.

If the work can be queued up, processed in a cookie-cutter fashion, and inspected for defects, then it benefits from industrial management. But if the work involves novelty, innovation, discernment, judgment, or care, then industrial management is a poor substitute for enrollment, skill, and leadership. What sort of work do you need done? What we make isn’t widgets: we make decisions.

Take responsibility and give away credit.

Systems work is people work.

Bees aren’t self-organizing. They’re simply organized, aware of what the other bees are doing and each bee’s role in the journey of the hive. They have a culture of peer-to-peer awareness, not top-down authority. The same is true of all resilient, decentralized human organizations. It sounds obvious, but it’s rare, because it means giving up the feeling of control.

The water is a heavy substance, practically a solid mass. We use the water to leverage ourselves and our boat forward. We don’t change the lake that much. The lake responds to our effort by changing us.

It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us, but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. gabrielle zevin

A significant organization needs employees who are enrolled in the journey and willing to do this sort of work. In turn, employees who are willing to do this sort of work need an organization that won’t revert to an industrial management mindset, one without regard for the people who built it. The Catch-22 is obvious. You can’t have one without the other, but everyone hesitates to go first. Given that the number of people seeking to make a commitment is far greater than the number of organizations willing to enable those commitments, it seems to me that the organization needs to go first. To not only state the commitments, but to honor them when it’s difficult to do so. Especially then.

When we rebuild work around significance, we change the promise. We require bosses to produce a different set of rules, and we invite workers to bring different expectations, energy, and commitment to their jobs.

74. The Significance Commitments We’re here to make change happen We are acting with intention Dignity is worth investing in Tension is not the same as stress Mistakes are the way forward Take responsibility, give credit Criticize the work, not the worker Turnover is okay Mutual respect is expected Do the reading Get to vs. have to Standards instead of obedience Show your work Make it better Celebrate real skills

there’s to be a new product, an announcement, or even a meeting, we must be clear about why.

Because change is the metric, we need to acknowledge the “who.” We cannot (and don’t even want to) change everyone, so “Who is it for?” is a question we’re comfortable asking. If we keep measuring the wrong things, we’ll keep getting the things we don’t want.

76. We Are Acting with Intention Instead of “I’m just doing my job” or “Is this what the boss wants?,” we are committed to being intentional about our decisions, our metrics, and our interactions. Each meeting should last exactly as long as it takes to deliver on the intention of the meeting. And if a meeting doesn’t have an intention, it should be canceled. Behavior that harms the mission of the organization is likely to disappear if we’re required to announce our intentions.

More than a raise, people seek a place to belong. A place to see and be seen, to do their work in a way they’re proud of.

When people feel seen and are given the chance to make a difference, they often do. Supporting human dignity is more than a moral obligation. It’s also a competitive advantage.

78. Tension Is Not the Same as Stress Stress is the unhappy feeling of wanting two things at the same time. To stay and to go. To speak up and to shrink back. To get this done and to get that done. When we’re stressed, our brains undermine our well-being and we’re unlikely to find flow, joy, or significance. But tension? Tension is the feeling that leads to forward motion. Tension is a symptom of Pressfield’s Resistance. Tension is a countdown, a deadline, or a budget. Tension is the process of finding an answer to a riddle or the question that opens up a possibility. We know how to relieve tension. We can do it with reassurance, time, and insulation. We can pamper our guests, ease up on our requirements, or settle for average. But tension always accompanies change, and change is the hallmark of significance. The tension is good. It’s a sign we’re onto something. And tension is a tool. We can use it to make change happen.

If you’re not doing things that don’t work, you’re not trying hard enough.

But the org chart is brittle. And it can create three problems: 1. People who are just doing their job might end up doing horrible things. When we ask employees to suspend their own judgment and simply do what the boss says, then we’re relying on one person with power to have control over others. 2. The deniability of “just following orders” isn’t always about committing a crime, though. It can be an airplane stranded on the runway for hours, with little attention paid to passengers, or a company that simply waits, quietly, for the manager to tell them what to do. 3. Centralized decision-making is usually slow and ineffective when it’s time to offer action and solutions to local, decentralized customer needs, particularly in fast-moving environments. If employees are unable to act without direction, they won’t act without direction.

And the companion to taking responsibility is relentlessly giving away credit. When we offer others a chance to shine, they’re more likely to connect, to enroll in the journey, and to join in the next chance they have to do so.

From the time we are toddlers, criticism is personalized. It takes patience and wisdom to separate the project in front of us from the person who created it, and the shortcut of personal attacks is far too common. As a result, we hesitate to ship the work, to respond to the work of others, and most of all, to seek out more feedback. Feedback feels like criticism, and criticism feels fatal. The thing is, feedback is a gift. Feedback transformed into generous and useful criticism is priceless. Organizations that understand how to improve the work without undermining the worker create more value.

But the feedback that actually matters is in the marketplace. If we make something that works for our customers, we get the chance to do it again.

And the same is true for the work of making change on behalf of others. Feedback—from the marketplace and from our coworkers—is the only way to get better. But useful feedback is not the same as personal criticism. We care about the change that’s produced, not who made the work.