Make Work More Meaningful

Author: John Coleman

Curiosity is critical to professional success. A curious mind will spot and solve problems while being unafraid to try something new. It will seek out the insights of others and open itself to expanded thinking. A curious person will never succumb to apathy, instead pushing consistently for growth, innovation, and improvement. Anyone seeking to build a successful career must embrace curiosity.

Curiosity isn’t just essential to professional advancement—it’s central to crafting purpose and meaning at work. We all want to feel that our work is meaningful, and we all have an opportunity to make it so. But it takes curiosity—about ourselves, our work, and the people we work with—to unlock deeper purpose each day.

In my book the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose, I outline four essential ways in which any person can better pursue professional purpose: craft your work, make work a craft, connect work to service, and invest in positive relationships. Engaging in these four simple practices makes any job more meaningful. But each of us must embrace curiosity to fully mine these practices for meaning.

Craft your work

One of the best ways to enhance the meaning you get from work is through job crafting—the art of making small changes to your work life to turn the job you have into the job you want. The idea is that, by making small changes, you can tailor your work to your unique passions, personality, and interests in a way that maximizes its meaning to you and others. My favorite example is Curtis Jenkins, a Dallas bus driver who managed to revolutionize his position by creating what reporters called a “yellow bus utopia” while changing hundreds of lives.

Curiosity is a necessary precondition for job crafting. It starts with a self-evaluation. Ask yourself questions such as, What am I good at (really)? What do I love to do? What makes me happy on the job? A thoughtful self-understanding explored deeply and with an open mind can provide the foundation upon which job crafting is built.

Next, apply this self-awareness to the job:

• What elements of my job could I tweak to be more meaningful for me and more impactful for others?

• Can what I currently do be done differently?

• Is my job, as structured, solving the most important problems—for both the organization and those it serves—in the best ways?

To get started, list the core people you serve and the outcomes of your job that help serve them well. Then reflect on your current tasks and see if there are ways to serve those people as well or better by doing things differently. You may find ways to craft your work that are both better for them and more meaningful for you.

Make work a craft

The second way to make work more meaningful is to make it a craft. For much of history, people practiced professions intergenerationally. Trades like farming, carpentry, and cobblery might be passed down generation to generation in a family; a person would painstakingly perfect their craft over a lifetime. This quest for perfection and constant improvement created the most memorable achievements in history—from the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel to breakthroughs in genetics and the elegant simplicity of the original Mac.

This commitment to craftsmanship offers a sense of purpose in and of itself. As I explain in my book, we all gain meaning from work well done. There’s intrinsic motivation and purpose in knowing that we’ve put our best efforts into something, that we’ve honed a craft in a way that challenges us.

But how can we find opportunities for craft in our modern jobs? After all, building financial models or leading a team in a factory can feel a bit distant from Michelangelo’s masterworks or the genius of Steve Jobs. But craft is not about historical impact. It’s about self-improvement and a quest to push the limits of our own performance—to take on new challenges and achieve something hard and unique. When I was an analyst at McKinsey, this looked like building beautiful Excel models with elegant formulas that could last clients years. I did this whether the partners noticed or not because I took pride in challenging and improving myself. In your job, it’s something else. Curiosity can unlock it.

Ask yourself:

• What are the core elements of my job that require excellence?

• What skills do I need to perform that job well?

• What are one or two areas I can focus on now to make a craft, and how can I improve day by day until I do those things better than anyone else and to the best of my ability?

To begin, pick one area of your work you’d like to try to hone and perfect. Choose something you enjoy and that’s important to your job. Assess the five to 10 ways you could make it better, then start to implement those improvements and challenge yourself. Keep daily notes or save old versions sequentially so that you can see your improvement over time.

Connect work to service

There’s almost nothing in life that improves our sense of well-being and purpose like service to others. Numerous studies have shown that acts of service have an immediate impact on happiness and fulfillment. In my own life, I’ve rarely felt as purposeful as when building a Habitat for Humanity home with colleagues, serving in a soup kitchen, or reading to kids at a local school.

Service doesn’t have to be confined to volunteering in a community, however. In any job, there are at least six opportunities to serve others: clients or customers, colleagues, capital, community, partners, and people we love. Knowing this and seeking opportunities for service in each of these areas can bring meaning to work.

Identifying the people we serve and ways to serve them requires deep-seated curiosity. Consider these questions:

• Who are my clients?

• What do they need?

• What are the key obstacles to their well-being that I’m helping to overcome, and how can I do better?

• Which colleagues most need my help?

• How can I effectively offer that help without expectation of return?

• Which two or three people could I best serve today?

These questions, founded in curiosity, are at the heart of service to others. Pick two of the six areas you like—colleagues and customers, for example. Think of two to three individuals in each of those two groups whom you could better serve. Then spend the next month trying to really understand them and how your work can serve them well.

Invest in positive relationships

In social science literature, perhaps nothing is as central to happiness as meaningful, positive relationships. They are essential to Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework for flourishing, and also to the finding of the Harvard Grant Study that “happiness is love.” Other studies echo these findings.

Relationships aren’t just confined to our personal lives. Each workday we spend more than eight hours with colleagues, whether remotely or in person. And trying to navigate work in the absence of meaningful relationships is a recipe for disappointment. Positive professional relationships can help us flourish, make others happy, and create extraordinary corporate cultures.

At work, as at home, relationships rest on empathy and curiosity. We can’t have a relationship of mutual care and respect with someone if we don’t display a genuine curiosity for them. Ask:

• Who are they?

• What matters to them?

• What are their anxieties and fears, passions, and purpose?

• On any given day, how are they feeling?

• What are they interested in intellectually?

Approaching others with curiosity will naturally build your own empathy and show that you care, creating meaningful relationships in the process. When you’re interacting with colleagues over the next month or two, consciously make a game of trying to know them better. Ask more questions than you answer. And carve out time for conversations and interactions that don’t just accomplish your work tasks but also (in a professional way) enhance your relationships. Improving these work relationships will make you and those around you happier and probably make you more productive as well.

Curiosity is undoubtedly essential to professional success and is at the heart of purpose. Living with greater curiosity at work can help us craft jobs and professional environments in which we and others can flourish.

JOHN COLEMAN is the author of the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). Subscribe to his free newsletter, On Purpose, follow him on social @johnwcoleman, or contact him at johnwilliamcoleman.com.