Winnie Jiang: Finding Meaning at Work

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the second in the new series of Thinkers50 Radar webinars, celebrating the most exciting new voices in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2025, 30 rising stars in management thinking, and we’ll be hearing from another one of them today. But we’d also like to hear from you. We like to make these sessions as interactive as we possibly can. So please, do let us know where you are joining us from and put your questions in the chat box. Now, this year’s Radar List is brought to you in partnership with ATD, The Association of Talent Development, and developing talent is a topic we will be exploring today and over the coming weeks, including of course, the implications of AI in the workplace and the many other challenges and opportunities facing leaders and organisations.

My co-host today is John Coné. John has worked in talent development for, it’s hard to believe, John, but for more than 50 years. During that time, he serves as chief learning officer, a vice president of HR, and on the boards of non-profit and for-profit learning companies and organisations, including ATD. He currently serves as catalyst of ATD’s Chief Talent Development Officer Group. John, it’s great to see you.

John Coné:

Good to see you, Des. It’s great to be here, and I’m very excited about our guest today. It is my great pleasure to introduce today’s distinguished guest, Dr. Winnie Jiang. Dr. Jiang is a leading researcher in organisational behaviour and career development with particular focus on how individuals navigate career transitions, how they find meaning in their work, and adapt to changing professional landscapes. As an esteemed professor at INSEAD, she’s contributed groundbreaking insights into how personal identity, work relationships, and leadership shape our experiences at work. Her research has been published in top academic journals and our expertise as highly sought after by organisations that are aiming to create purpose-driven work environments. Today, she’s going to be sharing her invaluable insights on finding meaning at work, helping us to better understand how organisations and individuals cultivate careers that are both fulfilling and impactful. So please join me in giving a warm virtual welcome to Dr. Winnie Jiang.

Winnie Jiang:

Thank you. Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Winnie, welcome, welcome. And congratulations on the Thinkers50 Radar recognition.

Winnie Jiang:

Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Listen. First, let’s kind of get an idea of where you are coming from. So I’m going to start with a very general question. What initially drew you to research workplace purpose and career transitions?

Winnie Jiang:

Sure. Many people have asked me these questions and I always said it goes back to when I was in college. Actually, one day I was reading a book called Working by Studs Terkel, maybe many of you have heard of him, and I came across this passage in the opening chapter that just really struck me, and it’s still to this day one of my favourite descriptions about people’s experiences with their work. So I would just read it here. He wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of live rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying,” and I was just really intrigued after reading it and started wondering all these questions, why do some people find deeper meaning in their work while others feel like they’re just enduring it? What makes work feel purposeful?

And that curiosity eventually led me to research how people understand and create meaning in their careers. And that interest in career transitions, which is the second part of your question, is a natural extension of that actually. So as I study how people pursue meaning in their work, I noticed patterns often, meaning seeking involves career changes. People will leave jobs that don’t align with who they are and seek out work that does, but I also saw other more complicated sides to this. What happens when someone has already found deeply meaningful work, but external forces such as sociopolitical changes, which is happening a lot right now, and job losses driven by technologies, AI, automation, these forces that you mentioned, what if these external forces disrupt that path that they have committed to pursuing? How do they then move forward? How do they rebuild the sense of purpose when the work they love is no longer viable?

So in many ways, I guess my research started really with just a single quote that I read in a book, but then it has grown into something I see as a much bigger, which is a way to understand how people navigate meaning and identities in a constantly changing world of work.

John Coné:

When you talk about different kinds of career transitions, and I’m wondering about that in the context of all the change that’s going on now, the changes in how people even define careers, the decline of the traditional career ladder and lifelong jobs, and I should say people working till they’re older. Our transitions, have they changed a lot?

Des Dearlove:

See, John’s asking that because we know about working until we’re older. John and I, we are in that slot. So yeah, please.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. Well, when I talk about career transitions, I’m referring to really a whole range of changes people go through in their work lives. Some transitions, as I mentioned earlier, are voluntary. So people leaving a job to pursue something more meaningful, they may switch industries and professions completely or starting their own business. Other kind of transitions are forced upon them and maybe their industry is shrinking, which they don’t want to face, but unfortunately have to navigate, and their job is automated or become redundant or some unexpected life circumstances push them into rethinking their career path. As you said, career transitions today really look different from how they were looking in the past. The idea of climbing a stable career ladder where you stay in one company, move up over time, and retire with a pension, it might still be the case for some, but it isn’t the reality, I think, for a growing number of people anymore.

And instead, careers now are more fluid, unstable, and unpredictable. So people are more open, more likely to switch jobs, even entire industries, professions, and some are piecing together multiple careers over a lifetime and others are working, as you said, well past retirement age in the traditional term of a retirement age, either by choice or necessity. So my research really tries to unpack all these kind of transitions, what drives these transitions, how people make meaning from the different transitions, how they rebuild a sense of purpose in their work when their career takes an unexpected turn or even expected turn, I think it will still require them to rebuild the sense of purpose, because sometimes they may have expected to find some meaning, but it may not turn out the way they want.

Des Dearlove:

When he introduced you, John mentioned some of your research touches on personal identity. What role does personal identity play in shaping career choices and how do people reshape their identities during transitions? Because I guess we don’t just have a single kind of working identity.

Identity and career transitions

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think maybe it’s helpful to start with the simple definition of what identity is. At this core, our identity is our own answer to the question, “Who am I?” So what will be your own answers to this question? And the answer will shape a lot of our career decisions, what kind of work we choose, how much time we want to dedicate to the work, the kinds of people we want to work with, and even the impact we hope to have through the work we do. So when people choose a career, it is about, I think, making an identity statement about who they are, what they value, and where they belong in the world. So our personal answers to the question, who we are, who am I, is directly shaping all these choices we make about our careers.

To the second part of your question, how do people reshape their identities, during a career transition, the sense of identity can be shaken, sometimes even completely upended. If someone has spent years in a profession and suddenly has to leave either involuntarily because of layoffs, or voluntarily because they’re just burning out, or shift in life priorities, they don’t just lose a job, they can feel like they’re actually losing a part of themselves because that work they have been involved in previous has become who they are, and it was their answers to who they are, these identity questions that led them to initially choose that work as the career. So that’s what makes career changes so unsettling. It’s not just about finding another job, it’s about asking, “Who am I now or next?” So when it comes to the question of how do people reshape their identities during these transitions, I think a lot of it comes down to, I think, that’s my research focus, meaning. How do they make meaning of these transitions? What do they think these transitions actually mean?

Some people are able to reframe these transitions not as starting over again or having to sort of start from the bottom again in any new line of work or industry, but instead they see that it means they’re evolving. So it’s not that their identity has to stop in some way, that their previous identity has to be left behind. Instead, they frame it as they’re evolving in some way. So they look for threads of continuity between their old work and their new path. Take a journalist as an example, and this journalist who becomes a corporate lawyer, and he doesn’t see this transition as abandoning his journalistic experiences from his successful prior career that he had to leave. Instead, he’s using the investigative and communication abilities he has built before in a different way.

And this example actually comes from my research with Amy Wrzesniewski, who when we were doing this research, she was my doctoral advisor at Yale, and now she’s a faculty at Wharton. And we studied journalists who were forced to leave their profession, a job many of them deeply loved and saw as a calling. So their identity is really rooted in being a journalist, but we found that when journalism is undergoing decline and destabilisation and forced many to leave this profession, some of them were able to reinvent themselves quite effectively. They move into fields like PR, law, academia and continue to build a meaningful career in a very different field. But others, they just could not imagine doing anything else but journalism, so they found ways to stay and persist, often taking on freelance work even if it meant financial instability. So you can see that the former group have successfully reshaped their professional identity, while the latter didn’t seem to be able to do that.

And what explained this difference in our research, it shows that it came down to a process of meaning-making that we call meaning-fixness. Some journalists have a very fixed view of making meaning or thinking what makes their work meaningful. They believe that only journalism could give them that sense of purpose, but the other journalists who had a more successful sort of experience reshaping their professional identity, they had a more flexible way of meaning-making. Instead of tying their sense of purpose to the job, the role of being journalists, they tied it to the variety of activities they love, like storytelling, doing investigative work, interviewing, writing. These things that could also exist in other careers too.

So the more we can see meaning as something we can carry with us rather than something that’s tied to a single role, the more hopeful and adaptable we can be when life throws us a curveball and when we have to especially embark on some involuntary career transition. So this is how I see how people can reshape their identities, that sometimes it really comes down to how they make meaning of the transitions that they have to engage in.

Des Dearlove:

John, just I might just cut in just a couple of comments on that because a couple of things come to mind. One is the parallel with fixed mindset and growth mindset in terms of how you approach a challenge, and the other thought that was going through my head as you were speaking is I’m often amused when people talk about people having a midlife crisis or a mid-career crisis, because the other way of flipping that is it can be a mid-career opportunity. You get a chance to relaunch yourself, to take those transferable skills and apply them in different ways and do more interesting stuff. So a lot of it does come down to, as you were indicating to, how you frame these things. John, I took your slot there to ask a question. 

John Coné:

I was actually going to follow up. The question I was going to ask I think you’ve started to answer. I was going to ask you about the key factors that help employees find meaning in these transitions, and you mentioned reframing is one approach, and you mentioned finding threads of continuity, but I’m wondering are there other key things that help people find meaning in these transitions and other barriers that hold them back from doing that?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, of course. So a lot of research has been done by both myself and my other colleagues who are interested in this domain of meaning-making at work, and we identify a lot of factors that shape whether people find their work meaningful, and they generally fall into two big categories, the contextual factors, which are things about the job itself or the work environment, and the individual factors, things about the person doing the job. So on the contextual side, some jobs and work environments seem to be more conducive, and naturally allow people to find meaning in it. This is work, for example, that allows people to actually see by themselves the impact they can have, whether it’s helping a client, so that they can see the beneficiaries, that their work is influencing, solving a tough problem that actually helps someone make someone smile. This visual, directly seeing the impact in a visual way, and contributing to something bigger than themselves. And this work tends to feel more meaningful.

There are also jobs that offer interesting and challenging tasks as they can spark a sense of purpose by pushing people to grow. And of course, that is autonomy, flexibility, a strong sense of camaraderie, all play a big role. And in general, when people feel valued and supported at work, they’re more likely to see their work as meaningful. So there’s a lot of research that has demonstrated the important impact of having the conducive meaning-making working environment. But I think what’s also interesting is to find out this other research done by my colleagues, also myself, that suggests meaning isn’t just about the job itself. There are also big individual differences in how people experience meaning at work and create meaning at work. Some people seem naturally better at finding or creating meaning no matter what they do.

So research has shown that even in jobs that seem extremely repetitive, exhausting, or undervalued, sociologists sometimes refer to these jobs as dirty work as they’re physically, morally, relationally dirty, but there are people who can find deep fulfillment even in these kind of jobs that we normally do not expect anyone to be able to find meaning. And these people, they find ways to reframe their tasks in a way that makes them personally feel that this is a meaningful job that’s worthwhile and personally significant.

So I recently watched an interview with the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, which made me believe he’s someone that actually falls into this category. In that interview, he said for him it’s easier to fall in love with things he’s doing, he does, rather than finding what he loves, and he said he’s fallen in love with many things he has done. He’s been a dishwasher and he loves it. He’s been a busboy, loves it. Someone delivering papers, newspapers, he loves it. Being a waiter. He loves it. So he said literally in the interview, he loves every single job he’s ever had, and now he loves every single day at NVIDIA. So there are people like that who say these things and who seem to be able to love or find meaning in anything they do, and this is confirmed by our research. We indeed find just a subset and subgroup of people in any kind of job that seems just more resilient and positive and always able to find some meaning out of what they have.

And now on the flip side, since you asked about barriers, what can get in the way of finding meaning in work, there are also both the contextual and the personal barriers, and contextually related to what I mentioned earlier, and a big one is disconnect from your direct impact. When people never get to see how their work efforts actually can make a difference, it’s hard to stay motivated. And lack of autonomy is another big barrier, to when people feel they’re being micromanaged, stuck in rigid systems, struggle to take ownership over their work and they will struggle to find it meaningful. And then there is, as probably common sense, caustic work environments, no matter how meaningful a job could be, if people feel unappreciated, overworked, or disrespected, that sense of purpose will get overshadowed by frustrations over these treatments.

The six sources of workplace meaning

And on a personal level, I think the barrier for many people to find meaning to not become people like Jensen Huang, who somehow was able to love everything he does. Many people, I guess, overlook the fact that meaning can come from very variety of different sources. It doesn’t always have to be about making a huge social impact, though that’s great if your job has that and it’s there. So in a recent research I conducted with my pre-doctoral student at INSEAD, so at INSEAD we have this pre-doctoral program that allows students just to explore whether academic career is a good fit for them. And with this student, Shaun Chang, we surveyed over 400 working adults and just asking them in their view, what makes their current jobs feel worth doing or meaningful, and the answers we got, and we analysed them and actually identified six key sources of meaning that we summarise as, first, livelihood. That means that while your job can be meaningful because it helps you meet financial goals. So it brings financial resources and that is a source of meaning. In fact, for many people, that’s a very important source of meaning. And second, community. It creates a sense of belonging and connection with others. Stimulation. It challenges and develops you. Recognition, it makes you feel acknowledged and valued. Impact. It allows you to make a positive difference. And the last one might be surprising for many people, which we call rejuvenation, as work can also provide a break from personal life stress and can serve as a source of structure and focus.

So it may catch you off guard, but many participants in this study said that during tough times in their personal lives, like going through divorce, sickness, or death of loved ones, they want to go back to work. Work gave them a sense of stability and even a refuge from the stress and griefs that they’re going through in their personal life. So there are more ways to find meaning than we often realise. So I think what’s really powerful to keep in mind is that meaning isn’t just something you find or expect that there will be there at your work. It is something you can actually create. By recognising and combining these different sources, you can turn your job into valuable, meaningful part of your life. Companies definitely should design jobs that can foster meaning and conducive to meaning and purpose-making, but individuals also need to realise they have the power to shape their own experience of their work.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to obviously pursue some of these issues that you’ve raised in a second, but one of the things I love about these webinars is how global they are in terms… I mean, I’m sure you read, Winnie is joining us from Singapore, but we have people… I was just looking through the chat. We have people joining us from Colorado; from Wales; from Montreal; from Jakarta; from Tulsa; from Minnesota; from Iran; from Copenhagen; we even have somebody who’s flying at the moment who’s over Spain somewhere; Durban, South Africa; Helsinki; Switzerland; Wisconsin; London. It’s just a real cornucopia of different points of view.

And please do put your questions, because we want to take your questions and we will be putting some of your questions to Winnie, so please stick your questions into the comments section and we will come to them. But before we do that, I have to ask, Winnie, you’ve laid it out beautifully, but what can we do to kind of foster a culture where employees feel a strong sense of purpose in their roles? How can organisations and leaders perhaps help people make that connection, and also how does that impact on obviously important things like retention?

Purpose identification and purpose infusion

Winnie Jiang:

Sure. Yeah, at INSEAD, I created and I have been teaching this session called The Purpose-Driven Leadership, and when developing this course, I thought a lot about the question you just asked, and building on the research I’ve done and decades of research my other colleagues also have done on finding meaning at work, and my answer at this point is that it definitely starts with leadership, not just at the top, but at every level starts with leaders developing the capabilities to identify and effectively infuse into employees purpose that feels authentic, personal and relevant to everyone involved. Maybe actually, I think it will be helpful to use an example, and this example is actually my personal story. So when I started teaching my very first MBA class at INSEAD, I was just 26 years old, fresh out of my PhD at Yale, and many of my students were older than me with years of real-world experience managing people, and yet there I was, Asian woman, 26 years old, standing in front of them trying to teach them about leadership.

So it really didn’t feel credible, and I had huge imposter syndrome and self-doubt bubbling up. So why should they listen to me? And I knew I couldn’t just tell them, “Oh. Hey, your purpose here is to learn from me.” That would’ve felt forced, and frankly, it’s just unconvincing. They would just laugh and leave the class and nobody will stay to, I guess, to listen. But INSEAD students are nicer than that, but still, I just don’t feel that’s a credible reason for them to be here. Instead, I think I was reflecting on what I have learned from my own research and what I can do to actually give them a truly relevant, authentic, genuine reason to be there, and that is the purpose, the real purpose for them to be here that can actually keep them there.

So I took this approach. I told them, “This is my very first class. You are my very first group of students. Whether you realise it or not, you will play an incredibly important role in my career and my life, and I will always remember you. I commit to giving you my absolute best in this class, and I hope you will commit to also being fully present and engaged and also giving me your honest feedback after each class to help me grow as a professor,” and I generally felt that way. It’s not that I made this up, because I really, really do feel to one of my more senior colleagues at INSEAD, they already have hundreds of thousands of students over these years, and they probably won’t remember any one of them, but I will remember every single one of the students in my first class. So I told them that and then they played an incredibly important role in my career development, and any experience they had in the class, the feedback they would give me, I would take that seriously.

So after that, I think something shifted, really. Afterwards, the classroom wasn’t just about me teaching them, and it was really about us creating something meaningful together, and they weren’t just students, they were playing, again, like I said, an essential role in shaping a young professor’s career. And the energy in the room just transformed. They participated fully, they challenged each other’s ideas, including my own ideas, and just engaged deeply. And at the end of the course, they even nominated me for a best teaching award at INSEAD, and to this day, I’m still deeply grateful for that first group of students I had. I remember every single one of them indeed and just that experience altogether.

As I think this experience shows you that purpose is a sense that has to be felt, and that starts with the leaders. I think in that setting, it’s not a traditional work setting, but it shows you that you are something that has the power to drive how people feel in that setting, and it starts with the leaders developing the capability of what I now call purpose identification and purpose infusion. So you need to first identify what is the purpose that can really make everyone involved in that group, in that setting, feel related, feel that is personally meaningful and important, and then how do you infuse that in every one of them?

So the ability to identify what actually matters and can be meaningful to everyone involved in a given setting and infuse that into the people and the environment. And when people see how their role contributes to something or some people beyond themselves, they will invest more in their work, they form stronger connections with everyone in the team, and then, yes, I do believe that has a direct positive impact on retention. I guess nobody quit my class and stays through, so I think that’s one evidence to show that it matters. And I think, yeah, a short answer to your question, right now, I think, is for leaders to develop the capability of purpose identification and infusion.

The future of meaningful work

John Coné:

Winnie, I’m looking in the chat and I’m seeing references to things like generational differences in the workforce, remote and hybrid work, even a recent comment about a seeming erosion of loyalty from employees. What do you see as the trends that are going to be shaping the future of meaningful work and career?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I really love this question. I find it very important. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome more people to join the discussion and share their thoughts, and I will start by sharing my perspectives in the hope of encouraging others to do the same. So when I first started doing the research on journalists that I mentioned earlier, which is how journalists were navigating their career transitions, that was back in 2016, and I was a second year doctoral student at Yale, and I was just looking for data related to occupations undergoing destabilisation or disruption. And I came across data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US showing that of the top 10 professions facing the biggest declines, journalism was the only one on the list that required a bachelor’s degree, and so all the other jobs do not require bachelor’s degrees, and journalism is the only one on the list that requires a bachelor’s degree.

And fast-forward now almost a decade later, and I think we’re going to see, probably we’re already seeing more and more professions that require higher education, at least a bachelor’s degree, facing similar disruptions like 10 years or longer ago, what journalists were facing. So when people have invested so much time and effort into a career, it’s not easy to just pivot or find new meaning in their work, and in some ways, the challenges that journalists were facing back then might soon be the reality for a lot more professionals. So I do think this could be a trend. We are going to see a lot more professionals with the higher educational degrees and credentials facing issues related to career disruptions and have to build meaningful careers in their own way, so not following the traditional career path anymore.

And I was actually discussing this recently with my colleague, Phanish Puranam, who just published a fantastic book. I recommend everybody to check it out. It’s called Re-Humanize. It’s about how organisations can stay human-centered in an age where AI and algorithms are automating more and more jobs. And we got into this conversation about how individuals can still build meaningful careers when jobs they’ve just started to feel attached to, could be automated tomorrow. So it’s kind of like… Maybe it’s not a very appropriate metaphor, but I think it’s really like when you start getting invested in a romantic relationship and just as things are getting serious, the other person tells you, “No. Oh, it’s not a good time to continue,” and it stings the first time, but imagine it keeps happening over and over. As AI technology advances, I think more people will probably, just as they start to commit to a career, and then some automation or technology changes happen, and they will have to think about reinvention of their career again.

So the reality is that the future of meaningful work, I think, is going to be about more than just avoiding job displacement, it’s going to be about individuals taking control and creating their own jobs and finding or building meaning in those jobs they create. I think right now the public discourse is focused a lot on job loss, job disruption, which is important, and we should discuss those topics, but I think maybe we should also think about paying more attention and spending more time discussing job creation.

John Coné:

Winnie, I was going to mention, I was just looking at the World Economic Forum report and it says over the next five years, AI will essentially end 92 million jobs, but it will create 149 million new jobs that never existed before. So it’s really right in line with what you’re talking about.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad to hear that. I’ll need to check out that report you were mentioning. So yeah, maybe people are indeed talking about job creation, but I wasn’t seeing that in the media as much as I think it should be. I think we should be talking even more about it. What are the jobs that should be created and in the future it’s going to be crucial for people to claim their own ability or power to create work that not only supports themselves, but also serves other people, and same for the future of career development, I think it will be less about following the traditional path of choosing a major or industry or job, I think. That was the path I took, look at the list of majors possible or being offered in college, you try to predict and assess which one will be growing in the next four decades that we still need to be working, or which one will be less likely to become redundant.

So that’s about sort of a predicting, “Okay, what are the current jobs that seem more viable during the time that we are alive?” But it actually will be more about creating your own meaningful jobs, creating jobs that align with our own interests and aspirations, talents, competences, as well as provide something valuable to other people. I think increasingly people need the ability not only to find meaning in jobs for themselves, but also communicate to others why this job is meaningful, so be able to sort of sell the meaning to the broader audiences.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to take some questions, got some great questions coming in. You mentioned just now individuals taking control and creating meaning. We’ve got a question from Elisabeth, and it’s a very nicely phrased question, so I’m going to read it. It’s quite long. “We often hear about the essential role in leaders creating a culture that values meaning,” – We’ve been talking about that – “But what if someone’s in a workplace that doesn’t foster this? What can colleagues on the floor do?” – I mean, peers I guess rather than managers – “either to create grassroots movements, sort of a bottom-up movement or even just make everyday life meaningful? In essence, create meaning in the face of adverse circumstances?” Not everybody’s in that wonderful culture that we would like to think that our organisations create. Not all leaders are doing that. What do you do if you’re stuck with perhaps not the ideal situation in terms of who’s leading you?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question, and I think by asking that question, you’re already showing that you’re claiming control and trying to leverage the power you have as individuals to make a job more meaningful. So I think there could be, for example, if the organisation does not support formal events that facilitate the peer sharing, informal social gatherings that facilitate this kind of meaning-making. Maybe you could bring the list of sources that I shared earlier, livelihood, community, stimulation, recognition, impact, rejuvenation, and have each other talk about where they find meaning in the current job they’re doing. Maybe you’ll be very surprised to find that some people, who you don’t really engage in this kind of conversation on a daily work basis with, but when you are in an informal social gathering, they’ll share with you what are the sources that make the work feel meaningful and worthwhile to them. So I think these informal social gatherings could be a way to do it. Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. I’m going to bring another question in because the questions are flowing in. I mean, we touched on this, John touched on this, but how do… A question coming in from LinkedIn. “How do cultural and generational differences shape our expectation of finding meaning through work?” I’m not sure that my parents expected their work to be meaningful all the time, but I think people now have a higher expectation. Do you see differences between different generations and even different national cultures?

Winnie Jiang:

Oh. Yeah, I do. As I said, across generations and cultures. I’m originally from China and my parents will… When I actually tell them what I do in my job, what I study in my PhD, they were like, “What? And you can get paid by doing that?” They were very distanced, because to them, they are in this traditional sort of ideology about career development. They just stay in one organisation and they retire and get a pension. So there are definitely, I think, generational differences within China, but I think there are also cross-cultural differences. So at INSEAD, our classroom is usually extremely diverse. There’s not a single dominant nationality or language being spoken. We all teach and speak, communicate English, but people, all of them almost, speak English with some accents, and you’ll see in the classroom discussion the emergence of these cultural differences, and I think it’s okay. It is fine.

I think with the media and technology, even people in cultures that are probably still embracing the more traditional kind of career development will have exposure to cultures that embrace different kinds of meaningful career development, and I think that’s great actually. You are exposed to different perspectives, and I think it is really helpful in some sense that it creates a sort of balance. To me, I really care when my job provides stimulation, community, recognition, impact, rejuvenation. I seem to care less just about livelihood, but my parents will come in and say, “Well, livelihood is important,” and that actually gave me a different perspective that maybe my job is pretty decent. It is pretty good.

And so I think it helps sort of to remind people that there are indeed the different sources of meaning, and maybe we need to think about sometimes we can re-weight that when the path to leave the current job and find some alternatives is more difficult, and maybe it’s actually better to stay and develop new sources of meaning that do not seem too important to us initially, but actually, are important to other people, and that helps us realise they could also become important to us. So I think it’s actually a good thing that we recognise these differences.

Des Dearlove:

Keep the questions coming. We’ve got another sort 10 minutes or so of Winnie’s time, so please do pitch in with your questions. There’s a lot of people agreeing with what you’re saying, Winnie. It’d be nice to see somebody perhaps disagreeing or having a different point of view. But I want to ask you one more thing, and then I’m going to revert to John, because I know he’s got lots of questions too. When you were speaking earlier, as I understood, you were talking about meaning is something we do together, meaning-making. It’s not something we just do. It sort of can happen and it does happen in the spaces in between us, and I thought that was just a really interesting point.

And there’s one of the questions, I’ve lost it now in the thread that it’s gone back so far, but someone was asking about what role do community and connection with each other play in creating meaning at work? And apologies to the person’s question… Oh, there we go. Yeah. But that sense that the meaning isn’t just something we project. And you talked earlier about getting better at explaining what the meaning is and explaining it possibly to ourselves as well as others.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. So at the community and connection with others, it’s an important source of meaning for many, many people, but not everybody… I think what my research is showing, not everybody sees that as kind of a necessary source of meaning. You mentioned hybrid work, remote work. Actually, many people love it and found that when they’re working remotely or in a hybrid way, the work feels more meaningful because it enhances some other thing which they care more about, which is autonomy, flexibility, and time with family. So I think it helps to reflect on yourselves, which sources that I mentioned just now, which sources of this meaning matter more to you, actually play a bigger role in helping you feel that what you do is meaningful? Again, I mentioned livelihood; community, which is connection to others, like the question referenced to; stimulation, the work you do in your job challenges, develops you; and the recognition, it makes you feel acknowledged, valued; and the impact, it allows you to make a positive difference. Rejuvenation helps you to take a break from the everyday stress sometimes you feel in your daily lives.

As a new parent myself, so I have a three year old and an 18 months old at home. I love going to work. So the chaos at home on its own just makes me feel that working in any job is extremely meaningful, because it allows me to take some personal time and take some time for myself. So I think it could help to reflect a bit by yourself at the current stage of your life because it can change, it can evolve depending on which life stage you are at. I think five years from today, I probably will not feel that rejuvenation from work, taking personal breaks from family by working is as important, so it could change. So at this current stage of your life, which sources of this meaning actually play a bigger role for you and how to align that with the work you do or the career you plan to build.

Building a purpose-driven culture

John Coné:

Winnie, I know a number of the people who are in this conversation are likely people who are in human resources or in talent development inside of an organisation, and I’m wondering what your advice is to them on the things that they can be focusing on to help the individuals in their organisation find more meaning and to help their organisation be one where people can find more meaning. What can professionals and human resources do?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, that’s a great question too. So I mentioned, ideally, you want every leader in the organisations to have the capability of purpose, identification and infusion. So they sort of view this purpose on a daily basis and help people continue to feel this sense of meaning on a daily basis. So I think providing some kind of work purpose identification and infusion, and to show them the power of purpose-building and give them the toolkits to build this purpose-driven culture is an important way. In terms of individual career development, I think you could think about, for example, mentorship programs. I think mentorships can play an important role in terms of providing information and emotional support, but I think that in this kind of a changing world of work, the traditional idea of mentorship where a more experienced person hands down with them based on their own career path is becoming less relevant.

So nowadays, the organisations to help people find their own purpose, take control of their own meaning-making. The mentors need to play a role in terms of they’re not just offering answers, like what traditionally mentors do, they should be asking the right questions. And I think mentors should be playing more of a cheerleading role, encouraging the mentees to think outside the box, try new things, even create their own opportunities, instead of thinking of mentorship as a way of help us find purpose and direction, maybe we should see as a source of support and encouragement to explore or create purpose and direction. And I think organisations can provide an environment that facilitates people to think of themselves as individuals that have the capability and power to create this purposeful job and create these purpose-driven careers.

So in a sense that instead of drifting, which means now people fall into roles, take the next promotion because it’s offered or stay in jobs out of habit rather than intention, now I think HR managers or talent leaders want to help people and organisations become more intentional about their careers, and that is to navigate or drive their career development. They help them create space for reflection, structure, exploration, and real conversations about growth. So I think when people feel that their organisations can turn them and recognise that they have their own power to drive their careers, to navigate their career rather than drift in their career, once they have this sort of sense of power and ownership, they will feel more purposeful in the organisation.

So I think probably I would summarise as, one, providing leaders the opportunity to develop the capabilities in building purpose, identifying purpose, and infusing purpose in the workplace, and also providing these opportunities for everybody at work, everybody in the organisations to navigate and drive their career. And so I think I will focus on these two domains because that can really build a workforce in the organisations that everybody feels that they are leading their own career in a purposeful way rather than just drifting through it.

John Coné:

I think that’s really, really important. Right now in organisations there’s this tendency to talk about you’re in charge of your own career, but then we leave you on your own instead of, as you say, providing opportunities, providing the space, providing tools that help them be intentional. I think that’s a great point.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I think there are really very different, sort of specific, ways to do that. I think first, in terms of building intentional career, companies need to move beyond the idea that career growth just means climbing the corporate ladder, and not everyone wants to or should aim for the next level, and some people could find fulfillment in just staying where they are, deepening their expertise, and others actually thrive in more lateral moves that expose them to new functions, and some might even want to take a step back temporarily to recalibrate their priorities. So I think talent leaders should normalise these multiple ways of transitions within the organisation so that people don’t feel like there’s only one right way to progress, to proceed, and that will truly make them feel that they’re driving their own career rather than sort of following the traditional career ladder.

And second, I think what comes to mind also is that organisations need to be proactive about career development. Maybe many organisations are already doing it, but I think it’s really important to emphasise that career planning shouldn’t just happen during annual reviews, and companies can build in structured career conversations, check-ins that go beyond performance and focus on where someone wants to go and how they can get there. So I think more importantly, leaders should encourage career experimentation, give employees opportunities to try out different roles, shadow their colleagues, to take on stretch projects, even side gigs. Sometimes I think the best way to figure out what’s next is to test drive these possibilities in a low risk rate and organisations, and their leaders should encourage that. Now, I think it will be good for not just the employees themselves, also for the organisations, because increasingly, organisations need these employees to help them create jobs in their organisations that are making them, I think, more adaptable in this new world of work.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, now I’m going to throw in a bit of a curveball. You mentioned recalibrating careers. By coincidence, I was listening to a TED Talk earlier and the guy was saying that his whole career and life changed when one day he was driving home and he realised that his life had become about selling more shampoo, and he had this moment where he just thought, “Oh, no. That’s the meaning in my life.” We’ve got a good question from Anna, which relates to this. She’s saying, “By trying to find meaning in work, are we trying to make ourselves feel better because some work or that some work is actually harmful to us or harmful to the planet?” Sometimes the meaning isn’t there, and perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves, and maybe it might be time for… This individual on the TED Talk took himself off and went to Africa and started working for an NGO because he was looking for more meaning than selling shampoo.

Winnie Jiang:

It’s really important I think to, like you said, be honest with ourselves, and if you feel that it is really betraying yourself to try to find meaning in whatever you’re currently doing, then I think your feeling is telling you something, that you probably need to consider a change. So I think you are the one that can really give yourself the answer you need, and I think it’s, again, coming down to that self-reflection. You need to listen to what your gut feeling sometimes is telling you. So I think it’s really important to point out that, yeah, you shouldn’t force yourself to finding if it really, really feels wrong. I think that’s an important message actually.

Des Dearlove:

We probably have time for one more question. John, I’m going to give you the dibs on that.

John Coné:

Oh, I appreciate that. Well, it’s the easy one. If you could give one piece of advice to an organisation that’s trying to create meaning in a purpose-driven culture, what would you tell them, “Do this one thing.”?

Winnie Jiang:

Wow. Well, I guess… Yeah, I guess I’ll go back to what I said earlier when I was teaching purpose-driven leadership at INSEAD. I think over and over again, I emphasise that purpose has to be felt. It’s not something that is strategically built. It has to be truly felt, genuinely, authentically, relatable to everyone involved, and then I think that takes deep reflection for the leaders to engage in, to be able to identify that purpose that can be actually felt by everyone and to infuse that into everybody. When I teach this, I also keep going back to the example that I share about how I make the first group of students I was teaching feel that they are actually engaging in something quite meaningful. They’re not just learning from someone that seems very inexperienced, but they’re actually helping this person grow in their career. Well, I guess the one piece of advice that I want to give organisations, the leaders, find that purpose that can be felt by everybody, and that creates the power for everybody to engage and unlock their talents.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic. I think that’s brilliant what you did in the classroom. I think all leaders could learn from that in terms of asking people to help create meaning and making it meaningful in terms of developing the talent of somebody else who’s perhaps in the leadership role. Well, I’m afraid that is all we have time for. Huge thanks to our guest, Winnie Jiang, and to you, our audience, who contributes so much. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope you’ll join us again. This is a Thinkers50 Radar webinar in collaboration with the Association of Talent Development, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and John Coné. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Thinkers50 Radar.