How To Create Meaning In Business
Many business-savvy professionals will tell you that business revolves solely around various measurements of success. Those metrics and performance indicators are generally synonymous with lasting performance, viability and revenue accrual. However, this long-standing viewpoint-while inherently true on several fronts-is no longer the end-all and be-all of a business’s identity. Today’s most successful executive leaders recognize a crucial second focal point within their daily obligations: Creating meaning and a sense of worth and purpose.
Establishing meaning can yield numerous benefits for leaders and employees, centering operations and goals on a healthier internal culture. You may find success in this approach by considering the following steps:
Start With Foundational Elements
To properly foster a stronger sense of meaning and purpose-driven growth within your business, you must first provide an appropriate foundation atop which your employees can develop in this manner. Start by adjusting (or flat-out removing) the standing elements, methods and ideologies that are incompatible with a value-oriented framework.
For instance, if a typical day in the office involves excessive administrative busywork and meetings rife with top-down orders from leadership, explore ways to streamline such obligations and add variety while communicating a clearly defined purpose. This approach will get you into a habit of never settling on outdated or inappropriate norms, allowing you to better define value and focus on necessary changes benefitting your employees.
The foundational stage also entails looking inward and auditing yourself as a leader based on the same fields. For your company to have a defined core purpose, it must have a clear frame of reference, and you can take initiative by leading by example. Practicing what you preach can jumpstart a healthy new way of thinking and defining one’s work, which is often contagious and conducive to improved professional worth.
Create New Internal Opportunities
The natural next step is to get your employees involved in your ideological transition early and often. Strive to empower workers where they may otherwise feel absent or unheard, encouraging autonomy and participation in projects, meetings and potential outlets for solution ideation. Such a culture is mutually beneficial for leaders and employees; it helps leaders get into a more worker-oriented corporate routine while opening a transparent internal dialogue for employees-all of which bolsters value by linking it to mutual understanding and respect.
You may, for example, establish more pathways for ongoing development and training, implement a more open-forum method in team meetings and high-level discussions or create additional opportunities for employee recognition and motivation. These measures reflect an inherent desire to unroot antiquated, unhelpful parts of office culture and replace them with ones rooted in employee enrichment and support.
Stay Consistent
No matter which value-building method works for your business, it is important to make it a steadfast part of everyday life in the office. These changes should not be fleeting or performative and should certainly not come with ulterior motives tied to performance and goal achievement alone. Those factors remain a key part of business viability, but they should go hand in hand with an overarching sense of purpose. This way, employees will feel like their work matters rather than simply seeing it as a cog in a cold, impersonal machine.
Above all, the key to business-related meaning is never to let go of it once you have established it as a cultural cornerstone; this will be paramount for ensuring the previous steps continue having an effective, enduring impact on both current and future employees.
Originally published at https://www.forbes.com.
About Dylan Taylor
Dylan Taylor is a global business leader, commercial astronaut, thought leader and philanthropist. Currently, Dylan serves as Chairman & CEO of Voyager Space, a multi-national space exploration firm focused on building the next generation of space infrastructure for NASA and other global space agencies.
Dylan has been recognized by Harvard University, SpaceNews, the BBC, the Financial Times, Pitchbook,CNBC, CNN and others as having played a seminal role in the growth of the private space industry. As an early-stage investor in more than 50 emerging space ventures, including Axiom, Kepler, York, Astrobotic, LeoLabs, Relativity, and Planet, Dylan is widely considered the most active private space investor in the world.
Dylan’s technical background, global business experience and unbridled passion for space make him a unique figure within his industry. As a thought leader and futurist, he has written many popular pieces on the future of the space industry for Forbes, FastCompany, Newsweek, SpaceNews, The Space Review, and Space.com. As a speaker, Dylan has keynoted many of the major space conferences around the world and has appeared regularly on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC.
Dylan has extensive global business experience as both a board director and CEO in several industries, including advanced electronics, finance and real estate. He previously served as a Director for UMB Bank, a Fortune 500 company based in Kansas City and as a mutual fund director for the Jackson Funds where he oversaw assets of $8B across 130 distinct funds. He has also served in the roles of CEO, President and Board Director for multinational companies like Prudential PLC, Honeywell, Colliers and Jones Lang LaSalle. Dylan was recognized as a Fortune 1000 CEO with P&L responsibility in excess of $3B and operations encompassing 15,000 employees in over 60 countries. In addition, Dylan has participated in 4 IPOs over the course of his career.
Dylan is a leading advocate of space manufacturing and the utilization of in-space resources to further space exploration and settlement. In 2017, he became the first private citizen to manufacture an item in space when the gravity meter he co-designed and commissioned was 3D printed on the International Space Station. The historic item is now housed in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Dylan is an explorer of note. On December 11th, 2021 Dylan became just the 606th human to go to space as part of the crew of Blue Origin’s NewShepard Mission 19. Accordingly, Dylan earned his commercial astronaut wings with the FAA and his universal astronaut wings from the Association of Space Explorers.
He is also one of only a handful of humans to have descended to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench as part of the Limiting Factor Expedition in July of 2022. In that mission, Dylan descended with pilot Victor Vescovo to a depth in excess of 10,800 meters (35,500 feet) into an area of the Mariana Trench that had never been visited by humans. Dylan is the youngest human to have been to the deepest part of the world’s oceans and crossed the Karman line into Space. Dylan has been a member of the Explorers Club since 2014.
Dylan maintains an extensive philanthropic impact on the space industry. In 2017, Dylan founded the nonprofit and social movement, Space for Humanity, which seeks to democratize space exploration and develop solutions to global issues through the scope of human awareness to help solve the world’s most intractable problems. Space for Humanity has successfully sent two citizen astronauts to space via Blue Origin including both the first Mexican-born woman (Katya Echazareta), and first African-born woman (Sara Sabry). Building upon his passion and support for the space industry, Dylan serves as a strategic advisor for both the Archmission and the Human Spaceflight Program and is a co-founding patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which promotes the growth of commercial space activity. Additionally, he is also a leading benefactor to the Brooke Owens Fellowship, Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and Mission: Astro Access.
Dylan is the founder and Chairman of Multiverse Media, an integrated global media company focused on science and technology, with an emphasis on space. Multiverse is the parent company of the popular space philosophy website 2211.world as well as the Ad Astra Dinners, a Jeffersonian-style dinner series featuring some of the world’s leading influencers discussing the future of humanity in space. Another subsidiary of Multiverse Media, Multiverse Publishing, publishes books by leading authors including Frank White, Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill. Multiverse is also the executive producer of the documentary film, The High Frontier and the forthcoming film, Fortitude.
For his influence as a global leader and his commitment to creating a positive impact on the world, Dylan has been honored with numerous personal and professional accolades in recent years. The World Economic Forum recognized Dylan as a Young Global Leader in 2011 and a full member of the World Economic Forum in 2014. That same year he was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. In 2020, Dylan was recognized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation with their top honor for business and finance, following in the footsteps of 2019’s inaugural winner, the late Paul Allen
and subsequent winners Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Dylan Taylor earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago and holds a BS in Engineering from the honors college at the University of Arizona, where he graduated Tau Beta Pi and in 2018 was named Alumnus of the year. He is also a graduate of the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century program at Harvard University.
Dylan and his family reside in Denver, Colorado where he is active locally with Colorado Concern and theColorado Spaceport. In his spare time, Dylan enjoys hiking, competing in triathlons and spending time outdoors. As a weekend warrior athlete, Dylan has more than 25 top ten finishes and 25 age group wins to his credit, and he regularly interviews world class athletes whom have shown extraordinary resilience as the host of the Legendary Podcast. He is married to legal expert, consultant and author Gabrielle V. Taylor with whom he has two teenage daughters.
