One secret to generating high performance in work (and other) roles
- sciart0
- Jun 6
- 2 min read
KEY POINTS
"Mattering" combines feeling valued and knowing your value.
Small acts fostering mattering can boost engagement, innovation, and retention.
Leaders can excel by observing, noting, and sharing team members' contributions.
Excerpt: After I finished my first year of law school, I clerked for a judge during the summer. I felt nervous about the experience and constantly wondered whether I had what it took to practice law. As the summer progressed, the judge gave me a complicated research project that I fumbled my way through and eventually submitted.
Several days later, I found a note on my chair that said this: “Your report was excellent. I appreciated how you summarized the key takeaways—it made my life easier. Thanks. – Judge.” It was as though his words were magic and unlocked something that I have remembered almost 20 years later. I still have his note in my office. Why?
That magical feeling from something as simple as a 20-word note has a name—it’s mattering—and it’s the subject of Dr. Zach Mercurio’s new book, The Power of Mattering. I first discovered Zach and his work while I was researching my own book. I had the pleasure of interviewing him about his work because I identified that mattering was an important driver of high-performing and thriving team cultures.
Mattering has two parts. The first part is feeling valued (appreciation and recognition) and the second part is knowing that you add value (achievement). He explains that mattering is created through small, repeated interactions that help people feel:
Noticed: seeing and hearing other people.
Affirmed: showing people how their unique strengths make a difference.
Needed: showing people how they are relied upon.
This work comes at an important time. Gallup recently reported that employee engagement in the U.S. dropped to a 10-year low and globally, both employee engagement and well-being have dropped in the past year, with engagement falling for only the second time since 2009. Managers are experiencing the sharpest decline. In addition, burnout continues to be a problem across industries, and one survey of more than 4,000 workers found that 82% of the respondents have felt lonely at work.