What are your fundamental needs at work? And are they being met?
I’ve been asked to share more of me personally — well, this isn’t quite that! But it’s a neat little video, twelve minutes long, with Ben Mosior:
We have six fundamental needs:
- certainty and comfort (sameness, predictability)
- uncertainty and variety (newness, unpredictability)
- love, connection, and belonging
- significance and uniqueness
And learning/growth (personal development), and contribution to the world.
(These needs come from many places — several of my heroes including Scitovsky, Beer, and Oshry point to them — but they are most clearly spelled out, to my slight embarrassment, by cheesy-but-good self-help guru Tony Robbins)
To meet and harness these human needs in organisation, we need:
- honest conversations
- clarity of relationships, roles, tasks
- learning
- a positively-shaped culture that promotes psychological safety and discretionary effort
- a good and clear intent — impact in the world
Which of these needs is best met by your current work? Which is lacking?
