The Power of Context
Creating context is an essential and tremendously powerful leadership and management concept to understand and to utilize.
Context is defined as “the part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning”. It comes from the Latin contextere meaning to join together or to weave.
The key idea for context is that of determining meaning. Meaning is only determined in relationship to other things – no relationship, no meaning. If something makes no difference to something else, it also has no meaning.
Now apply this to your organization. More than anything, people want to create meaning in their lives. They want to make a difference. But as we just defined above, meaning requires context.
So if you are a leader, one of the best ways to help your people create meaning in their work and their lives is to continuously create context – to show people how they fit and how they make a difference.
Let me give you a specific example. Recently I began interviews with the entire team of one of my clients. Every single interview eventually touched on a key point – where do I fit into the big picture? How do I best contribute? In other words, everyone is craving context. No context, no meaning.
When I interviewed the office manager, I learned again the importance and power of context. This person is relatively new to the company and is doing a tremendous job of streamlining the organization and workflow of the organization. When I asked about what would be most helpful to her – she said “Nothing big – but I don’t really understand what happens with our invoices before they come to me. In my previous job, I generated them myself – but now I just take them from the system. I don’t really understand what is going into them.”
Nothing big – yet potentially very big. She’s looking for context. No understanding – no context – no meaning. In the next few minutes, I helped her brainstorm ways to act on her curiosity and to get the context she’s craving. The simplest approach we identified was to go to one of the salespeople who is a natural coach and ask for some help – “The next time you are preparing a customer order and invoice, would it be ok if I looked over your shoulder and watched how you use our system? Would you walk me through a few orders?” What a simple request – the sales person who is a natural coach loves the opportunity to help, it really doesn’t take any additional time for him to help her since he’s preparing the order anyway, and the office manager now understands the source of the information that is flowing to her. Initially, this context gives her reassurance about where she fits – but over time, it creates tremendous value for the company. The more context she develops about the overall system, the more she can suggest improvements.
The amazing part of this conversation is that as we brainstormed how she could go get the information she wanted, I noticed a significant shift in her energy. She already was quite positive about the company, but this new strategy for how to create context for herself – to create greater meaning for herself – ignited even more energy in her. You could see her posture shift forward, a smile broaden, and a spark in her eyes. Creating context creates meaning which creates energy. Wow.
As a leader, the context is always changing – as the market, customers, and technology change, the context must change as well. It is your job to continuously communicate this evolving context.
When I looked up the definition of context for this post, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Latin root meaning of “to weave” – because that is what creating context is like as a leader. You have all of these various threads and you, with the help of your team, can weave them together into your own creation.
When you consciously and continuously create context – and help your people create their own context – you tap into a core of energy that is tremendously powerful. What are you going to create?
