“You can fill every box and still feel empty.”
In my 20 years as a recruiter, it was my job to call the most successful people on the planet.
…to tell them about a job they didn’t know was available
…to tell them about a company they didn’t know was looking
…to tell them about a search we were doing, as a recruiter they’d never heard of.
Sounds like a hard job, right? How do you convince someone who is super successful in what they do to leave and turn their lives upside down and start all over again?
Actually, it was easy. Because despite all this success, which is why I was calling them, they weren’t very happy, so they all called me back.
Burnout is a current scapegoat, as is the pandemic, quiet quitting, silent cracking. But that’s not it. And, it’s not impostor syndrome either that was stopping their growth. It was misalignment — sure, they were successful, but it was success according to everyone else’s definition, not their own.
That’s the real crisis at work today.
The Success-Without-Fulfillment Problem
According to Gallup, only 23% of employees worldwide describe themselves as fully engaged. My own Global Limitless Leader Research, with responses from nearly 10,000 professionals across 113 countries from every possible demographic and every possible industry, echoes this. People are over-credentialed, over-scheduled, over-achieving, and under-fulfilled.
They’re not disengaged because they lack drive. They’re disengaged because they’ve lost the through line between what they do every day and who they actually are or want to be.
As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, you don’t fix disengagement with free snacks or flexible schedules. You fix it by restoring meaning.
That’s where consonance comes in.
Consonance: The Alignment That Creates Engagement
“It’s not how much you achieve. It’s how aligned you feel while achieving it.”
In my research and coaching practices, four elements determine whether work feels fulfilling or futile. Together, they give us consonance – that alignment, that flow, when everything you do matches everything you are. That’s true success.
Consonance is made up of four vital parts:
1. Calling — the purpose that pulls you forward
This is the gravitational force, the “why” that makes the hard work worth it. Without calling, ambition becomes directionless. In one of our surveys, employees who could articulate a personal calling were 2.8 times more likely to describe their work as “energizing.”
What’s more, we learned that 98.7% of all employees wanted calling to be part of what brought them to work every day. And, this isn’t just a nonprofit sector number. This was nonprofits, public sector, private sector… everyone. Being inspired by our work is a universal desire.
Studies in organizational psychology back this up: people with purpose are more resilient under stress, more creative under pressure, and more likely to stay through turbulence. But, leaders can’t manufacture calling. You have to help your people locate it, but learning what they care about, why they come to work, what’s interesting to them about this company or cause, and know that, for everyone, at each age and each life stage, the answer will be different, and the answer will be correct.
2. Connection — the link between the daily and the meaningful
If calling is why you care, connection is how your work matters day to day.
When people lose connection, they lose context. They can’t see how their role advances the mission. Connection predicts belonging; belonging predicts performance. But in our surveys, we learned that less than half of all employees can connect their daily work with the long term goals of their organizations, less than half of all employees knew what those long term goals even were, and less than half had a clue what they themselves should do to reach their own goals.
When people can draw a straight line from effort to impact, motivation becomes self-fueling.
Leaders who over-communicate context build connected teams. Those who don’t end up managing compliance instead of commitment.
3. Contribution — the way work supports your life, not consumes it
Your work should contribute something to your life, right? But what? Contribution is how the work aligns with your own goals — career trajectory, learning, income, and lifestyle.
People stay when their effort contributes to their version of success. In fact, in our research, we learned that when contribution scored high, turnover intention dropped by 37%. During a 20 year career in executive search, though, I saw manager after manager get this wrong; this was, after all, the opening for a headhunter like me to sneak in and recruit your best people away.
Here’s why: Managers often skip this step, assuming pay and promotion are a universal motivator. But, only about a third of your team put money as the most important factor that inspired them to come to work today. The rest care more about the mission of the company, how much you inspire them as a leader, how prestigious this job will look on their resumes, how many skills they will learn, how deep will the impact be that they will make, and other such artifacts of contribution. If you can’t point to each of your team members and identify, with certainty, how this work contributes to their lives, you’ve got some conversations to schedule so that you can listen for misalignment before it turns into resignation.
4. Control — the agency to shape your path
Control is the ability to decide how, when, and where we do our great work… and the amount of control that we have has a direct correlation to how great that work actually is. In fact, the level of autonomy we have is so important to us that people are willing to take jobs that give them more control over jobs that give them more power.
People can handle enormous amounts of pressure when they have ownership — but crumble under comfort without it.
We saw this firsthand in our global study. Control was the strongest predictor of engagement. Those with high control described themselves as “curious” and “energized.” Those with low control used words like “stuck” and “tired.” Further, almost three quarters of our respondents said that they would work longer and harder if they felt some level of control over their work.
What surprised us most, however, was that feeling of control often came down to the relationship that your workers have with you: the leader. We know that bad bosses bleed out good people; that much is obvious. So, we focused our attention on people who self-identified as working for “good bosses” – leaders who do the work, get the results, are well respected – and what we learned shocked us: people who say they work for a good boss, but have no relationship with that boss, are just as likely to leave as people who say they work for a bad boss.
And how did they define that relationship? Almost entirely with metrics that allowed them to have some influence over the measure of control they had in their work: how they worked, where they worked, when they worked, and how their work would be measured.
How to Re-Engineer Consonance on Your Team
This is your opportunity to deeply engage your team members to bring their very best selves to work every single day. Consonance is a continuous calibration, not a one-time audit. But, the ways to get there, together, are as simple as one, two, three:
- Ask deeper questions.
Replace “How’s it going?” with “What matters to you about this?” Small talk reveals output; real talk reveals alignment. - Translate strategy into meaning.
Don’t assume people see the link between their task list and the organization’s mission. Draw the line in bold ink, over and over. - Measure the right metrics.
Productivity without purpose is a short-term game. Engagement, retention, and innovation all rise when calling, connection, contribution, and control rise together.
As I tell audiences around the world:
You don’t fix burnout with free snacks. You fix it with alignment.
The Payoff of Redefining Success
When people experience consonance, they don’t need external motivation. They stop chasing “more” and start pursuing meaning. They align what they do with who they are — and that’s when performance, retention, and satisfaction finally intersect. So if success feels strangely hollow, or if your high performers seem restless right after a win, don’t double down on hustle. Double down on alignment. Because the future of leadership isn’t about driving harder. It’s about helping people find their through line — the harmony between their work and their why.
Bring Limitless to Your Organization
My Limitless Keynote helps leaders and teams reconnect success with meaning, using data from 10,000 professionals and practical tools to raise engagement through consonance — Calling, Connection, Contribution, and Control.
Because the goal isn’t to have it all. It’s to have it all aligned.
