Listen to people around you and you'll hear understandable yet disturbing concerns. Many refuse to engage in the political process because they're sure they can't make a difference. At work, they look out for themselves: Corporations don't show workers any loyalty, so why should they get what they don't give? Even many sports fans come to wonder if there is anything to their favorite games other than employment for millionaires.

The Shrinking World

People feel tiny and insignificant, so they focus on finding a little peace and a little comfort and staying out of the way of trouble. Much of what you will notice in the world is of agonizing smallness. Your neighbors rarely connect with anything greater than themselves, which is why they sometimes hold on so fervently to anything that strikes them at first glimpse. The popular political figure looks around to adoring ovations. Actors and musicians find themselves asked about everything from social theory to quantum mechanics. People are desperate for something more than what they see.

If despair and disillusion were all there was to life, existence would be pretty grim. That's why you'll find people who devote time to causes they find important, work extraordinarily hard to accomplish projects, or throw themselves into painting or gardening or some other activity merely for the love of it. Ordinary people even have the potential to be true heroes.

Hope for People

People need hope, and they need to feel that there is meaning in what they do. One problem that teams run into is that the tasks facing their members become routine. You knock door-to-door, canvassing a neighborhood, or you work on an assembly line. If you do anything often enough that the activity becomes rote, it is a chore and ultimately seems unimportant.

Contrast that with someone who sees the importance, in context, of the task to the team. At that point, the activity is anything but rote. Every action, no matter how mundane, connects to big goals of the team. Every success of the team becomes possible because of all the tasks that the team members do.

Meaning transforms individuals from cynics and skeptics to champions. The person running into the blazing building to save a child, the worker who spends all night to perfect an important project, the volunteer who coordinates a reading tutoring program for adults — no one who achieves anything of value does so by accident.

Hope for a Team

If people work with a sense of drudgery, they are nowhere near as effective as if they worked with purpose. You only have to think about your own life and experiences to know the difference between the two states and the results you get from each. If people in the first category are on your team, you can forget about high achievement.

On the other hand, when people do their part with joy and intensity, then the team similarly benefits. How could it not if all the team members work with passion? The difference is that in the second case, the team members know how the work they do fits into a greater effort. They work with vision. Leaders who want to harness that power need to develop, instill, and make use of vision.