On Mattering

There is a word that is almost entirely absent from business education, and it predicts more of what we say we care about than any of the words we use instead.

The word is mattering.

Engagement, retention, performance, even leadership effectiveness — the research has been quietly converging for a decade. People who feel they matter at work do better work and stay longer.

What makes mattering interesting is that it cannot be installed. It is not a programme. It is the felt sense of a person that their presence is noticed. That their contribution registers somewhere. That their absence would be felt.

You cannot generate it through a campaign. You can only generate it through how an organisation is actually structured — who gets heard in meetings, whose work gets named, whose questions shape decisions, whose silence is treated as agreement.

Most organisations treat this as soft territory. It is not soft. It is the most predictive variable we have for whether a workplace can keep its best people through a difficult year.

And it sits, almost untouched, in the curricula of the institutions training the next generation of leaders.

That is something we are trying to change.

– The HAANA founding team: Alejandro Villazon Pineda, Jürgen Mohr, Liane Grassi, Maria Marshall-Clarke –