The Day the Work Meant More
I was in my early thirties when I stumbled into a realization that would permanently change how I thought about work.
At the time, I was leading a customer-facing team inside a growing technology company. Like many teams, we were busy. We delivered software. We guided implementations. We tracked initial value milestones. We solved problems. We answered questions. We managed escalations. We strategically managed relationships across customers, partners, and internal teams.
We worked incredibly hard.
Yet if you had asked most people on the team how their work influenced the business, the answers likely would have stayed close to the work immediately in front of them.
We implement software.
We help customers.
We solve problems.
All true.
But incomplete.
As my role evolved, I found myself spending more time in discussions about revenue forecasts, growth targets, retention trends, and company performance. I was sitting in rooms with executives discussing revenue realization, expansion opportunities, and long-term business health.
What struck me wasn't what they were talking about.
It was how they were talking about it.
And suddenly I realized my team and the executive team were speaking two entirely different languages.
My team talked about implementation plans.
Executives talked about revenue realization.
My team talked about customer relationships.
Executives talked about retention.
My team talked about stakeholder alignment.
Executives talked about expansion opportunities.
Yet they were describing the same reality from different vantage points.
The longer I sat in both worlds, the harder it became to ignore the connection.
When executives discussed revenue forecasts, I could see implementation plans that at strategic intervals triggered revenue.
When they discussed retention, I could see the countless moments that influenced whether a customer stayed or left.
I could see the delicate balancing act between successful go-lives and unresolved product issues. I could see teams navigating high-stakes customer dynamics while maintaining trust through uncertainty. I could see difficult conversations, thoughtful escalations, and hundreds of small decisions that never appeared in a report but shaped the customer experience every day.
When they discussed future growth, I could see hundreds of conversations my team had already been having for months.
In many ways, we were watching the future arrive before it appeared in a dashboard.
We spent enormous amounts of time understanding what created customer confidence and, equally important, what eroded it.
We paid attention to signals.
We noticed shifts in engagement.
We watched stakeholder alignment strengthen or weaken.
We listened for concerns that hadn't yet become risks.
In fact, we became so focused on understanding those patterns that we created our own risk model. We scored every customer against indicators we believed influenced both short-term revenue triggers and long-term revenue growth. Sometimes we even evaluated individual stakeholder relationships within a customer environment.
This was years before customer health indexes became commonplace.
At the time, it simply felt like good stewardship.
Looking back, I realize we were trying to make visible what wasn't yet measurable.
The executive team was often looking at outcomes.
My team was living inside the conditions that created those outcomes.
And somewhere between those two perspectives, I began to understand that one of the most valuable things a leader can do is help people see how their work participates in a larger story.
So I started experimenting.
Instead of talking only about project timelines, resource constraints, product limitations, and implementation goals, I began introducing a different conversation.
We talked in measures. Like, the correlation of a risk-score to a predictive revenue trigger event for each customer revenue line in the forecast.
We lived in calculated measure that accelerated initial value milestones, affecting the first revenue realization.
We continuously measured customer confidence that influenced conditions for future growth.
Daily, we experimented and evaluated what nurtured customer trust and what slowly eroded it.
More than anything, we worked to create a common language.
A language that connected what happened in customer meetings to what happened in executive meetings.
At first, it felt unfamiliar.
Not because the concepts were difficult.
Because nobody had ever framed the work that way before.
Then something started to happen.
A team member would reference an initial value milestone metric and a revenue milestone in the same conversation, naturally … on their own, and amongst one another.
Someone would connect a customer experience decision to a business outcome when asked by our CEO who would be walking through the cubicle halls. For the first time, the executives and the team were speaking the same language.
People began drawing the connections themselves.
What began as information slowly became perspective.
And then came the moment that has stayed with me all these years later.
I’ve since moved on from this role, but I still hear from my team once-in-a-while and they share how this has unfolded into their jobs and roles even now.
They could explain not only what they did each day, but why it mattered.
Not because their jobs had changed.
Because their understanding had.
There was a different kind of pride in those conversations.
Not ego.
Not status.
Understanding.
The kind that emerges when people recognize that their work contributes to something larger than the task sitting directly in front of them.
Looking back, I don't think the most important thing I gave that team was information.
I think it was perspective.
Many people spend their careers surrounded by evidence that their work matters while never actually seeing it or knowing how to speak to it.
They prevent problems that never happen.
They create trust that becomes invisible because it feels normal.
They influence outcomes that are measured somewhere else, by someone else, long after the work itself is complete.
The contribution exists.
The visibility doesn't.
And perhaps that's why this experience has stayed with me for so many years.
Not because it taught me something about leadership.
Because it taught me something about people.
Most of us want to know that what we do matters.
Not in a performative way.
Not for recognition.
But because meaning helps us make sense of effort.
It helps us connect today's work to tomorrow's outcome.
It helps us understand our place in a larger story.
Which is why I've become increasingly interested in the relationship between work and perspective.
Sometimes people are carrying meaningful work while lacking meaningful context.
And context changes everything.
One of the healthiest questions we can ask ourselves is:
What larger outcome might I already be influencing, even if I can't yet see it?
A QUESTION TO CARRY FORWARD
