Meaningful Workplaces: Reframing How and Where We Work

Personal Mastery

Susan Gayle (1997) discovered that “gold collar” workers (the top 1 percent of high-technology systems experts) were continuously honing their skills and learning new advances when they were not deeply immersed in their work. They were either improving themselves or improving the systems they were working on. So the end goal of money or status was not what was of importance to them; it was their ability to have an impact on the organization’s effectiveness through the work, and the self-directed “space” to be constantly challenged, creative, and learning. Peter Senge (1990), author of The Fifth Discipline, describes personal mastery this way:

People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They ...