Tom Rath on the COVID Reset, Creating Meaning, and the Power of Positive Energy

Author Tom Rath spoke to Leadership Council SMC about finding meaning.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic upending our lives and routines, our team at Leadership Council San Mateo County wanted to host a launch event that not only focused on the topic of leadership, but also acknowledged the many changes and challenges we’ve all experienced this past year.

For us, 2020 underscored how much in our lives we had taken for granted before the pandemic. But more importantly, the pandemic made us reevaluate how we lived our day-to-day lives before the world as we knew it came to halt.

In Tom Rath’s new book, Life’s Great Question: Discover How You Can Contribute to the World, he explores Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous quote “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?” We invited Tom, a #1 New York Times bestselling author and researcher on human health and wellbeing, to discuss his book with NBC Bay Area news anchor Raj Mathai for our official launch event on February 26, 2021, which raised funds for the San Mateo County Strong Fund for COVID relief.

“How can we do a small thing today that will help someone a week from now, a month from now, or when we’re gone?” Tom asked participants during the Zoom webinar. “How can you contribute to things in a way that will have exponential growth and benefit other people?”

For Tom, these questions are personal. When he was 15, he learned he had a rare genetic disorder that would claim one of his eyes and lead to multiple battles with cancer over the course of his life. He was told his life expectancy was around 37 years; he’s now 45. That acute mortality creates a sense of urgency, he said, to contribute to others’ lives in whatever small ways he can, whether it’s helping his daughter with her math homework or writing multiple books that help people find meaning in their lives.

Finding that meaning in life, especially in our work, is more important than we realize. When we have a role in our society that we find meaningful, it energizes us. That energy we derive from our work then flows into our personal lives, boosting our health, our relationships with our family, and our productivity.

“I think people should have more energy when they get home because of their work than when they leave in the morning,” Tom said.

But how do we foster that energy in the workplace, especially in a culture that values working as hard as possible to generate the highest returns?

Tom’s answer: Leaders need to act as role models for their teams. He explained that managers and executives often set the wrong example for their organization by working long hours, not taking days off, and overall not modeling a healthy work-life balance. By setting this standard, leaders create more stress and make it harder for their co-workers to be energized by their work.

“The relationship between people and the organization they’re part of is pretty broken at its core,” Tom said. “We’ve got to find a way to fix that.”

So how do we fix it?

According to Tom, there are two things followers really need from leaders, especially right now: stability and hope. He discussed how leaders need to practice what they preach and be good examples in terms of taking care of their health and energy from a wellbeing standpoint. From the military to the boardroom, leaders modeling self-care is the best way to change a culture within an organization.

Tom said one of the most valuable things leaders can do today is to take time to walk around the office or jump around on Zoom calls, asking good personal questions to the people they lead about their strengths and challenges, and listening to those answers without judgement. Understanding each team member’s strengths and challenges will help us to become better leaders, boost energy and morale at work, and stimulate conversations about the meaning behind what we do.

“We all need to find some way today to remind ourselves of how we can see the contributions we make on this day that have a positive influence on at least one other person and that can kind of carry forward,” Tom said. When we’re able to do that, he said, we finish our days with more energy to bring home to our friends and family members, we get a better night’s sleep, and we diminish the stress that causes a lot of physiological damage to our bodies and mental health.

“I’m kind of getting optimistic right now that COVID is a reset of all our expectations,” Tom said. “We’re all sitting around asking questions about, ‘Is what I’m doing really important or not?’ We’re sitting around asking, ‘Is the way I worked before the right way to work when I go back?’” As for the future of work, Tom hopes leaders will think hard about the best way for each person to work. Once life begins returning to normal, we should think about how we can have more meaningful, more focused in-person time in the office with our teams while also having the chance to work from home some days. Cutting out the commute and the expectation that employees must spend a certain amount of time in the office regardless of productivity will allow for more time with family and more energy to do our best work.

As we officially launch Leadership Council San Mateo County, we hope to instill these values in the community leaders who go through our program. Launching a nonprofit in the middle of a pandemic was never something we imagined for ourselves back in March 2020, yet this past year has dramatically underscored the need for strong leaders who are able to make decisions with good judgement, sound knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, empathy.

We hope to inspire leaders to model these traits and use their own strengths to derive meaning from their work. Like Tom said, when we use our strengths to create positive change, it energizes us. That energy permeates through our teams and organizations, leaving us all better off and leading happier, healthier lifestyles.

So as we begin this exciting new chapter, we look forward to sharing the energy we gain from our work as leaders of Leadership Council SMC and turning it into positive, meaningful change for San Mateo County.


The Leadership Council SMC Team


Special thanks to Tom Rath, Raj Mathai and our event sponsors.