Reaching New Heights: Empowering Self-Actualization at Work

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Today, we asked the question, is the future of business about helping employees self-actualize? Will climbing the corporate ladder mean climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs until you hit self-actualization? I love when we start talking consciousness models, guys. I'm going to jump in here real quick and try to briefly go through Maslow's hierarchy of needs before we jump into the conversation.
I don't know how many of you out there fully know this, but it's pretty common one and so it's the one I think most people are familiar with as far as consciousness models. I want to go through that just briefly for those who aren't familiar with it. It's often visualized as a pyramid with layers that represent different levels of human needs. The idea is that you need to satisfy these lower levels before you can move up to the higher ones and the highest level is this self-actualization. At the base of this pyramid are the physiological needs. They include the basics like food, water, shelter. These are the essentials you need to survive essentially while you get a job. Then just above this level on the pyramid, now moving up, we have safety needs, which encompass personal and financial security, health, and well-being. I think this is where most employers certainly not all tend to stop. They provide some of the basics here.
Then there's this middle layer of the hierarchy that holds love and belonging needs. This is focusing on relationships and friendships. This is where our social lives fit into this pyramid. Good companies focus on trying to help with culture here to help with some of this.
Next up, we have the esteem needs. This involves the need for self-esteem, respect, recognition from others, your better companies try to help here. I'm not just talking about the employee of the month award, but a good company builds a system here so they are consistently operating on this level with continual recognition and respect. Then at the top of the pyramid, we reach this self-actualization needs stage. This is where individuals reach their full potential, they're engaging in activities that lead to personal growth and fulfillment.
Maslow believed that each level unlocks the next layer up, so culminating in this self-actualization where personal and professional growth is maximized. In the grand scheme of things, really very few companies focus on the personal, part of the personal and professional growth.
Research by Maslow showed that individuals who can achieve this state are better at reconciling contradictions, embracing uncertainties, and problem-solving scenarios. Self-actualized people typically exhibit this superior problem-solving skills. I wanted to drop in this background today when talking about personal growth and fulfillment. Let's talk about the future of business. Will the sole purpose of business no longer be about maximizing profits, but maximizing profits and people? Tullio, is self-actualization is the future of business? I think we all agree that it is, but why?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:03)
I think it's not only the future, it's what it was intended to be from the beginning of time. If you look at the agricultural age, everything we did was about self-actualization. Some would say it was about survival, but it was really about learning how to have harmony with the land, and extracting value from the land, nurturing the land, taking care of the symbiotic relationship between nature and human. That's how we thrive. Then we moved into this industrial age where it was about automating a lot of these functions, using technology to enhance these functions, and introducing new things that could happen. All that happened through innovative thinking, and many of the folks who did that self-actualized themselves, like Michelangelo and so on. But over time, somehow we realized we can use this stuff to make more profits, more wealth, and so those individuals self-actualized themselves. But somewhere along the lines, it got lost, this idea that my job isn't just to earn money to take care of my family, but to actually grow and become something more.
I think a lot of the newer generation are realizing, I don't want to just do something to, quote unquote, make the man rich, or work for the man or whatever the expression is lately, right? But I want to be able to do something meaningful that fuels my soul, so to speak.
And so they're looking for ways to join organizations where they can grow, where they can make an impact, where they can become part of something greater than themselves, they can have meaning behind what they're doing. And many of them are realizing that most organizations aren't set up that way, so it's letting them down.