PDF Summary:The Power of Mattering, by Zach Mercurio

Modern employees report record-low levels of engagement with their work, and researcher Zach Mercurio argues that the reason is a “mattering deficit”—people don’t feel seen, heard, or significant to those around them. In The Power of Mattering, Mercurio argues that mattering—the experience of feeling valued while knowing you add value—is the foundation for motivation, resilience, and performance. When people feel they matter, everything improves. When they don’t, they either withdraw or act out in desperation.

In this guide, we’ll explore Mercurio’s framework for making people feel seen and heard, showing them how their unique gifts create impact, and demonstrating that they’re indispensable. You’ll discover why modern workplaces make people feel they don’t matter, how your perceptions of others shape who they become, and how your interactions affect them—whether you manage people or not. We’ll also examine the evolutionary mismatch between our hunter-gatherer brains and modern work, explore the neuroscience behind helping others, and connect Mercurio’s framework to the power of language.

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Alternative Explanations for Loneliness and Disengagement

Mercurio attributes workplace loneliness and disengagement to people not feeling they matter. But the human experience is complex, and other research frameworks offer complementary perspectives on these trends. Consider self-determination theory, which we discussed earlier. It suggests that people have three fundamental psychological needs: the freedom to make meaningful choices about their work, the ability to do their job well, and genuine connections with colleagues. When any of these needs goes unmet, disengagement follows, regardless of whether someone explicitly feels they don’t matter.

The psychological idea of alienation—a feeling of disconnection from your work or your sense of identity—offers another lens. The core insight here is structural: When your job becomes so specialized that you lose sight of how your efforts contribute to anything tangible, a sense of disconnection is almost inevitable. Add to that the physical distance many workers face—long commutes that separate work from the rest of life, or remote setups that eliminate spontaneous human contact—and you have conditions ripe for alienation. Research on meaningful work adds yet another dimension: People disengage when their work conflicts with their values or fails to connect to anything they find important.

Perhaps most telling is what neuroscience reveals about our daily interactions. Much of how humans understand each other happens below conscious awareness—we read tiny shifts in posture, catch micro-expressions, and sync our behavior to subtle social rhythms. Video calls strip most of this nonverbal information away, so your brain has to work significantly harder during a virtual meeting to extract the social meaning you would easily get in person. This explains why Zoom calls are exhausting, and it also clarifies why loneliness has risen even as meetings have multiplied: More interaction doesn’t help when each interaction delivers far less of what our brains need to feel connected.

Modern Workplaces Undermine Mattering

Mercurio argues that most workplaces are structured in ways that make mattering difficult or impossible. The problem isn’t dramatic events that make people feel they don’t matter—it’s the accumulation of small moments where people feel unseen, unheard, or undervalued. These moments occur routinely because we’ve shifted from having face-to-face conversations that build genuine connection to text-based exchanges that strip away emotional content. The pace of modern work intensifies the problem: Meetings have tripled since 2021, yet most entail rapid exchanges of information with no space for understanding how people are actually doing.

Mercurio emphasizes that when we’re rushed, interactions become transactional, and each small moment of inattention teaches people they don’t really matter. These feelings of insignificance accumulate through small moments: Someone mispronounces your name in a meeting, talks over you, assigns you routine work while giving colleagues high-visibility projects without explanation, or forgets you mentioned your parent’s surgery. None of these alone would drive you to quit, but together they send a clear message: “You don’t really matter here.”

The Cumulative Power of Small Slights

Mercurio’s argument that small moments of inattention accumulate to send the message “you don’t matter” parallels research on microaggressions: subtle, often unintentional slights directed at marginalized groups, including people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities. Psychologists describe microaggressions as “death by a thousand cuts” because while any single incident may seem harmless, the cumulative burden contributes to depression, anxiety, and diminished confidence. Repeatedly questioning whether slights are real or imagined takes a toll, and microaggressions have documented impacts on people’s productivity and mental health and on workplace climate.

While research on microaggressions illuminates the problem, organizations often struggle to counter the effect. But some approaches show promise: “Microinterventions” are everyday actions that validate the worth of those targeted by bias, reduce their sense of helplessness, and challenge biased behaviors. Similarly, bystander intervention training teaches people to recognize discriminatory actions and interrupt harmful moments. Another strategy is to slow down, notice how an organization treats people, and consciously question the underlying beliefs. Just as Mercurio notes that small moments of inattention accumulate to create a deficit of mattering, small moments of intervention can counteract them.

Leaders Lack the Skills to Counteract These Pressures

Mercurio argues that even if work environments weren’t hostile to mattering, most leaders wouldn’t know how to create it. We’ve treated interpersonal skills as “soft skills” that leaders should have naturally, rather than developing them with the same rigor we apply to technical competencies. Less than 2% of people receive formal training in quality listening, one of the most fundamental skills for making people feel heard. Organizations promote people for technical excellence, then expect them to magically know how to lead people.

Hearing Versus Listening

As Mercurio points out, few people are taught to listen. We spend more of our day listening than speaking, reading, or writing, and there’s a widespread assumption that listening is something people naturally know how to do. This misconception has consequences: Most American schools don’t test students’ listening abilities unless they’re learning English as a second language, which means the majority of students go through their entire education without being taught how to become better listeners.

The reality is that listening is far more complex than simply hearing words. While hearing is a physical process in which your ears perceive sound waves, listening involves cognitive work: paying attention despite distractions, interpreting what’s being said, evaluating the information, and formulating a response. Experts who study communication identify multiple competencies involved in effective listening, including the ability to withhold judgment while someone is speaking, reflect back what you’ve heard to confirm understanding, ask clarifying questions, and pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues. These skills can be taught and practiced, but they’re not innate.

Beyond lacking the skills to really listen to people, Mercurio explains that leaders struggle with how they perceive people. We form quick judgments based on limited information, then treat people according to those judgments—creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where our perceptions shape who people become. Our perceptual biases tend to emphasize negative traits and recent behaviors, leading us to label people and stop seeking to understand them.

(Shortform note: Mercurio’s observation that we make quick judgments that become self-fulfilling prophecies is grounded in neuroscience. Research shows you judge someone’s trustworthiness and competence in about 100 milliseconds, faster than a blink, and these first impressions can persist for months, even when they’re contradicted by someone’s actual behavior. Stereotypes and expectations bias our interpretation of someone’s face and shape what social categories we place them in before we’ve even consciously thought about what we’re seeing. In other words, when leaders hold negative expectations, they’re not just interpreting behavior unfairly—they may be seeing a different person than they would without those expectations.)

Why Conventional Solutions Fail

Mercurio argues that workplaces have been applying the wrong solutions. They’ve thrown programs and perks at the problem: engagement surveys and platforms, recognition programs, free lunches and gym memberships, more meetings, and wellness apps. These interventions try to fix an interpersonal problem with impersonal solutions. Engagement surveys measure the problem but don’t fix it. Recognition programs offer generic appreciation that doesn’t create genuine mattering. Perks don’t substitute for being seen as a person. More meetings increase the quantity of connection, but not the quality. Wellness programs focused on individual development miss the point that well-being depends on relationships.

These solutions fail because they’re programmatic rather than interpersonal—they treat mattering as an initiative to add rather than something to embed in every interaction. They focus on lagging indicators like engagement scores rather than the behaviors that create mattering: whether leaders are noticing, affirming, and showing people they’re needed in daily interactions. What’s needed, according to Mercurio, are leaders who have the skills to make people feel noticed, affirmed, and needed in everyday interactions—and organizational systems that make these behaviors inevitable rather than leaving them to chance.

Our Brains Evolved for Small Groups, Not Corporate Hierarchies

Modern organizational structures conflict with how our brains evolved to work and connect. For approximately 2 million years (representing almost all of our species’s history), humans lived as hunter-gatherers in small, mobile groups. Research on brain size and social groups suggests that under these social conditions, the human brain evolved to form and maintain stable relationships with roughly 150 people. In the environments where our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived, everyone knew everyone else, hierarchies were minimal or nonexistent, there was no real separation between “work” and “life,” and people maintained their relationships through constant face-to-face interaction.

The impersonal corporations Mercurio describes—with thousands of employees, multiple offices, and rigid hierarchies—are a radical departure from our natural social environment. This evolutionary mismatch helps explain why corporations’ attempts to counter loneliness and disengagement fail: Our brains evolved to matter within a network of people we see regularly and know personally. When we try to scale mattering up to the size of multinational corporations, we’re fighting against cognitive limits shaped by millions of years of evolution.

How to Create Mattering

Now that we understand what mattering is and why organizations struggle with it, we can explore Mercurio’s framework for creating it in everyday interactions. His method consists of three practices: Noticing (making people feel seen and heard), Affirming (showing people how their unique gifts have an impact), and Needing (demonstrating that people are indispensable). These practices are learnable skills, not personality traits, that transform ordinary interactions into what Mercurio calls “moments of mattering.”

Noticing

Mercurio defines noticing as ensuring that people feel truly seen and heard, which requires that we deliberately counteract how our biases, time pressures, and attention deficits prevent us from accurately perceiving others. He emphasizes an important distinction: You can know someone without noticing them. You might know that your colleague has two kids, but fail to notice she’s been stressed for weeks because her childcare fell through.

Three barriers prevent effective noticing. First, the perceptual barrier: How you see people determines how you treat them, which influences who they become. We form quick judgments, then label people—seeing them as a “difficult employee” or a “low performer”—and stop seeking to understand them. Mercurio explains that instead, it’s crucial to separate the person from their behavior. Instead of thinking “This is a difficult person,” think “This is a person behaving in ways I perceive as difficult.” When you catch yourself making a negative judgment, ask: What information am I missing? What circumstances might be shaping this behavior?

Second, the time barrier: Most work interactions are transactional—“update me,” “what’s the status?”—with no space for genuine connection. Mercurio’s solution: Schedule dedicated time for relationships rather than leaving them to chance—make one-on-ones sacrosanct and protect them from cancellation. Also, optimize moments like the two minutes before a meeting starts or a hallway conversation, which create brief but critical opportunities to demonstrate that people matter.

Third, the attention barrier: Our ability to sustain attention has collapsed—from over two minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today. We operate on autopilot and ask rote questions like “How are you?” that don’t yield real information. Mercurio offers two solutions: Create systems to help you remember details about others, like a simple log where you note one thing about each team member every week and review it before your next interaction. Also, ask meaningful questions that replace “How are you?” with “What has your attention today?” or “What’s been most challenging this week?”

Mindfulness as a Tool for Noticing

Training in mindfulness counteracts the challenges that prevent us from truly seeing others. Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are) defines mindfulness as the practice of paying attention to the present moment and observing it without judgment. Research shows that workers who practice mindfulness feel more satisfied with their jobs and experience less burnout. Workplace mindfulness programs that teach skills like presence, emotional regulation, resilience, cognitive flexibility, and communication have proven effective. In fact, mindfulness can help address all three of Mercurio’s barriers to noticing the people around you.

Mindfulness reduces the perceptual barrier by helping us counteract the quick judgments that show up in how we label and dismiss people. We spend much of our day on mental “cruise control,” following habitual patterns as our thoughts wander, and we feel significantly less happy during these moments. Mindfulness interrupts this automatic processing by training us to observe without immediately judging, reducing our vulnerability to cognitive biases. This extends to how we perceive other people: Mindfulness training helps people read others’ emotions more accurately (and less judgmentally).

As for the time barrier, mindfulness creates the present-moment awareness we need to transform the brief, transactional interactions Mercurio describes into deeper, more meaningful conversations where we can show people they matter to us. People with higher levels of mindfulness engage in conversations, even difficult ones, with lower anxiety and tend to communicate more positively and productively. Similarly, regarding the attention barrier, mindfulness practice significantly improves our power over our attention, helping us regain the ability to focus intentionally. Even a little bit helps: A single 10-minute mindfulness meditation session improves people’s accuracy on attention tasks.

Affirming

Mercurio defines affirmation as showing people specifically how their unique gifts create unique impact. Affirmation differs from generic appreciation by revealing exactly how someone matters. Humans need to be seen as unique, not just another group member. Mercurio recommends identifying people’s particular gifts in four areas: what they’re naturally good at (strengths), the impact they want to make (purpose), how they see the world (perspective), and what only they can teach (wisdom). You identify these by paying attention to what makes someone light up, what others ask them for help with, and what comes easily to them.

How Do We Assess Whether We Feel Unique?

Like Mercurio, psychologists have noted that even as we need to belong, we also want to feel special and distinct, and research suggests we’re constantly seeking to balance these competing needs. We want to feel included in our groups without losing our sense of individual identity—stand out too much, and we risk isolation; blend in too much, and we lose ourselves. Cultural context often shapes how this plays out. In collectivist societies—common in East Asia, for example—the group takes priority, and standing out is often discouraged. Individualistic cultures like the US flip this emphasis: They celebrate personal uniqueness, competitiveness, and self-expression.

Mercurio’s approach to affirming uniqueness—focusing on people’s strengths, purpose, perspective, and wisdom—maps onto psychological research. His “strengths” dimension parallels a framework that identifies two dozen universal character traits that everyone has in different combinations. His “purpose” dimension connects to research showing that a sense of meaning helps people define who they are. His “perspective” dimension reflects findings that each person’s worldview is shaped by their unique experiences, personal beliefs, and cultural background. And “wisdom,” in psychological research, encompasses flexible thinking, the ability to see multiple viewpoints, and skill at managing life’s uncertainties.

Once you’ve identified a person’s gifts, connect them to a specific result. Mercurio explains you shouldn’t just say “thank you.” Instead, show the chain of causation: what they did, what gifts they used, and what effect it had. For example: “The way you anticipated the client’s questions and had data ready—that’s your strategic thinking. Because of that, they approved the budget immediately, so we can start a month early.” Mercurio also recommends making affirmation systematic rather than occasional by collecting and sharing stories of how people’s work helped others. Before you even assign a task to someone, he advises that you frame tasks by explaining their significance: Point out why the task matters and why this person is right for it.

How Research Validates Mercurio’s Approach

Mercurio’s three-part approach to affirmation—showing the chain of causation, making recognition systematic, and pre-framing tasks—aligns with decades of research on how people develop a sense that their work matters. Studies on how people react to feedback show that precise feedback is more effective than generic praise, and behavior-specific feedback that describes what someone did and how to build on it helps people learn and improve their performance.

Mercurio’s call for frequent recognition is also well-supported. Research shows that 98% of employees who receive daily recognition feel valued by their employer. This proportion drops to 94% among those who receive weekly recognition, 88% among those who get monthly recognition, and just 37% for workers who receive only annual feedback. Separately, workers who receive feedback from their manager a few times per week or more report significantly higher engagement levels.

Mercurio’s advice to help people see how their work affects others draws on research into task significance. In experiments with people raising money for a university, callers who briefly met a scholarship recipient were motivated to spend 142% more time on the phone and raise 171% more money for the school over the following month. Together, these practices help employees understand both retrospectively (through recognition of the impact they’ve made in the past) and prospectively (through thinking about the impact that they’ll have with their future tasks) that their work creates positive outcomes for others—which is ultimately what makes work feel meaningful.

Needing

Mercurio defines needing as showing people they’re relied upon and essential. When people feel replaceable, they act replaceable. When they feel indispensable, they rise to that significance. We see this pattern in research on group behavior, which shows that people exert less effort in groups than individually because they feel less essential. Yet feeling needed triggers neurochemical rewards and gives people purpose beyond themselves.

Why We Need to Feel Indispensable

Social loafing—the phenomenon Mercurio references where people slack off when they’re part of a group—happens because people feel their individual contribution won’t matter. Psychologists have found that people will exert effort on a collective task only when they believe their effort will lead to their performance being noticed, their individual work will meaningfully impact the group, and the group’s success will lead to something they personally value. When any link in this chain breaks, motivation drops.

This connects to how your brain’s reward system reinforces the experience of feeling needed: The dopamine your brain releases is tied to whether you anticipate that your effort will be rewarded. When you feel like you’re not needed or won’t be noticed by the group, this breaks the chain connecting your effort to a predicted reward, and dopamine decreases. However, there’s a simple way to get the motivation system back online: Research shows that even subtle cues suggesting you’re working together with others, rather than just alongside them, can increase motivation, likely because it signals that your contribution will be noticed.

Mercurio offers three practices for showing people they’re needed. First, make their absence visible. When someone is gone, tell them what was different. Don’t say “everything was fine”—identify what was specifically missed.

Second, connect their work to a larger purpose by showing how each specific task enables something bigger. For example: “You’re updating product descriptions, which feeds into the website refresh, which makes it easier for customers to find what they need.”

Third, tell people explicitly how you rely on them. Use “If it weren’t for you...” and complete it specifically. For example: “If it weren’t for you keeping our clients happy during our transition, we would have lost three accounts. Your ability to build trust gave us the runway we needed.”

The Language That Makes Work Matter

Research suggests the brain processes cause-and-effect relationships more powerfully than isolated facts. This explains why Mercurio’s three practices—articulating how someone’s absence affected you, connecting their tasks to their bigger purpose, and articulating how you rely on them—are neurologically effective at helping people feel needed. These statements give people what psychologists call “causal coherence,” creating narratives that help people create meaning. When a leader says, “If it weren’t for your efforts, we would have lost three accounts,” they’re providing a linguistic structure that allows their worker’s hippocampus to identify cause-and-effect relationships and impose order and meaning onto events.

This language does more than inform: It also transforms identity. As employees are told how their work connects to larger outcomes, their understanding of the meaning of their work shifts, which in turn alters their work identity and helps them define themselves in positive terms. Research suggests that people form their identity by integrating their experiences into an internalized, evolving story that provides a sense of unity and purpose. So when leaders consistently use the language of “cause and effect” that Mercurio recommends, they give employees the linguistic building blocks their brains need to transform their work into a story of personal significance.

Reciprocity

Mercurio emphasizes that you don’t need to be a leader to make people feel they matter—and doing so benefits you as much as others. When you show someone they matter, you witness their response, which provides evidence of your own significance. These acts of kindness boost your own well-being, reduce your chances of burnout, and increase your own job satisfaction while simultaneously helping the recipient.

This reciprocal dynamic operates through what psychologists call the “norm of reciprocity”—people tend to return the actions of others. When you notice, affirm, or show someone they’re needed, you increase the likelihood they’ll do the same, creating an upward spiral. But even without reciprocation, you benefit. Research shows that people drastically underestimate how much their acts of kindness affect recipients, which means your small gestures likely matter far more than you realize.

The Science Behind Social Well-Being

Being kind to others isn’t just good for them—it’s one of the most reliable ways to improve your own life. Scientists have found that when people feel they’ve made a meaningful difference on any given day, they report deeper feelings of purpose alongside greater happiness. The health benefits are significant: Those who feel lonely or cut off from others face roughly 26-29% higher risk of early death, while maintaining close relationships can extend your lifespan by approximately half. Here’s what happens in your brain when you help someone: You get a surge of mood-enhancing neurochemicals that affect everything from how you feel to how well you remember things. Researchers call this the “helper’s high.”

This effect is self-reinforcing: Feeling good makes you more likely to be kind again, creating an upward cycle. Yet there’s a catch that Mercurio highlights: We’re bad at recognizing our own impact. When researchers studied people performing acts of kindness, they consistently found that the person being kind dramatically underestimated how much their gesture mattered to the recipient. This gap in perception can discourage us from reaching out more often, causing us to miss opportunities that would benefit everyone involved—opportunities that give us a sense of meaning (and mattering) because social connections may benefit us most when they let us help others.

Consider the film About Time, in which the protagonist can travel back in time. He learns to use this ability to make life better by appreciating moments as they happen and enriching other people’s experiences. What would you do differently if you could see how the day turns out and then go back and change your approach? Perhaps you’d be more present with a colleague who seemed down, more generous with your attention to a friend, more intentional about noticing the people around you. The film suggests—and research confirms—that these everyday acts of connection and kindness are the substance of a meaningful life.