What a Homemade Pie Revealed About Shared Meaning at Work
A lesson in how expanding the “shared pool of meaning” helps organizations align their people, processes, and systems.
Last year, I had the opportunity to help a senior living organization define and articulate its employer brand—the shared story employees experience about what it means to work there. During one of my employee interviews for that project, a housekeeper whom we’ll call Mary shared a story that stayed with me long after the conversation ended.
It happened during the holidays, a time of year when family traditions and familiar routines often matter most. Mary explained that one resident in particular – we’ll call him Bill – was struggling because he didn’t have loved ones nearby to spend the season with. The absence felt especially noticeable that time of year.
But Mary and one of her co-workers took notice.
They knew Bill loved pumpkin pie, so they decided to bake one for him and deliver it to his apartment door. When he opened the door and saw it, he had tears in his eyes. He asked them why they would do something like that for him.
Their answer was simple: “We didn’t want you to be alone.”
When Mary finished telling the story, she paused and added something that struck me even more than the story itself.
“We do things like that all the time here.”
As soon as I heard her story, it triggered my own nostalgic memory of a previous neighbor – an elderly widow named Dottie.
Dottie lived alone in a large two-story house well into her late eighties. One of the ways she showed care for the people around her was through baking. If someone helped her with a small task like bringing her newspaper to her door or pulling some weeds around her flowerbed, she would often respond by bringing over a freshly baked pie. For Dottie, baking was her love language. And, my husband and I were the beneficiaries of her baking a few times in the past.
So when I heard Mary’s story about baking Bill a pumpkin pie, it immediately connected me back to my own memories of Dottie. At that moment, the story meant something more to me than just an example of good customer service. It revealed something deeper about the culture of the organization I was working with.
But here’s the interesting part.
Before this employer brand project began, the organization didn’t yet have an organized and shared way to talk about moments like that. Employees experienced them. Residents felt them. Leaders valued them. But the organization didn’t yet have a common language to describe what those moments represented.
The Challenge Behind the Project
Like many senior living organizations across the country, this one was facing a familiar challenge. Turnover was high across this industry, and recruiting and retaining enough staff to provide consistent care was becoming increasingly difficult – especially during and after COVID.
The work itself is demanding. It requires emotional resilience, physical stamina, and the ability to build meaningful relationships with residents and families. On top of that, the industry is highly regulated, which adds additional layers of responsibility and complexity.
The organization’s HR and talent acquisition leaders understood that simply posting more job openings wasn’t going to solve the problem. They believed the organization needed to better articulate its employer brand—the story employees experience about working there and the reasons people choose to join and stay.
But outside of HR, the concept of employer brand wasn’t widely understood.
Some leaders had heard the phrase before. Others hadn’t. Many assumed it was simply another version of the organization’s external brand used in marketing to residents and their families.
In fact, the organization had already attempted a smaller effort to define its employer brand before I became involved. That effort produced what many organizations create first: a tagline.
But something felt incomplete. A tagline alone couldn’t capture the full experience of working there. The leadership team sensed there was a deeper story about the employee experience that hadn’t yet been told.
When People Don’t Share Meaning
Recently, while reading the book Crucial Conversations, I came across a concept that helped me make sense of what had happened during that employer brand project.
The authors describe the importance of building what they call a “shared pool of meaning.”
Essentially, every person in a conversation brings their own experiences, perspectives, and assumptions. When people contribute those perspectives openly, the pool of shared meaning grows. More information enters the conversation, more context becomes visible, and better decisions become possible.
However, when the pool of meaning is small, something very different happens. People still make decisions and they still use the same words—but those words often mean different things to different people.
That’s exactly what we encountered at the beginning of the employer brand project.
Some leaders believed employer brand involved improving recruiting marketing. Others thought it meant defining workplace culture. Some assumed it would produce a new tagline or slogan.
Each perspective contained a kernel of the truth, but none of them represented the full picture. Until those perspectives were shared and explored together, it was difficult for the organization to move forward.
Expanding the Pool of Meaning
So we started where most meaningful organizational work should begin: listening.
The project included:
executive interviews
employee surveys
story-gathering conversations with across multiple job categories and communities across the organization
brand ideation sessions with the HR team
As employees shared their experiences, certain patterns began to emerge.
People talked about teamwork. They talked about compassion—not just for residents, but for each other. They talked about growth and development opportunities that had kept them with the organization for many years.
Again and again, stories surfaced that illustrated what made the workplace meaningful. Stories like the homemade pumpkin pie.
At first these stories existed as individual experiences. But when leaders began hearing them together, something shifted.
They started recognizing that those moments weren’t isolated events. They were part of a broader pattern that reflected how the organization actually operated and how it supported its team.
Over time, those patterns became the foundation for the organization’s employer brand model. Together, we defined:
a brand essence that captured the heart of the employee experience
three brand pillars that reflected recurring themes in employee stories
employee value propositions (EVPs) describing the “gives and gets” of working there
But the real breakthrough didn’t happen in a document. It happened in conversation. It happened in leadership discussions, pilot testing with internal groups, and brand activation workshops with employees across the organization. In those workshops, participants were invited to share their own stories connected to the brand pillars.
You could see the moment when someone recognized the pattern.
“Oh,” they would say. “I’ve seen that here too.”
The shared pool of meaning was expanding.
When Shared Meaning Turns Into Systems
Once the leadership team reached alignment around the employer brand, the concept stopped feeling abstract. It became operational.
Instead of being an idea owned by HR, it became a shared reference point for how leaders talked about hiring, onboarding, development, and recognition.
The employer brand began showing up across the employee lifecycle:
Recruitment messaging became more consistent because hiring managers had a shared way to describe the workplace.
Onboarding conversations reinforced the same themes employees had shared during interviews.
Leadership discussions about professional development and workforce planning referenced the same brand pillars.
Instead of different departments describing the organization in different ways, people now had a common language. And that made the whole system stronger.
Because when people share meaning, systems become easier to implement. Without that shared understanding, the messaging would have felt like just another empty tagline—a phrase created in a silo that didn’t resonate across the organization.
Instead, it reflected something employees already recognized as true.
Why Systems Often Fail
One of the lessons I’ve learned repeatedly while helping organizations align their people, processes, and technology is this:
Systems rarely fail because the process itself is wrong. More often, they fail because the meaning behind the system isn’t shared and communication in general is lackluster.
Different stakeholders interpret the same initiative differently. Different teams prioritize different outcomes. Eventually the system stops producing the results it was designed to deliver.
Leaders sometimes try to solve that problem by redesigning the system again. But often the real issue isn’t the system—it’s the lack of shared understanding behind it.
Expanding the shared pool of meaning takes time. It requires listening to perspectives that may initially feel unfamiliar and inviting people to share experiences that might otherwise remain invisible.
But when leaders invest in that process, something powerful happens. People begin moving in the same direction—not because they were instructed to, but because they now understand the same story.
The Real Meaning of the Pie
That small act of kindness—baking a pumpkin pie for Bill who was feeling alone—wasn’t created by a branding exercise. It was already part of the organization’s culture.
The employer brand work simply gave people a shared language to recognize it, reinforce it, and build on it. And that’s the deeper lesson.
When leaders take the time to expand the shared pool of meaning, they don’t just improve conversations…they create the conditions for their systems to actually work.
