Meri Miller-Decker's journey highlights the importance of personal fulfillment in leadership and career longevity. After years of outward success, she realized she had lost her sense of fulfillment and took a sabbatical to reflect on her internal motivations. Despite external achievements and adventures, she discovered that personal disengagement was more about her internal mindset than her circumstances. Returning to her job, she adopted a new approach to self-leadership, focusing on reframing, gratitude, and solution-oriented thinking, which transformed her engagement. This experience led her to see personal fulfillment as a crucial skill for leadership development and a valuable investment for employee retention.

“Every individual that we can lift up to experience themselves differently, experience their coworkers differently, experience their life outside of work in a newly empowered way—that is where we can add a differentiation to the competitiveness of attracting and retaining talent as an employer.” - Meri Miller-Decker

Building a high-performance team requires understanding and addressing the motivations of team members. Meri emphasizes that personal engagement significantly influences professional engagement. For senior management, the evidence is clear: investing in employees as individuals leads to happier teams and a more resilient business. As the conversation on employee engagement and retention evolves, adopting these strategies enables companies to create workplaces where both employees and businesses thrive.