Early in our multiyear journey studying standout leaders and the things they do to help their teams find meaning in their work, we found ourselves on a call with Katie Burke, former chief people officer at HubSpot. It was a call that opened our eyes to the profound impact leaders have on making work meaningful.
HubSpot has ranked at the top of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list for nearly a decade, including a year at the No. 1 spot. A growing tech company that makes marketing and sales software, HubSpot perhaps seems an unlikely place for people to find their life’s calling. However, it is exactly that—and that’s no accident.
Katie, along with the rest of the senior leadership at HubSpot, is highly engaged in the design and execution of the company culture. That culture revolves around the idea that every person should be doing work that matters. This idea is codified in their now- famous Culture Code, which set the benchmark for building a values- driven company when it was first released in 2013. The document is publicly available and has been viewed over five million times. It offers an inside look at what HubSpot believes in and how it operates. Some highlights include “Employees who work at HubSpot have HEART: Humble, Empathetic, Adaptable, Remarkable, Transparent” and “We’d rather be failing frequently than never trying.”
We were eager to press Katie for the magic formula that she and her colleagues had discovered to fuel such a dedicated team. What she ended up telling us confirmed what we had long suspected—it is up to leaders to design the environments where individuals can experience meaning at work.
We first met with Katie in May of 2020, just two months into the global Covid-19 pandemic. Even in those early days of lockdown, when the better part of the world was in full-on crisis mode, Katie exuded calmness. She met us with an intent, magnetic focus. Over Zoom from her home outside Boston, she told us about HubSpot’s internal response to the pandemic. Less than a week in, while most companies were trying to figure out how to navigate video calls and file sharing, Katie and her team had quickly pivoted to support the HubSpotters who needed the most help.
Realizing that parents of small children were struggling, they hired musicians to keep their kids entertained over Zoom to give parents a short break. They set up a virtual fireside chat with a sober author to discuss “navigating sobriety through the pandemic” to support HubSpotters in recovery who had suddenly become separated from their networks. Realizing that many of their employees were taking advantage of the company’s free books program to purchase antiracism texts given the national reckoning with systemic racism and social injustice, Katie’s team found Black- owned bookstores in every market and asked HubSpotters to support them.
Even during a time of crisis, leaders at HubSpot didn’t just focus on pulling the proverbial weeds—managing burnout, reducing uncertainty, and clearing roadblocks to productivity. Of course, they did those things. But what set them apart is that they focused as strongly on nourishing the soil—supporting their employees and showing them that they truly care. As we dug deeper into Katie’s approach, we worked to piece together the day-to-day actions she took to cultivate more meaning at work. She told us about efforts to create a sense of belonging, to show each HubSpotter how their work positively impacts others, and to challenge team members to learn and grow.
We wanted to know why she thought it was important for leaders to cultivate meaning at work. “Meaningful work has of course economic value, but I also believe that it has great personal value,” Katie told us. “People are happier with their family and friends when they’re fulfilled at work. We think about our impact as certainly helping customers grow better [HubSpot’s mission] but also as helping our employees and their families grow better.”
Those three sentences struck a chord. The sentiment is simple, but underlying it is a shift in mindset that holds incredible promise. Katie takes for granted the economic value of meaningful work, emphasizing instead the human value—the factor from which all these outcomes grow. Instead of leading downstream—focusing on outcomes like engagement, productivity and retention—Katie leads with upstream strategies—focusing on creating the conditions for these outcomes to occur. And make no mistake, HubSpot’s outcomes are remarkable.
The company is in the top 5 percent of similar sized organizations in its ability to retain quality employees. Not only that, 83 percent of employees would not leave HubSpot if they were offered a job for more money, while 86 percent are excited to go to work each day. Additionally, the company’s revenue has grown at an average rate of 40 percent every year since 2014, the year after they implemented their culture code.
This mindset shift has positioned HubSpot as a leader in its field and a place where high performers thrive. We want to share what we learned from Katie and the other leaders we’ve studied to help you make that shift.
UPSTREAM LEADERSHIP
Imagine that you and a friend are enjoying a picnic by the river on a beautiful, sunny day. Suddenly, you hear a child screaming for help, floundering in the river. You both jump into the water, grab the child and swim back to shore. Before you can catch your breath, you hear another child crying for help, so you jump back in and rescue them as well. Then a third child comes into sight—and another and another. With both of you near exhaustion at this point, your friend abandons the rescue effort and starts running up the riverbank. You call out to ask why. The reply: “I’m going upstream to stop these kids from falling in the water!”
This classic parable is a metaphor for the way we lead today. By staying in reactive mode, downstream leadership may save some employees from drowning, but it never addresses the root causes of burnout and turnover. Upstream leadership, on the other hand, takes a proactive approach to achieving excellence. Its focus isn’t on solving problems after they occur. It’s on creating the conditions for people to do their best work. It’s about nourishing the soil, not just pulling the weeds. This kind of leadership requires asking fundamental questions like: How do we create a workplace that inspires people to be their best selves? To perform at their full potential? To understand how their work makes a difference? This approach is the key not only to preventing your people from falling in the river in the first place, but also to helping them do their best work. It is a simple yet powerful shift.
Meaning-driven leadership is the upstream strategy that leads to innovation, creativity, performance, retention and engagement. Many leaders try to solve one employee crisis at a time. They deal with issues like faltering productivity, low engagement, chronic burnout, quiet quitting and high turnover as individual problems to be solved. Only a few, like Katie, look upstream for a systemic solution that will not only prevent future problems, but will also unlock the full potential of every employee. The future of work demands that leaders make this shift.
Katie told us that HubSpot intentionally trains its managers on these upstream leadership skills. She feels that we typically don’t teach enough about people management in college or graduate school. As a result, most new managers have to wing it, and bad management habits get passed down from generation to generation of leaders. To combat this, HubSpot retrains all of its leaders rather than assuming that, just because someone was promoted to a management role, they know how to lead others thoughtfully. When people ask Katie, “How do I fix my Glassdoor score?” or “How do I get someone to write a good LinkedIn review?,” she tells them that they are asking the wrong questions. To have happy employees and get good reviews, leaders need to interrogate how they are enabling people to build strong relationships with each other, to find significance in their tasks and to reach their full potential.
Excerpted from Meaningful Work: How to Ignite Passion and Performance in Every Employee. Copyright © 2025 by Wes Adams and Tamara Myles. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
