April 26, 2011 | Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and an education professor at Harvard University, is best known for developing the theory of multiple intelligences in the early 1980s. But for the past 15-plus years, he has been involved in the GoodWork Project.

He began the project in 1995 with fellow psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. Their research group interviewed more than 1,200 leading professionals to understand how they defined and identified good work and how they made ethical job-related decisions.

From that, Gardner set out to “figure out what’s the best way to reach young people on ‘good work,’” which he defines as the intertwining of excellence, engagement and ethics, he said.

The GoodWork Project group has published 10 books based on their research. The latest, written by Gardner, is “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century.” It was released in April 2011.

Gardner spoke with Faith & Leadership about the GoodWork Project, how leaders can nurture good work, and the role that faith and social entrepreneurship play in it.

Q: Why the GoodWork Project?

Three of us started this project because we were interested in what would happen to professions at a time when markets are very powerful. We were seeing journalism being pushed off the stage, even before the digital revolution, because of the prioritization of profit margins. The notion of the public lawyer disappeared as law and corporate life became virtually indistinguishable. We didn’t know enough to include auditing in our initial set of professions, but Enron taught us that people who are trained as auditors and accountants are all too often for sale.

So the interest was, since we believed that professions are important and not easily replaceable, what’s their status at the present time?

Though it took us 10 years, we interviewed more than 1,200 people in nine different domains, mostly professions, to understand what they thought “good work” was, what helps people carry it out, what obstacles they encounter and how they saw the future of their own professional sector.

One of the things we discovered was that just about everybody could distinguish between good work and not-good work. But many young people said they couldn’t afford to do good work at present, because they were ambitious. It’s a classical ends-justify-the-means argument. At that point, I stopped being the researcher and said, this is serious. This has become a mission for me.

Q: How do you define good work?

It’s the intertwining of excellence, engagement and ethics. A good worker knows what he’s doing, cares about it and tries to do it in an ethical way. But good workers don’t just use their knowledge to promote their own selfish interests.

Q: What did you learn from the 1,200 interviews about how people understood good work?

A big thing was how important mentoring in the first job was for people. One of the things that many people lamented was that there’s much less mentoring now, because everything moves too fast and people move around from one job or city to another.

Fifty years ago, many senior people saw it as their job to mentor younger people, and people were much more likely to stay with the same law firm, the same hospital, the same accounting firm. The pre-doctoral and postdoctoral training of the scientist is probably the last area where mentoring is still very powerful.

In the absence of effective, positive mentoring, it’s very difficult to become a good worker. After all, on whom will you model yourself?

I often say to young people, to the extent that you have any choice, the institutional culture of the first place you work is going to have a very, very powerful influence on you.

Q: What did you learn about the relationship between faith and how people thought about good work?

Many people whom we would consider good workers actually referred to religious upbringing, whether or not they currently are believers or practice religion in any public sense. So it seems to be an important marker of your childhood and the stories you heard and whether you went to church or synagogue or whatever.

But in American life, particularly outside the South, if people have religion, it’s often not something they talk about. It’s quite personal. And so it didn’t come up that often when interview subjects on the coasts were talking about work. But the South is different. I think in the South people wear their religion more on their sleeves. And I’m not making a value judgment about that.

Q: What type of environment nurtures good work?

First of all, the leaders really have to believe [in good work]. Second of all, they have to embody it in everything that they do and say. Third of all, they can’t explain often enough what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Though to older people who grew up in a different time, things may seem obvious, it’s really not obvious to young people who live in a different time.