The Meaning and Impact of Purpose, with Aaron Hurst
In this episode of the podcast, Andrew speaks with Aaron Hurst, author of the prominent book, The Purpose Economy, (2014). Aaron is a researcher, author, and social entrepreneur who is dedicated to driving positive societal change. He talks about his research, defining, cultivating, and leveraging purpose. Importantly, Aaron shares the four myths of purpose, as well as the importance of recognizing the diversity of purpose on any team. He also talks about the impact of a purpose mindset in the workplace, as opposed to a transactional mindset. This is a very practical and inviting conversation about what purpose really is, why it matters, and what steps leaders can take to cultivate it.
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The Meaning and Impact of Purpose, with Aaron Hurst
Introduction
I’m here with my relatively new friend and fascinating individual and author, Aaron Hurst, who is the author of The Purpose Economy. I'm excited to have you with us. Aaron, welcome to the show.
It's great to be here. We haven't known each other for a long time, but I feel like we've got a lot in common, starting and ending with the Yankees, which is the most important thing.
You are joining us from your office in Northern California.
I'm in Seattle. It is like Northern California. You're not that far off.
When I lived in LA years ago, there were bumper stickers that said, “Welcome to California. Go home.” My sense is that there are similar things in Seattle.
Someone told me the unofficial tagline. It is like, “Leave me alone.” It's the Seattle cultural vibe, which I'm trying to figure out how to change. Hopefully, in a couple of years, it won't be that anymore.
Personal Story And Background
I appreciate that commitment and perhaps a place to start. I've talked with you about the thesis of this show and shared some of my assumptions and operating principles. You come from a bit of a different place. You have an interesting background. I'd love it if you'd share your personal story and how you came to be talking about these topics of purpose, particularly purpose in the workplace.
The story I share starts with my grandfather, who was a naval officer in World War II and one of the first officers in Hitler's bunk at the end of the war. He'd stolen a piece of Hitler's stationery from his desk that he kept in the closet as a memento. It was weird, but it brought you back to picturing that moment. Coming out of World War II, he made it his goal to figure out what role he could play in preventing World War III and seeing the incredible pain that was caused by a World War.
His key insight was about shared purpose. When we get to know each other and have a shared purpose, we tend to find ways to collaborate and work together. When we don't, we tend to fill the void with assumptions and hatred. Traditional tourism doesn't build understanding between countries. We need to find ways to create a shared purpose.
He went on and wrote a memo for President Kennedy when he was in the State Department, articulating the need for the Peace Corps and how it should be developed, which was instrumental in getting that off the ground. He runs the Aspen Institute for roughly its first several years. Both of those organizations were fundamentally about shared purpose, getting people from different backgrounds together who have a shared human goal of making a community and a person the world a better place.
I grew up with that as a legacy. A lot of my work around purpose has been trying to understand what my contribution is. Having those huge shoes to fill, it's like, how can my little size two shoes? What can I do to make a difference? How can I make an impact? It's been a journey. Often, those who study something struggle with it. It's not the ones where it's intuitive.
Going back to the Yankees, I remember there was a piece about hitting coaches and how people like Don Mattingly are terrible hitting coaches because they are bad intuitively. You need to find the person who struggled with hitting to be the best hitting coach because they can help someone through that process.
They can articulate the steps that they take.
They had to intentionally go about it versus the person for whom it was intuitive. I started my first business when I was sixteen, which was fun, and I got that entrepreneurial bug. I created a program when I was at Michigan as a student teaching the prisons, which was a powerful experience for me to take students out to prisons to teach creative writing and tie that back to the interdisciplinary curriculum for which they got Michigan University credit.
I went and worked in inner city ed in Chicago for about six months in the combination of Midwest winter and seeing how big the challenge was, and the current approaches didn't seem to be making it work. I moved to my family's home in Palo Alto and started working in Silicon Valley. I did that for several years in early-stage startups, coming in as a self-taught developer over the weekend and as a product manager. It’s an early-stage ten-people startup that scaled to about 200 people before imploding based on economic trends.
That was learning about how to scale work and how we start to think about scale. At that point, I realized I wanted to go back and figure out how to help social impact issues. I started the Taproot Foundation back in 2001 after 9/11. The real inspiration there was I saw how startups had access to talent that helped them lay the track before they needed the track. With nonprofits, they rarely got that talent. If they did, it was way after they needed it. They're always playing catch-up. I realized that if we could get business talent to do pro bono work the way lawyers do, we could shift that resource equation.
That was an incredible journey. We opened up seven offices across the US. We became the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world. I had this a-ha moment that no matter how big we got, we would never be big enough to meet the need. We switched strategies and got to figure out how to build a marketplace. We’re working with the White House, business schools, and corporations, looking at how to build pro bono into the ethic of business the way it is in the legal profession. We’re partnering with BMW and brought that to 30 countries around the world.
What I saw there, which leads into the purpose at work piece, was that when I asked people why they were doing pro bono work on top of their 50 hours a week, kids, and everything else in their lives, what I heard most often is I find pro bono work so much more fulfilling than my job. I did a project with LinkedIn where we got them to add a field for which I'm interested in doing pro bono work and another one in which I'm interested in doing board service. Overwhelmingly, people were like, “Yes, I want to do it.” Nonprofits were like, “They didn't engage. We need the resources, but we're not the place for corporate folks to get their needs met for fulfillment. Their employers need to do that.”
It was an a-ha moment for me. We've been treating and volunteering like taking a supplement after eating at McDonald's. By doing that, it made it okay to eat at McDonald's. What we needed to do instead was figure out how to serve healthy food at work. That's where I transitioned into writing The Purpose Economy. I’m starting to look at this question around how we could change work itself to focus on meaning and the emerging science around meaning. I can talk forever about all this stuff. That's an intro to my journey up until several years ago.
The Purpose Economy, Expanded and Updated: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
There’s one thing I'd like to ask because I'm fascinated by this connection with your grandfather. I feel this beautiful sense of continuity and honoring your grandfather and his work and direction. Do you think he would define purpose the way you do, especially after you've done all the research, written a book, and done all these different things? Would it be different? Does it change over time?
I don't know what his take on it would be. People decide what they want that word to mean and to fit the narrative that they want. He probably would have a slightly different definition of it. Seeing the research now, he was always someone who constantly shifted his thinking based on research and what he experienced.
In terms of it changing over time, there are two different parts to that. Does it change during our lifetimes based on our own personal development? Historically, has it shifted in terms of thinking? In terms of the historical part, it's tied into every faith that has been around forever. It's tied into every culture that's been around forever. In American pop culture, the purpose has come first to be a Christian piece with Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life and this whole narrative around purpose as a revelation tied to religion.
Hollywood is treating it as if it's a superhero who's figured out what the problem in the world they need to fix. Telling these romanticized stories that are misleading and harmful to our culture and our understanding of purpose. Much like the criticism of romcoms. The way romance is portrayed in the media isn't helpful. It shifted there.
In terms of human development, what we found in our research was that contrary to what pop culture says, people tend to find a lot more purpose and meaning as they get older, not when they're younger. It's at about age 55 that you see a huge bump in purpose, but it's stable up until that point. What we've seen is newer generations that are much more conscious of problems in the world and have a desire to make a difference in them, or at least to portray themselves as making a difference in them. Psychologically, they aren't any more purposeful than in previous generations.
I coach MBA students at Wharton. I love working with that generation. They're young, but they're not that young. It’s much more about meaning and making a contribution, which may or may not be the same as the purpose. There's something I want to help solve. There's a goal I'd like to accomplish, a social goal, a universal societal goal, or something to improve, which has a different definition than purpose, but we don't need to wordsmith. They are cousins.
You and I met in a retreat with the Modern Elder Academy, which is all about helping people of a certain age, which is broadly defined personally. I think it’s too broad, but that's my subjective opinion. They’re helping people of a certain age who are coming to that point. What contribution do I want to make?
Over the years, a lot has been written particularly by older people who have been successful in business, writing about not about making money. The complaint is it's easy for you to say you've made your money. I believe it is a natural part of maturity to get to a certain age. I'm not a social scientist, but subjectively, it's a part of maturity. You say, “I've done all this. What do I want to do?”
That old cliche, wherever you go, there you are. Anything you're young you don't realize. After you've been to a lot of places, you realize you're still the same person. You gain that wisdom.
Purpose And Subjectivity
You know that because you realize you're having the same marriage the second time around or the same conflicts that work. It’s a good plug to get John Cain's book in here like that. I heard you say that you don't necessarily work to define purpose. Did I hear you say that? If you did that, what that triggers for me is I'm reluctant to define what spirituality means for purposes of spirituality and leadership. It means a lot of different things to different people. A narrow definition can often be alienating and unnecessary. For you with purpose, is that something that's easy for you to define? Do you find it can be very subjective and better left alone that way?
There are two pieces to that. The definition of the word purpose and Andrew's purpose. The one around the definition of the word purpose ends up leading into a semantic conversation, which I don't think is the purpose of purpose. It creates this spin cycle, and you start arguing semantics. Purpose to me at a high level is North Star. It's clarity around how you best show up in the world. I don't tie it down to a specific definition. I try to avoid that.
At the individual level, what I found was that we did this study, and we used psychology to do an assessment to predict the purpose of every employee in a company. I deployed that everywhere, from Disney, PwC, Microsoft, and several hundred companies, to help individual employees uncover their purpose.
It's tied to psychology because what we found was that if you work with executive coaches and they do purpose statements with their folks, they generate beautiful poetry. If you peel back what's going on under the poetry, there are patterns behind it based on people's psychological profiles that are predictable to a large degree. We were able to decode that and help people understand what their purpose is and how to start making it accessible to people to play with.
From the lens that I tend to see through and focus on, how does that information help leadership and help an organization invite people to be more engaged and committed in their work to give them a place where that purpose can be expressed? We have this information. What do we do with it? How does it benefit the individual and our collective workplace?
That ties into the myths of purpose because those are the things that get in the way of that question. Unless people have thought through those and unlearn certain things, they get caught up back in that logic. The first one is the most important, which is that purpose is not a cause. I saw this all the time leading Taproot, where you'd have business professionals being like, “I'm not fulfilled because I haven't found my cause.” They'd quit their job and work at a nonprofit. They'd be like, “I'm getting paid a lot less, and I'm still not fulfilled.
We saw in the data that people in the nonprofit sector and healthcare education are majority unfulfilled. You saw people in accounting who barely saw sunlight and who are fulfilled, and you're like, “You can't tie this to the cause. That's problematic.” That's what most people are looking for. They say, “I'm looking for my purpose.” They want to know that one-legged kittens are the thing they're meant to work on. They see Hollywood talk about that. They see people who go into things like medicine. It appears as if they've known all their lives. This is the thing they're meant to do. That's problematic.
There are two reasons that I'd like to focus on. One is that it's putting external ownership over it versus internal. You're waiting for the cause to reveal itself versus trying to figure out what is meaningful to you. The second one is you, and I have talked about growth and a fixed mindset. When people think about a calling, which is this idea of finding your cause, a calling or a cause is a fixed mindset towards purpose. It's getting locked in on a singular definition. What happens is if that is no longer available to you and you've lost your purpose and identity. That's what you see a lot with retirement, where people are like, “I have no identity.” It's because they treated purpose as a calling or a cause.” It's important to let go of that definition. That's the first myth.
Before you go to the second, if it's not a cause, what is it? This needs to be part two of a conversation.
A couple of other things are myths surround help to dimensionalize that. The purpose is not a revelation. People don't suddenly have their purpose revealed to them. Hollywood loves to tell this story. We like to think we climb to the top of a mountain and get the tablets that give us our purpose, and we know what to do. We hear stories about someone reading an article or something happening in our lives. All of a sudden, their purpose was revealed to them. That's sitting around passively waiting for someone else to answer the question for us. What we found was that it's something that continuously reveals itself to you when you're open to it and are trying to learn about yourself as you show up in the world. That's that second myth.
The purpose is not a revelation, so people don't just suddenly have their purpose revealed to them.
The third is you touched on this earlier, but is that purpose a luxury? A lot of people think, especially because of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, that until you have money, you can't worry about purpose. My hypothesis is that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is based on a scarcity mindset. You see, in a lot of cultures, there's an abundance mindset. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs doesn't have nearly the same pull.
You find people in poor conditions who are barely surviving and deeply fulfilled. You and I have both been in corporate boardrooms. We're not a single person in the room as fulfilled. The problem with that myth is that it tends to enable leadership to classify certain jobs as non-purpose jobs and other jobs as purpose jobs. They want a job. That's all they care about.
I hear that all the time about low-wage jobs. They're happy to have a job. That's where they're at. It's completely dehumanizing people. It's also not addressing the fact that a lot of our problems at work come from executives not being fulfilled, and they’re spreading their pain around because they aren't connected to who they are at their core.
That's a major myth around that piece. I've got more. I'm going to share one last one because it's important, which is that a lot of people believe it's okay to not have fulfillment and purpose at work and to get that elsewhere. They get it from family, temple, or softball league. Work doesn't have to fill that role. As a leader, your job is your job. This is not your place to get purpose and fulfillment. That's that narrative.
What we found in our research was that the people who are fulfilled in life, Andrew, if you say, “I'm fulfilled in life.” You're a working person. Only 1% of you said unfulfilled at work. If you're fulfilled in life, you're fulfilled at work because we're one person, and it's one mindset. This whole idea of work doesn't have to be that you get it elsewhere. That doesn't fundamentally add up. We found that statistically.
From a leadership standpoint, these things are incredibly important because they have been ways that leadership has let itself off the hook for creating cultures that are effective because they've said, “This isn't a cause. They're not going to get that here. Low-paying jobs are not important here. They can get that met elsewhere.” These are all excuses for creating subhuman, non-human workplaces. From your lens of leadership, it's important to recognize that these myths are a big part of what's causing leadership to have the wrong narrative about work.
I want to ask you a wildly open-ended question. What's the answer? Where to start? I have never been a researcher in my life. I've been a practitioner since day one, even in my first career. I'm glad to hear that the statistics have caught up with what I've observed. It is intuitive, and I can learn from reviewing some of that research. It's a bit of a cop-out. Engagement, purpose, and fulfillment are not our areas. This is work. It's important. I'm grateful that the research is available. Thought leaders like you were sharing it because it brings some additional people into the conversation.
I find that some of the leaders that I coach in my executive coaching work are now wrestling with forcing people to come back to the office. This notion of like, “We'll make them come back to the office. It'll be worthwhile.” Why will it be worthwhile by osmosis to have people in the same place? We need to think about what is going to be valuable deliberately. How do we make this happen? You can't cop out and say, “This is the way we've always done it. We force people to come to the office. It has its own reward.” No, not necessarily. It puts pressure on leaders to think in a different way. As far as I'm concerned, it's a healthy pressure and should come with the job.
The things we've found that matter, which is getting to your question, are three pieces. How do we think about someone's purpose? What creates fulfillment? There's the mindset piece of it. Starting with the first one, how do you help people understand their purpose? We found that when people know what their purpose is and what fulfills them, they're more than 50% more likely to be fulfilled. If you drive without a map, you're not likely to get where you're trying to go because you don't know where you're trying to go. You may get there randomly, but it is much less likely.
It is helpful for someone to have self-awareness around what fulfills them. I'll give you one of the dimensions, Andrew. We don't have to go through all of them, but one of the things we found in the research was that elevation of impact is a real thing and makes a big difference. What we found was that about a third of people gain the most fulfillment when they feel like they can see their work impact individuals. They have that on-the-ground direct experience and affirmation of their impact. Think of a doctor feeling a sense of impact from helping a patient.
It’s more directly as opposed to less directly.
The next one is the organizational level or team level. This is the person who might be a hospital administrator, and they're like, “Why would I wanna help patients that way when I can help a whole hospital be effective and therefore I'm reaching the lives of thousands of people? I'm more that way. If I had to see patients individually, it would drive me nuts. It would not be fulfilling. That's not the way I get a sense of meaning. There's a group of people who about a third get the most meaning from being team and organization builders and about sustained organization.
The final third is what we call society. These are folks for whom it's lovely what the doctor does. It's lovely what a hospital does, but they're like, “I want to be contributing to fighting cancer. I want to be contributing to inequality and healthcare.” They could be doing that as a doctor, but they want to feel like their work is part of that broader change in society for them to feel fulfilled. Whereas a lot of people at that individual level, those things are abstract, and they don't care that much. For others without that, no matter how many people I help, I don't get that motivated unless I know that I'm helping this broader societal change.
As an individual, it's helpful to know where you are on that elevation. I'm at that societal level. The thing that gets me excited, where I feel like I made a difference, is when I see a change happen at a societal level. I can be a part of it, but not as much in the organization and not much on the individual side for me. Why does that matter to me as a leader? When I give speeches to my team, they're all about the societal change we're making, which is great because it harnesses my passion. The challenge is for the person on my team, who's an individual driver, to be like, “Nice speech. That was cool, but Bob over here needs help.”
Understanding that there's a diversity of purpose in your team and that while it's important to channel your passion and your elevation of impact, recognizing that for a lot of people, that's not going to hit the way you think it should just because it gives you goosebumps doesn't mean it gives it to other people. You need to be able to think about that, on your team, there are people at all these levels. How are you communicating, celebrating, and rewarding impact at each level? Rewarding and celebrating impact at a level that doesn't matter to somebody as much is not going to have an impact.
Purpose Mindset In Leadership
It's to be aware of those different levels of motivation so as to speak to them so I can be fully engaged. What you're sharing doesn't light me up. It's not going to be as energizing as the same fuel for me.
It's hard because when we're fired up about something, we assume that everyone else is. To some degree, your energy is contagious, but there's a limit to it.
In the leadership development business, the way we use different assessments to pinpoint people's motivators and preferences is it’s always good to be able to articulate them, to your point, to your peers and to your boss. If I'm not aware, I could be sending the wrong message. I could be driving a message of making money. For some people, that doesn't resonate at all. Other people are more altruistic or affiliative. They want to win together. You have to speak the right language.
It is powerful because it gets to people care about from an intrinsic standpoint. We've had close to half a million people take the assessment to determine purpose. It's multiple dimensions. I'm sharing one of those with you. That's the purpose definition. The second thing is, what fulfills us? This has been a big breakthrough. To your earlier point, the stuff is intuitive, but it hasn't been researched and clarified.
When it comes to fulfillment, there are only three things that matter. These are relationships, impact, and growth. We need to feel like we have meaningful relationships. We need to feel like we're making a meaningful impact. We need to always feel like we're growing. When those three conditions are met, report that we're fulfilled. If only two are met, you might be fulfilled in the short term, but it won't be in a sustained way.
This is a piece where a lot of leaders don't understand the nature of fulfillment and what's necessary. They tend to over-anchor on the impact part. I believe relationships are the foundational piece. If people don't have meaningful relationships at work, it doesn't matter how impactful the work is. They'll burn out and be unfulfilled. It's critical that we build cultures and relationships.
It goes to your point about working from home. People want relationships. I believe those are hard to do virtually. It's not impossible, but it's hard trying. How do you use the office as a place to meet folks' needs? There's great research on what is needed for a strong relationship. Shasta Nelson has a great book on this. It came down that you need positive, consistent, and vulnerable relationships. Whether you start off in a negative place, you always are working together to get to a better place.
Consistent is not like you talk once a month or sporadically. There's a drumbeat to it. Vulnerable doesn't mean you have to cry every time you talk. It means that you're being real. Those kinds of conversations are something companies need to do a better job of creating space for and cultivating in their culture if they want to have people fulfilled. Companies do a piss-forward job of that for themselves.
With Impact, to your point about office, people need to feel like they're making an impact. That doesn't necessarily have to be a big thing. It could be making someone smile. It could be holding the door for them. It could be being thoughtful. That is much harder to do virtually because there are fewer opportunities to help someone and observe, such as I'm going to ask him how he's doing. Andrew, I saw you got that thing done. That piece of work you were doing is awesome.” That happens more frequently in an in-person environment than it does in a virtual one because you lose that observational component.
The third one is growth. We need to feel like we're constantly growing. Growth is not about reading books. It's about being challenged to push yourself outside your comfort zone to become a bigger person. It's we do things that scare us. There are limits to how much we can do when we're in a home office all the time. It speaks to why people are struggling with fulfillment working from home a lot of the time, where companies can build better strategies around building relationships impacting growth into the in-office value proposition that follows.
Growth is about being challenged to push yourself outside your comfort zone and become a bigger person.
You've written something about the impact on the fulfillment of working from home. Yeah. It's interesting. It's a hot topic these days. If someone is reading this in several years, it may be less relevant. We'll see.
These problems are consistent. A lot of the work I'm doing in Latin America, and I did with Imperative, was about helping leaders and individuals optimize their lives around those three simple things. Relationships, impact, and growth. We tend to overcomplicate all these systems and measurements. The heart comes down to those three things that a five-year-old understands. When we start to take stock of those on a regular basis and take personal ownership of them to create changes on a weekly or monthly basis, our best bet at being able to change the nature of work is by focusing on those three things.
I need to ask you about the assessment that you spoke of, in case anyone reading may be curious about it. This is something that used to be publicly available. It's something that's less available but still available. Do I understand that correctly? Where could people look for that if they wanted it?
There's a simplified version of The Purpose Economy, the book itself. That's the easiest way for consumers to get access to it. If you are looking for it for your team or organization, Imperative.com is the source for that. They offer it. It's tied into a peer coaching platform. There are plans to start to look at how to get access to the assessment.
It's amazing how big of a hit that was. When people have insights about themselves, like there's this incredible rush and clarity that creates, a lot of people feel like, “I can't have a purpose. I'm never going to get it.” They get the result, and they're like, “This is something that's attainable and real. I get what this is all about.”
It's there. It's not something that has to be created. It's something to be the way that I've worked with it over the years. It has been something to be discovered. We know what has meaning for us. When I speak with my 23-year-old son about making some decisions about where he wants to work, he gets it. He's 23.
The final thing I was going to share with you on this thread, Andrew, is the biggest variable we found was mindset. We discovered there was a difference between a purpose mindset and a transactional mindset. A purpose mindset is a belief that work and life can be fulfilling if you make it. A growth mindset is a belief that I can learn anything if I work hard at it. A purpose mindset is anything that can be fulfilling if I make it. It's that belief and understanding that we manufacture fulfillment for ourselves.
A purpose mindset is the belief that work and life can be fulfilling if you make it so.
A transactional mindset is everything's a transaction. There's no fundamental meaning behind anything. It's all game. It's about winning, losing, or gaining. What we found is that two-thirds of the population has a transactional mindset and is wildly unfulfilled. The problem is their mindset. You could put them in the most “fulfilling” environment. They're not going to be fulfilled because they don't fundamentally believe that's the way the world works.
Even if they're around one-legged kittens, they would still feel that way.
Maybe no-legged kittens, but one-legged. Yes. In our educational system, we're producing more transactionally oriented adults through our educational system. We focus less on teaching people how to find fulfillment and more on competing grades and tests. That’s creating a workforce that is not a moral workforce and compassionate workforce. We try to change it around the edges without realizing that if you don't change the mindset, you can't change the system.
The way I hear you defining these two, which is why I love this simple model, is helpful. It's an orientation. It's like theory X and theory Y from traditional management theory. How do we see employees? How do we see interactions?
What do we do? Meaning is something we create as human beings. There's nothing inherently meaningful. We live in this vast universe in the galaxy. Nothing has any meaning unless we, as human beings, manufacture that meaning. We manufacture meaning through reflection. That's how we deposit meaning into our bank.
What's interesting is that people with a transactional mindset don't see the world that way. They don't reflect that way. Therefore, they don't create meaning and deposit in their bank. If you're transactional and I'm purposely doing the same task, I'm going to find meaning in something because I do the reflection work. If you do reflection work, it's going to be reflecting that. It doesn't have meaning. That's going to become a self-fulfilling reality.
I would think that by reflecting, we're more likely to veer towards something purposeful and to see purpose in something or to see something bigger in something. Reflection breeds purpose or breeds meaning and connection, but not necessarily. You could reflect through a transactional mindset, and it'll take you even further into that place.
It's confirmation bias. When we reflect, we tend to confirm what we think. If you confirm this is meaningful, it's meaningful. If you confirm nothing has meaning, nothing has meaning. You find that transactional folks tend to be more fear-driven. Reflection on not being done the right way can amplify fear. Reflection is a good thing, but the mindset and the way questions are asked have a big impact on what ends up getting processed.
I'm in the leadership development business. What can leaders at all levels do? I don't believe leadership is a position. What can leaders at all levels do to help promote a more of a purpose mindset? What can we do? I'm not going to try to refer you to a specific page, but in the book, you talked about new work rules and what leaders can do. Given there are limits to the educational system, we're not going to fix that in the workplace. I'm a big believer in creating microcultures on teams at work. What can a leader do to invite someone who may be more transactionally focused into the world of purpose? Is it even possible?
My theory is that there are some people who have a purpose mindset, some who are on the fence and could go either way, and some who are transactional and hard to change. For a leader, my advice at a practical level is, first of all, to know who you're hiring and who you're bringing onto your team. If you bring a transactional person onto your team, don't expect them to change. My grandma always said, “You can't change people.” Being careful about who you're bringing onto your team is important.
The second thing is to build reflection on relationships, impact, and growth into your weekly process. For example, my co-owner in Latin America does a peer coaching session every week where two employees are matched together for a full quarter. Once a week, they reflect on their relationships, impact, and growth and make goals for the following week about the relationships, impact and growth. They're processing their goals and the reflection through those three things that are intrinsically motivating. Every quarter, you swap partners. You're getting to know other people in the organization.
Does that need a lot of definitions? Do you find that by teeing it up and saying, “We're going to focus on X,” people tend to find a conversation around that? Do you need to provide a lot of guidance?
We give them three questions. Anybody could rewrite these in their own version. It’s like, “How are your relationships over the last week? To what degree do you feel like you made an impact this week? To what degree did you think you grew? Talk through. What do you want to proactively do with relationships this week, proactively impact, and proactively grow? You can word those in 600 different ways, but that's the soul or the heart of that.”
That process starts to rewire us to think about work that way, which is powerful. Being careful about, as a leader, when you are providing a transactional frame for work? You should start to be aware of what you're doing, which is not to say that work is often a transaction. There are transactions happening, but in terms of how you're processing it and how you're focusing the culture, you're making that shift.
I remember years ago working with an organizational model and a leadership model that ripped off of a Ken Wilbur, the I, the We, and the It. It’s the personal, the interpersonal, and the impersonal. The impact can be impersonal. The relationship is interpersonal, and the growth is personal. This is why I'm asking. From a practical level, we don't need to formulate some detailed things. Let's make this part of our dialogue. This is how we do business. We talk about these things.
We do it on a drumbeat. High-performing organizations do these on a drumbeat. They don't do them ad hoc. It's building that in and keeping it simple. I like how relationships impact growth. As kindergarten students, we would get that at a base level. All these other concepts are, even though you shared them, and it's like you have to think about them. What does that mean? It should be in the simplest of language and real. You start to see what matters.
Spiritual Dimension Of Purpose
I'm going to put a word into the conversation here. I'm not sure how you react to it. That word is spiritual or spirituality. This is a subjective thing. I asked 50 people this question, and I got 50 different answers. Do you find that there's a spiritual dimension to purpose? If so, what is it?
Spiritual purpose needs a definition to figure out how to engage with that question. As I think about it, spiritual is a belief that there's something greater going on than what we see. There are some levels of magic that are real. As I get older, I believe more in those things. I was more skeptical of it when I was younger. I've had experiences that give me proof of some of these things. I'm starting to think about it in a bunch of different lanes or paths. At one level, there's this fundamental belief that we are a collective. As a collective, there's a need to serve each other, to be human, and to be of service. That service is how we need to show up in the world. There's a spiritual dimension to that.
That connects back to what you said earlier about all religions would have a component of this. We're getting to the same place here.
A transactional mindset is often tied to fear. It's this sense of, like, there's nothing greater. Therefore, all there is is for the transaction to be in front of us. It's easy with the rational mind to get to that conclusion, but I don't think it ends up serving anybody well in the long term.
Final Thoughts
When I talk with people in this show and outside the show, they say, “How do you define what's spiritual?” I say, “I don't.” It’s not to be evasive, but because it can mean different things at different times. It can be alienating. I tend to talk about our spiritual dimensions as people. How can leaders invite that in a productive, safe, non-alienating way? Interesting. What questions haven't I asked you that you think I need to round out some of what we're talking about?
There are a lot of detailed things, but we hit on the main themes. It's around understanding what purpose is and isn't. It's reinforcing this idea of what defines purpose for somebody. The sources of meaning, relationships, impact, and growth. Understanding purpose mindset versus transactional mindset is the key thing I would want people to think about.
To your last question, how do you start to operationalize that? Leadership starts with you. If you haven't done the work around your personal sense of what brings meaning to you, and you haven't done work around assessing relationships, impacting growth in your work and in your life, and you haven't thought about what your default mindset is, doing that work yourself is a great way to start.
You can't embody what you don't have or what you haven't thought about, processed, and metabolized. If they want more, people can go to PurposeEconomy.com. There's a wonderful section on the website called The Purposeful CEO that talks about some research. The new group has done with fast company and leadership models. What that could look like. It’s not my intention to funnel anybody to a particular way of thinking. There's some good, thought-provoking material there. What else would be good resources for those wanting to learn more about what we're talking about?
I would love to connect with people on LinkedIn. I interact with the world through LinkedIn. I welcome people to come and connect with me there. I don't think it's about resources. It's about yourself. I would encourage people to stop trying to learn and start to spend more time trying to be. Start by reflecting on your relationships, impact, and growth. Score it on a 1 to 10. How well are you performing or showing up in each of those dimensions? What can you do to start to make a change there?
I don't have an appetite to read a lot more books or research. I feel like the older I get, the more I realize the truth all within. It's about shutting up, listening, and doing the reflection work, which is not easy to do because I'm finding ways to avoid it by being busy. The most important book I still think of is yourself. We rarely read ourselves.
Thank you for landing that as gracefully and clearly as you did. Thanks for your time, Aaron. If you're reading this and you're activated by this, keep looking, but not necessarily reading books. Thank you so much, Aaron. I appreciate your time and your wisdom.
It’s my pleasure. It's a lot of fun.
Thank you.
Important Links
LinkedIn – Aaron Hurst
About Aaron Hurst
Aaron Hurst is an award-winning social entrepreneur and CEO dedicated to using technology, research and human connection to drive positive societal change. He founded the Taproot Foundation, Imperative, and Board.dev. Currently on sabbatical, he is working on several early-stage purpose-driven ventures.