“The first and foremost job of every conscious leader…is to connect people to purpose.” This is my favorite quote from Conscious Leadership by John Mackey, Steve McIntosh, and Carter Phipps. I recently finished the book and highly recommend it.
When people hear that my goal is to do my life’s work at the intersection of profit and purpose, I often get asked what I mean by purpose. For me, purpose in a for-profit business is the value that the business contributes to the world, and it can be accomplished in many ways. One easy way that I define and think about purpose is to look at each stakeholder of a business (e.g., customers, staff, owners, suppliers, communities) and ask, “How does this business improve lives for this group?”. Profit follows purpose.
In Conscious Leadership, nine distinguishing characteristics of conscious leaders are organized into three categories: vision and virtue, mindset and strategy, and people and culture. To maximize my learning, I am using the book as a guide for a breakfast conversation series for the Houston Chapter of Conscious Capitalism this year. It is really fun and enlightening to discuss leadership dilemmas with other professionals and get energized for the day.
In our first session in February, we talked about nurturing curiosity as a key trait in our teams. Several leaders shared challenges and tips on staying curious and still achieving agreed goals. What advice do you have on increasing curiosity while getting stuff done? In March, we discussed how to both challenge and support teammates. In my experience and what I heard from others in the session, the best forum is often regular 1-1 meetings with teammates focused on four C’s – care, celebrate, challenge, commit. I learned this memorable framework for 1-1 meetings from my friend, John Meyer, on this episode of the Lead More podcast, and it works. Our April Conscious Conversation was just this morning. We discussed how leaders connect people to purpose. The top tip and challenge that we discussed? Listen and meet people where they are. Easier said than done. I have not settled on topics for all the Conscious Conversations for 2024 yet. Do you have leadership ideas or dilemmas that we should explore? Please send them my way. Let’s connect profit and purpose more in 2024!
TAMMIRA 