Lisa McLeod: Top 3 Sales Expert in the World & Author of Selling with Noble Purpose

A conversation with Lisa McLeod, esteemed author of "Selling with Noble Purpose.”

McLeod discusses the intrinsic link between the art of selling and the practice of coaching, advocating for a client-centric approach that transcends conventional sales tactics. 

She explains how integrating a noble purpose into sales and coaching not only heightens client success but also fosters a deeper sense of fulfillment and achievement for professionals in these fields.

McLeod's journey from a VP of sales to a pioneering coach and writer underscores the transformative impact of aligning business objectives with meaningful, purpose-driven goals. 

She elaborates on the concept of selling with noble purpose, illustrating that the most effective salespeople and coaches are those who prioritize making a significant, positive difference in their clients' lives above the mere act of closing transactions.

The conversation further explores the challenges faced by coaches in marketing their services, emphasizing the shift towards values that prioritize the client's well-being and success as a cornerstone of effective coaching and sales strategies. 

McLeod shares insightful strategies for navigating these challenges, offering practical advice for professionals looking to enhance their impact and success by fostering authentic, value-driven relationships with their clients.

This episode provides a compelling examination of how principles of noble purpose can revolutionize sales and coaching practices, offering valuable lessons for professionals aiming to achieve greater success through meaningful engagement and purposeful business practices.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Lisa McLeod

(interview blurb)

Lisa: And the secret of being a good salesperson is actually the same thing as being a good coach, which is saying, “What are you trying to achieve? What’s the best way I could help you with that? How can we help you get there?”

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an author and executive coach to CEOs in sales-driven organizations. She’s the author of the bestselling book, Selling with Noble Purpose. Please welcome Lisa McLeod.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Lisa, how are you?

Lisa: It’s such a pleasure to see you. I was with you in person last week and now I’m on the podcast.

Alex: I love it. I love it when that happens. I actually was with someone else the week before we went to London for Thinkers50 and then I saw her at Thinkers50 with you. It’s the opposite. I saw you there and now we’re recording our conversation today. 

Lisa: That’s right. It was really a great event. For those who don’t know, it was Thinkers50, it was in London, it’s the top 50 thinkers in the world and then those of us who are maybe in the next 500 were also attending. It was great.

Alex: I was just there to give out an award so that was fun for me. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee except when we talk about Thinkers50. What are we drinking today? 

Lisa: So I am drinking tonic water with pomegranate juice. I gave up drinking alcohol a couple of years ago and so really leaned into the mocktails. 

Alex: Love it. And I’m drinking sparkling water with a splash of juice as well. It’s great. 

Lisa: Nice. 

Alex: Let’s start at the beginning, like talking about your career. You did so many really cool things. I can see you’re very popular on LinkedIn as one of the top motivational speaking voices on LinkedIn, really cool. Take me through the journey of becoming who you are today. You do great strategy consult coaching, you write books. When you were growing up, is this the vision that you had for yourself? 

Lisa: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. This is basically a million times better. But, you know, things are clear in hindsight and I see that I was driven by two things. One was what we would call commercial traditional success. I grew up a little on the poor side, not poverty, but I went to school with a lot of kids that were wealthier than I was. I also am of the generation of women that were the first generation of women that mainstream got the message, you can have a big career. Certainly Clara Barton did a lot of big things but I was the first mainstream. So I had this lane of I really want to be, quote, “successful,” and that meant financially successful, that meant in my little 15-year-old brain wearing a suit successful, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. But I also see clearly that I was driven by another lane, which most people can relate to, which is this sense of greater purpose, which is wanting to make a difference, which is wanting to do something meaningful, to have an impact on others in some way. And so, for a long time, my life felt like it was going back and forth between those two lanes. I started a career in sales, I was a VP of sales, but then I found myself as the VP of sales of a training company, and so that’s where this need for making a difference came up. And so those two lanes felt like they were operating on parallel tracks, this higher purpose, this is why am I here, how am I going to make a difference, versus I want to pay my bills, I want to have a nice house. They felt like they were operating on two tracks and they finally came together about 10 years ago when I authored the book Selling with Noble Purpose because, as it turns out, I’m not the only one who wants those two things and the research also reveals that when you bring those two things together, the desire to improve life for someone other than yourself and you put it in a commercial setting, that’s actually what makes you really successful, individually and collectively as a company.

Alex: What inspired you to write your book, Selling with Noble Purpose? I find the topic very interesting and I know that it’s a very interesting topic for coaches and coaches are not really necessarily very good at selling, from having talked to hundreds and hundreds of coaches, so I want to make that connection of selling with noble purpose.

Lisa: So we have the impression that selling means pushy, aggressive, talking people into something that they don’t want, and coaches are motivated by a desire to help people so those two things feel in conflict and I meet lots and lots of coaches. I was at a meeting with, and they wouldn’t mind me sharing this, with Marshall Goldsmith, 100 Coaches, we were in Nashville, so these are a couple hundred, more than a hundred people, it’s a couple hundred of the top coaches in the world and Marshall Goldsmith, the number one leadership coach, asked everyone a question, “Who here is guilty of underselling themselves?” and the whole room raised their hands. And the reason why is sales is one of the only professions that we define by the people who do it badly. Because I’m here to tell you, this notion of pushy, aggressive, talking people into something they don’t want to do, the research tells us that the people who behave like that actually aren’t very good salespeople. The only reason they close business is sheer tenacity and applied effort. What the research tells us is that the people who are the best at sales, and this is across industries and especially true in the service professions where you’re not just trying to close something and move on, you’re trying to cement the relationship, the people who are the best are the people whose true north is to improve life for the, quote, “customer.” In coaching, it would be the client. And so one of the things that a lot of coaches feel like they need to do is they feel like they need to say, if you were a potential client, I coach a lot of CEOs and I coach a lot of VPs of sales, if you were the client, I’d say, “Well, Alex, here’s why I’m so great. Alex, here’s what I do,” oh my gosh, that’s exhausting. And it doesn’t work. And the secret of being a good salesperson is actually the same thing as being a good coach, which is saying, “What are you trying to achieve? What’s the best way I could help you with that? How can we help you get there? Here’s an example of someone else I helped,” and so what happens is when coaches realize your true north doesn’t need to be the wind for you. Closing business is a lagging indicator. Whether you are selling coaching or whether you are running a Fortune 500, the money is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is how much are you helping your customers. And then you got to put the right business model around it to actually charge for it. But what I’ve seen with coaches is the more clarity you have about how you’re improving life for customers, the more confident you get about charging what you’re worth.

Alex: That’s a great connection. What inspired you to write the book?

Lisa: I’ll answer that in two ways. I’ll talk about why I started my business and why I wrote the book. So a lot of people say, “Oh, what’s your big dream when you started your business? You went out on your own, you started a consulting company,” and so I think I owe it to the world to be honest. I had a baby and I worked for a narcissistic alcoholic. And so those two things led me to believe maybe I should work for myself.

Alex: And maybe I should never drink again.

Lisa: But what I realized, so I want to be really clear, when I started my company, it was out of necessity because I wanted to make a living and I could not work the 80 hours a week for a crazy person. So, as part of when I started my own company, as a lot of people, you take different projects and you’re not always doing the work that you dreamed about. And so I took on a research project and I didn’t know it was going to change my life. I took on a research project and it was for a big biotech company. We studied their sales team and the project for my team and I was to identify what differentiated the top performers. And so, if you’ve been in sales anytime you know that you’re seeing a good performer and a poor performer. Good performers know the product, good performers make sales calls, they know how to speak, we know that, it’s a set of trainable skill. What differentiates the good from the exceptional is hard to put your finger on. And so that’s what we were trying to find out. So we did this blind study and because I am very interested in people, I was always interested in what was going on in their heads, and I had this moment where looking at all these salespeople, how many questions that they asked, what were their backgrounds, all this stuff, but I asked this one salesperson a question that was not on our list of questions, I asked her what do you think about when you go on sales calls, and the story’s in Selling with Noble Purpose, and she said, “I always think about this one patient,” and I’m going to truncate the story here but she described this one grandmother that came up to her in a doctor’s office, talked to her about how her drug just changed your life and she said, “I think about her every single day,” and I knew when she was telling me this story, this was 12 years ago, I knew this is something, that she has called out the thing that I have seen in the top-performing salespeople, the thing that we didn’t have a name for, that we now call noble purpose. And so we had done this study, we did it as a blind study and the biotech company asked us who do you think our top performers are and I had identified after she said this, this idea of purpose, I had identified four other people that alluded to this. And so I went back to the biotech company, I said, “I think these are your top five people,” and I was right, and they said why and I said, “Because they have a different story in their heart,” and I couldn’t quite nail it at the time, only took a scant decade to get the methodology, but I did know that was a turning point for me because what I saw, it’s almost like when you watch one of those movies and somebody realizes that their spouse is having an affair and then they backfill like ten different things that they missed but they’re all in the back of their head, this was the positive version of that, I realized. All these years, I’ve been coaching salespeople, training salespeople, this is the thing. And it’s the true north. And what we now know 12 years later is the data is 100 percent clear in three areas. Number one, salespeople. Salespeople who sell with noble purpose outsell salespeople who are just focused on closing. Number two, individual contributors of every level, every place in the organization who have a sightline towards a purpose bigger than themselves will perform at a higher level and enjoy their jobs more. And number three, companies that have a purpose bigger than money, whose through line is to improve life for customers, outperform the market by 350 percent. So the data is now telling us what we’ve probably all experienced as individuals in our own hearts.

Alex: It kind of makes sense when you say it —

Lisa: Of course.

Alex: — and it also makes sense why we don’t operationalize it if we don’t become more aware of it.

Lisa: Well, one of the reasons we don’t operationalize it is because the P&L is easy to measure, the story in your heart is a little bit harder. It’s not impossible. But what we tend to measure in business is lagging indicators. And the story that the organization tells about who we are and why we’re here, that is more qualitative. However, one of the things we’ve done is we will go back and look at organizations’ town halls and get the transcript and we can predict if that organization, at their town halls, at their leadership meetings, if that organization is spending 75 percent of their time talking about internal numbers versus talking about how they’re improving life for customers, that organization will quickly become commoditized. But if they can get to the point where they’re spending half their time on internal numbers, because they matter, but half of the leadership airtime is spent on, “Here’s how we improve life for customers, here’s how we’re affecting our market,” if they can get that up to close to 50 percent, they will have breakthrough innovation, because you don’t innovate when you’re looking at the P&L, they will have greater competitive differentiation in the way their customers interact with them, not just in the product offering, and they will have greater employee engagement. But it starts with what is the story we’re telling about who we are and why we’re here. 

Alex: I want to go back through your journey and tap into your experience with coaching. Do you remember the first instance of being exposed to coaching when you recognized, “Wow, maybe this is something I want to do? It is powerful”? Do you remember that moment?

Lisa: I do. I do. I remember it clear as day. So I was the sales manager of our college newspaper. So I had 12 sales reps. So I was coaching them and I knew sales coaching was a thing and so it was already sort of in my mind, but I had a job early in my career, after I got out of college, I worked for Procter & Gamble.

Alex: Love Procter and Gamble. It’s one of our clients at Coaching.com

Lisa: I love them too in many ways. I was a sales manager in the 80s. It was a different world. But one of my jobs was I was a sales trainer and it was kind of this interim job between sales rep and sales manager, you had to do a stint as a sales trainer. I found out years later that everyone hated that job and I was the only one that liked it so there was to tell there. But one of the geniuses of that job that I remember really deeply understanding coaching is I would train a new hire, so I would say, “You just got out of college, you’re 23 years old,” I’m all of 24 in this time, “and I would spend a week training you in your territory and what happened was, at the end of a week, the following week, our big boss would come out with you,” and this is what made me understand coaching so well. If you did poorly, so I wasn’t going to be there when he rode with you and if you did poorly, it wasn’t on you, it was on me. Yeah, I was one that’s going to hear about it. And so it helped me understand coaching in a very different way versus directing, because my job over the course of a week was to get this person who’s never done this before to the point where they could do it without me there. So that meant — and what they were doing was interacting with customers so there was like wild variables in this thing so I had to get them to where they had a core set of techniques and mindsets and beliefs so that no matter what happened, they would react well when they were in front of the big boss. Otherwise, it was on me. And I just remember thinking, and it was a long week, and, again, years later, a bunch of us got together for P&G reunion, people were like, “Oh, God, do you remember that district field rep job? I hated that. I hated that,” and by now I’m almost 40 years old and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I loved that job.” Apparently, I was the only one. But I look at that as a pivotal spot in my coaching journey because that was when I truly understood it’s not about me telling them what to do. There’s going to be a little bit of that because I have a little more expertise than they do but this is about me getting them to the point where they can not only do it on their own but they can think and react so if something goes sideways, they are so grounded in what the true north of what they’re trying to do is they can respond. So that, to me, was when I look back on it, even at the time, I knew this is different and this is really important. Because I have — one of my good friends, again, I’m only a year or two older than the people that I coach, and one of my very good friends now is like the number one real estate agent in the entire state of Pennsylvania and she’s like, “I still remember that first week with you.” So that’s the power of coaching.

Alex: That is the power of coaching. One of the focus areas for you is purpose. 

Lisa: Yeah.

Alex: It does seem to me, kind of looking at where the world is today, that there is a longing for deeper purpose, and, sometimes, in organizational settings, that can be done very well, and in some cases, when companies try to infuse a little bit of purpose, it doesn’t seem — it seems a little disingenuous, right? Like you have to do it really well and I know that you’ve had a client recently that you like to talk about your experience working with Hilton and so I find that very interesting, kind of how do you bring purpose in a way that aligns with people’s longing for purpose that can be fulfilled partly through the work that you do and partly also, of course, in their personal lives, but when you do that right and you align it to strategic elements of the organization, you can get like one of those kind of win-win-win scenarios. So, tell me about this project with Hilton, how it came about and some of the outcomes from it. 

Lisa: So you used a word there, “longing,” and I want to double down on that word. Human beings have two fundamental needs once we get beyond food and shelter. We want belonging and significance. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves and we want to know that our contribution matters. So how does this relate to Hilton and the commercial success? Every human being has this longing. The stock market also has some requirements. And so this is our human challenge is to bring these two together. So Hilton is a client that has a legacy purpose. Over 100 years ago, this is public knowledge, Conrad Hilton said, “It is our purpose to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality,” as Conrad Hilton believed then, something that they believe now that I believe is when people go to different places and they experienced the hospitality of a different city, of a different country, it has a profound effect on them. 

Alex: Absolutely. 

Lisa: And he believed this and it is true. When you go to a different country and you experience their best hospitality, it just — we become more connected. So this purpose is real, it was at the founding of Hilton. They also own hotels all over the world, they have all these brands, they have all these hotel investors, and so the challenge is to take something like that and have it show up with the guy who’s greeting the guests at a Hampton Inn in Salisbury, Maryland, with the woman who is the maid at a Hilton in Thailand. It has to go all over the world. And so one of the reasons why organizations often fail at purpose is because they just keep it at the top and what cascades down is, “Hit the number, hit the number, hit the number, turn those rooms around, the metrics and metrics,” but the CEO of Hilton is a guy named Chris Nassetta and he is just so dialed in to this purpose. And so what they wanted to do was they wanted to activate it and those words are really important because a lot of companies think they want to cascade down the messaging. Yes, that’s a start, but what Hilton wanted to do was activate it. So we went around the world. I literally got to go to Singapore and all these other great places around the world, working with leaders on how do you bring this to life because, back to belonging and significance, belonging is you’re part of this thing that is changing people’s lives. You are literally changing people’s lives. When they go to our hotels and they experience this hospitality, whether they are driving 60 miles to go to a funeral and you’re giving them a soft place to land or they’re going around the world for the first time, whatever it is, but what we also had to do was get that significance and the significance is how does your job contribute? And that’s where a lot of companies miss. A way to think about it as a Venn diagram with three circles. There’s the company purpose, the second circle is how does your job connect to it, and the third circle is why does it matter to me. And so when we went around the world with this, how does housekeeping connect to this? How does IT connect? And why does it matter to me? People told stories about their first time as a kid staying in a hotel. The VP of Sales tells a story about the first time he stayed in a Hilton Hotel and he read Conrad Hilton’s book and it changed his life. But that’s a lot of times what’s missing and we just did a Harvard Business Review piece about this and they’re mentioned in that. People think that landing on the purpose is what they need to do and that’s only part of it. That’s a good start. The purpose has to be about how you’re making a difference to customers, not just we want to make the world a better place. But then the other two elements of it are how does each job connect, and people need to see a through line and I have a definite point of view on this, a lot of people talk about internal customers, I don’t use that language because the more you talk about everybody being a customer, it reduces the urgency for real customers who are the people that pay for your service. So, yes, be nice to the people internally, yes, treat your colleagues with respect, but we want every single person in the entire hotel chain to understand how when you lay your head on that pillow and you go, “Ah,” they contributed. And we want them to think at a deep level about what that means. We did an exercise with a group of senior leaders where we all talked about the first time we experienced hospitality and one of the leaders was embarrassed to share her story because she grew up fairly wealthy and it was in a really grandiose way and I was embarrassed to share my story because I grew up kind of poor and the first time I experienced hospitality was I went over to someone’s house and their father happened to be a minister and their mother brought us a tray of cookies to the room and I was like, “People do that? They bring a tray of cookies to your room?” But what’s interesting is we were both a little embarrassed to share that, neither of us had a reason because it’s not like she chose to grow up wealthy and I chose to grow up kind of poor. I mean, it’s not like we picked either of those, but the sharing of them opened the door for people to think of why does this even matter to me? And we’ve done the same thing, if you’re thinking, “Well, we don’t have anything as sexy as hospitality,” we’ve done this in a plumbing company and a concrete company, which are not that sexy, but you try living your life without plumbing or concrete. 

Alex: I find concrete particularly sexy. I actually have some Taschen books over there on concrete buildings. Yeah. 

Lisa: It holds up the world so there you go. 

Alex: Yeah, I just think concrete is —

Lisa: Well —

Alex: — borderline sexy. I love concrete. But, yes, point taken. So when you look at that initiative at Hilton, what are some of the elements that you think that helped make it as successful as it has been? 

Lisa: Number one, senior leadership airtime. Google purpose and Hilton and you’ll see the big bosses talking about it. They believe it, they live it, they breathe it. And a lot of times, we hear our senior leaders only talking about metrics and we tend to create a false dichotomy, caring about purpose and making a difference does not make you immune from the numbers. They have to care about numbers. That is part of being a job of a senior leader. But the first element that makes it successful is clarity of purpose, not just, “Hey, we wanna be a purposeful company.” We have a saying in our business, “specificity is sexy,” so you do need a purpose statement. And if you’ve got a great mission statement or something like that, but a purpose statement is not, “We wanna do right by our customers and our shareholders and our communities and be a good employer and be nice people and make, blah, blah, blah, blah.” No, you need clarity about your aim and your lane. What are we trying to do and which type of customer? What impact are we trying to have at the center of our commercial model? So that’s number one, clarity of purpose, and the senior leaders need to give it airtime. The second thing is it has to be front and center with your sales team, because what happens is a lot of companies will use purpose with their — even their customer support, their innovation. It has to be at the center of your commercial model. This is what you’re selling is your ability to deliver on your purpose so it has to be front and center of your commercial model. Then the other piece is you have to think about activating it at every level in the organization. That word there is really important. So everyone needs that through line on how their job connects, why it might matter to them, and that is individual manager conversations. We just did an activation with a large railroad company. They’re in the rail car, rail repair, they got a lot of businesses around that, and it is down to the guys, it’s mostly guys, sitting in the railyard with this little cheat sheet that we made them saying, “How does our job contribute? Why does it matter to you?” and they’re all like standing around with the tool belts on and everything but they need that because they’re the ones doing the tough, gritty work every single day. They need to know this actually matters to somebody. So I would say those three things. It’s got to have clarity of purpose that senior leaders are speaking to in a big way. Number two, it has to sit at the center of your commercial model, which means anybody selling for your company has to be lined up with it. And then, number three, you have to activate it all the way through, which doesn’t have to take that long and it doesn’t have to be another, “Oh God, not another project.” One of the things we’ve really worked on over the last decade is taking purpose and bringing it to life in the cadence of regular work. 

Alex: That’s interesting, because purpose is something so deeply ingrained in human existence, making it practical and aligning it with work and in a way that is also aligned with strategic objectives of an organization, I mean, that’s where art meets science and business management. So how do you go about mapping some of that out? And I think this is relevant for coaches because we work with a lot of people and I think the mark of a very successful coach is being able to understand the systemic impact of the work that you’re doing. You and I know a lot of coaches. I think the more experienced the coach, the more they’re able to track what’s happening broadly in an organization, just by working with one person, and picking up on the language that they use and the way they think about certain aspects of the business, the way they relate to even metrics like profitability. I mean, the systemic impact of coaching is tremendous, so, from the coach’s lens, how do you go about really connecting that sense of purpose with the operational grind? 

Lisa: So I’ll give you two examples. One is a question that any leader can ask inside an organization and the second is a coaching question. So, in both the books about noble purpose, the sales book and the leading book, we talk about the game-changing question and the question is this: How will the customer be different as a result of doing business with us? So if you’re in product development and they’re going, “We’ve got this, we’ve got this, we’ve got that,” how will the customer’s life be different as a result of this? If you’re in sales, how will the customer’s life be different? If you are talking about your strategic plan, how will customers’ lives be different as a result of us implementing this? Because if you don’t have that, it’s all about you and it’s going to fall flat. So everything needs to be through this lens. And, again, it has to be the center of the commercial model. So even if I’m in IT, I need to be saying, “How will customers’ lives be different as a result of this?” and the answer might be, “Our employees won’t be so stressed out because we’re fixing these problems and they’ll be able to better serve,” it doesn’t have to be a direct line but it has to be a through line. So then back to coaching, coaches tend to lean in to the emotions and the behaviors and one of the places coaches often miss is the impact on the organization. So, as a coach, there’s a question that you want to ask and it’s how will whatever your ability to get the team together, your ability to speak better publicly, your ability to solve conflicts, whatever it is, how will that affect the organization’s ability to get results? How will that affect the organization’s ability to be successful? And the reason you want to ask that question, if you already are with a client and you’re coaching them, is we want to increase the urgency. So I’ll give you a simple example. If I were coaching a teacher who was teaching history to secondary schoolers, if I asked, “How will giving them a better understanding of history affect the rest of their lives?” A teacher might say, “It’s stupid and boring and it won’t affect them,” in which I would say, “I think you need to choose a different profession.” Or they might say, “Oh, I didn’t really think about that. I guess they’ll be better citizens. I guess they’ll be smarter people. I guess knowing the patterns of history can help you change the world for the better and avoid mistakes.” 

Alex: The patterns of history, love it. 

Lisa: Yeah, I mean that — most history teachers, if pressed, would get there. 

Alex: One of my favorite quotes is from George Bernard Shaw and don’t mind the fact that he uses man because it’s like a hundred-year-old quote but, “If history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man, or woman, or whatever you want, be of learning from experience.”

Lisa: You know what, in this context, I actually prefer man because I think that’s most of who’s repeated themselves. 

Alex: Oh, you know what, that is a very, very fine point you’re making. And you’re not wrong, I believe.

Lisa: And so the reason I use that example of asking the teacher is it gives the urgency and the clarity about the impact, which both shines a light on the solution in terms that heat up on the problem, which is how you create urgency. So now translate that to coaching and there’s two places you can ask it. If I’m dealing with a client and they are struggling with their team and I were to say, “What’s the win for you? What impact will it have if you solve this? What are the implications if you don’t solve this?” all of a sudden, we decide they may go, “Not much,” then I say, “Well, let’s move on to something else.” But the other place you can ask it, back to why are coaches reluctant to sell themselves, if someone says I’m trying to do this and this and this, coaches need to do a better job of drawing a line to the business results. What impact will it have if we solve this? Well, then we get products to market faster. If you get a product to market two months faster, what are the financial implications of that? Well, I guess, a couple million dollars. Okay, so what we’re dealing with here is a couple million-dollar problem. My fee doesn’t seem that big. And I’m not making that up. I’m not trying to be manipulative. I’m trying to be accurate.

Alex: I know you work both with large organizations and with startups, some smaller, some that have become unicorns.

Lisa: Yes. 

Alex: What do you enjoy the most? And how is it different when you’re working with large organization that’s established or a fast-paced startup?

Lisa: I’ll tell you the thing I enjoy the most. When the cook at Hilton goes home and tells their spouse, “My job matters.” So, for me, the single most exciting thing is when the people doing the tough, gritty work of the organization, whether it’s cooking, taking out the trash, chipping the concrete, two in the morning IT, when the people doing the hardest jobs that are often thankless, when they feel that deep sense that their work matters. That’s the most exciting thing for me. And so the difference between a big company and a startup, in a startup, it’s usually more apparent. So, you’re right, I have had a couple companies where I was with them and like Series C round of funding and we were able to create a great story, put the sales team on fire and they ultimately became unicorns, which those of you who don’t know, that means over a billion dollars in valuation. And so, in a startup, people usually have clarity of purpose because they’re usually pretty close to the founders. You don’t start a startup, “Hey, I think I wanna make a lot of money.” You might hope that but you usually start a startup because you got an idea and you’re serving a market need. And so one of the pieces we did for HBR was how to scale it. So it’s exciting to be with a startup, like, “We’ve got this great idea, we’re gonna change the world,” that’s exciting. The thing that’s great about working for a big, big company, candidly, it is harder to get that sense of purpose all the way through the organization in a large legacy company but once you do, you’ve affected more people because that’s the thing that I recognized when I first really saw with clarity why purpose and having it at work was so important is it’s not work that kills our spirit, it’s meaningless work, and if you feel a sense of purpose about your work, I don’t talk a lot about work-life balance, people are at different stages, I’ve had stages in my life where I didn’t work a lot, when I had little kids and I still felt a sense of purpose, and other times in my life where I worked 70 or 80 hours a week and I loved it, but when you feel a sense of aliveness, a sense of purpose in your work, you become a better human, you become a better partner, you become a better parent, because you are fully alive in the place that you spend most of your time.

Alex: For those that are struggling connecting with a deeper purpose, what do you suggest? 

Lisa: So there’s a couple questions. The first thing is that little voice in your head that’s going, “This doesn’t matter. I’m just a cog in the machine,” just pause that for a moment and park it. Just put it over there, you can pick it back up in a second if it’s true, but I ask you to think about when you do your work, your job, your coding, your mortgage lending, your whatever it is, what impact does it have when you do your job well? What if you didn’t do it? And there may be someone else to do it. So we were working with a bank and they do mortgages, they’re helping people get their home loans, and there’s a lot of paperwork and all this regulation, it can be really long and boring, but when you do it well, you have that image of those people walking into their home. Working with an accounting firm, you have the image of someone going to sleep at night knowing they’re paid off on their taxes. So really think about what impact does it have when I do my job well, and if you can’t get there, ask, we call it the ripple effect, ask, “What about if I don’t do it, what would happen?” because the thing is, if you’re struggling to have that sense of purpose, do not wait for your boss, do not wait for your company leader, that’d be great, if you’re a CEO, call me, we’ll help you, but don’t — you’re insane if you wait for someone else to give that to you, because we have all been in experiences, I’ll go back to teaching, we might have had two teachers on the same day teaching the exact same kids and one is on fire with purpose and the other is not. And so, same situation, look for when I do my work well and it’s not what happens, it’s who, who do I affect when I do it well and if I weren’t to do it, who will be impacted and how would they be impacted? If you can get that in your brain, that will ignite your frontal lobes, that will put a very different lens on work for you. Now, if you are not being paid what you’re worth, if you were being abused at work, if you are having to work so many hours that you don’t get to have a life, that’s a different thing and you know what you need to do. You already know. That is not a good way to live. But if you have a good enough job that you are showing up every day and you’re just struggling, you’re not alone. One of the reasons why we’re struggling is because when we go virtual, there’s a sameness to everything and the tether to our impact is buried in our inbox. So think about the ripple effect. How does my work impact people? What if I didn’t do it? And try and start your day with that. It can change your actual experience with your job.

Alex: Absolutely. That resonates. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today on this conversation on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Looking forward to seeing you in person soon and having another great conversation. 

Lisa: It was delightful. Coaching is a great way to have a big impact and to change people’s lives for the better. So if you’re a coach, you don’t have to think too far to see the ripple effect. 

Alex: Couldn’t agree with you more.