How do purposeful leaders experience growth?

First...

"It will be a great day, if everything goes according to plan."

and it will, won't it?

Leaders are told

• by analysts that they are leading just one of 57,170,715 firms in the U.S.
• by sociologists that going against popular opinion will not make you very popular.
• by psychologists that tell us our brain loves normalcy, patterns, and predictability.

The message received is:

• Be more effective.
• Be more efficient.
• Be more competitive.

That is what a lone business...

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• Science
• Measurements
• Facts

The data is

• Inarguable
• Tireless
• Powerful
• ...and if leaders are not careful, data will take you over

If that happens...

• Don't worry.
• Your business will be fine.

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• Your business will live to be just 15 years old (that's a teenager)
• People will remember working for your company and maybe say some nice things (about the people they worked with)
• ...but when it's all said and done, your company will be a bona fide statistic.

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It doesn't have to be that way.

Leading was not just about managing short and long term plans.

Their internal motivation is what enabled them to create meaningful work.

These leaders made a conscious choice to cultivate and use their Purpose.

Criterion of Purposeful Leaders

• Cultivated advocates in their ecosystem (employees, customers, suppliers)
• Encountered or managing a growth issue
• CEO is still a major participant in the hiring process
• Employees feel closely connected to the company and know most of the people in the organization

I wanted to know

• What makes them unique
• Why do they regulate differently that leaders in traditional companies
• What goes through their minds when they are confronted with such choices

Common Characteristics

• Clear values of what is "right" for the whole organization
• Sense of purpose around developing meaningful work
• Ability to manage risk if it enhances purpose
• Pronounced desire to protect what makes them unique.

Common Growth Experiences

• Scaling
• Maintaining
• Managing Crisis
• Transition & Succession

It was about their ability to manage the velocity of change while maintaining their commitment to meaningful work.

Feelings of fear, sadness, dread, excitement, enthusiasm underscored experiences related to growth

Values cultivated in early formative experiences influenced decision making during times of stress

When considering growth opportunities, values drove decisions.

3 categories of values; 3 decision styles

• Defaulters allowed external factors to write the story of their lives and dictate their opportunities.
• Correctors took a lesson from the past and took radical actions not to repeat the past.
• Balancers pay positive experiences forward.

Interesting Finding Alert

Values have life cycles too.

Generation

• Leaders seek to create something of their own that inspires them.

Productivity

• Hypnotized by 5X multipliers, viral cultural adoption and the sprint to IPO, companies embark on expansion and scale.

Self-Deception

• As companies continue to grow, they make trade-offs on quality and efficiency over uniqueness and meaning.

Re Generation

• Now with a noticeable difference in service or product from where it started, the company begins to re-anoint itself in its original values. First steps to regeneration often starts by retrofitting values through philanthropy, corporate social responsibility or sustainability programs.

At what point in a company's history did they lose their way and succumb to making the trade-offs required in order to achieve scale?

Positive?
Negative?

Positive?
Negative?

Positive?
Negative?

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Change only occurs when individuals choose to learn from an event.

Effective regeneration, the kind that ameliorates markets, requires top-to-bottom transformation of the company and of the leader, where the leader integrates knowledge and awareness of the broader impacts the company currently has, along with what it could do.

Interesting Finding Alert

Purposeful leaders

Purposeful leaders attempt to mitigate the potential dissipation of their purpose and values through self-regulation around the idea of “enough” (profit) for "a nice life."

As a result, these leaders have cultivated an ecosystem of loyalty, on a very personal level, with employees, suppliers, and customers.

While purposeful leaders respect data they are guided less by professional learning, and significantly more by their formative experiences.

They don't let data get in the way of creation. Creation through learning enhances their purpose and ability to do meaningful work.

Emphasis on relationships and meaningful work created a self-regulatory barrier of "enough" when opportunities for large scale presented itself.

"You know, you’re in your life between 25 and 55, you’re in it. I’m 62 now. But when I’m 80 I’ll be more proud of what we did with the company and how many lives we affected, than I would be about walking with my walker to Boeing Field to go to Tahiti."

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