Conscious Company Magazine | Spring 2018

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

CONSCIOUS COM PAN Y

TRANSFORMATIONAL

CEOs HOW 6 LEADERS REINVENTED THEIR BUSINESSES

BIGGBY COFFEE’S BOB FISH & MIKE MCFALL

INSIDE A $100 MILLION BRAND’S QUEST FOR PURPOSE

IMPACT | WORKPLACE | SUSTAINABILITY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS Q2 / SPRING 2018 | Issue 18

WORKPLACE CULTURE LEADERSHIP

8

HOW A USED-CAR DEALERSHIP BECAME A CONSCIOUS COMPANY*

14

THE BLUEPRINT TO CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

BY ERIC KAUFMANN

18

THIS SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR IS HELPING GIRLS TAKE CENTER STAGE

*Cover Story

26

HOW BIGGBY COFFEE FOUND ITS PURPOSE*

BY NATHAN HAVEY

42

INTERVIEW: BARRY-WEHMILLER CEO BOB CHAPMAN ON CREATING CARING CULTURES*

OPERATIONS

50

HOW TO FIRE A COLLEAGUE IN A CONSCIOUS WAY

BY DIANA CHAPMAN

54

NEW BELGIUM BREWING’S EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP JOURNEY*

60

HOW TO CREATE A COMPELLING PURPOSE FOR YOUR BUSINESS

BY RAJ SISODIA, TIMOTHY HENRY, AND THOMAS ECKSCHMIDT, WITH JESSICA AGNEESSENS AND HALEY RUSHING

64

EMPOWERING DIVERSE SUPPLY CHAINS WITH CONNXUS

IMPACT

70

DANONE’S JOURNEY TO BECOME A B CORP*

74

CAN MINDFULNESS CREATE MORE IMPACTFUL WORKPLACES?*

78

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IMPACT INVESTORS OVERLOOK

BY GINO BORGES

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY EDITORIAL

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MEDIA

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rachel Zurer

CEO & CO-FOUNDER Meghan French Dunbar

ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Kate Hermann

COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway

EVENTS & OPERATIONS ASSOCIATE Nina Bernardin

DIGITAL EDITOR Mary Mazzoni TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo

WEBSITE GURU Rolando Garcia CO-FOUNDER Maren Keeley

NEWSSTAND CONSULTANT Curtis Circulation Company PRINTING Publication Printers COVER PHOTO Laura Eich

CONTACT ADVERTISING advertise@consciouscomag.com SUBSCRIBE ONLINE consciouscompanymedia.com/subscribe WRITER’S GUIDELINES consciouscompanymedia.com/ pages/submit-a-story GENERAL INQUIRIES info@consciouscomag.com PHONE 844.522.4768

www.consciouscompanymedia.com facebook.com/ConsciousCoMag Follow us @ConsciousCoMag

INTENTIONAL MEDIA EXECUTIVE TEAM CHAIRMAN Robert Caruso MANAGING PARTNER John Morris CHIEF FINANCIAL AND OPERATIONS OFFICER Luc Fagerberg PARTNER Lindsay Zizumbo PRODUCER AND CURATOR, SOCAP Lindsay Smalling DIRECTOR, GOOD CAPITAL PROJECT Sharadiya Dasgupta

FSC logo

ON TRANSFORMATION A few months ago, in a small, glasswalled conference room at the Impact Hub in Boulder, the entire Conscious Company Media staff gathered in person — a special event for our remote team. On the agenda for the week: yet another stab at articulating our company’s core values, purpose, mission, and vision.

As a mission-driven company that exists to spread best practices around being a mission-driven company, we were acutely aware of the irony we were living in: we publish a chorus of voices extolling the importance of having a clear, co-created statement of what a company is really up to and why (see page 60), and yet we ourselves still lacked one that reflected our current best thinking. So we prepared to roll up our sleeves and dig deep into our own personal and collective why and how.

It was a process we undertook during a time of great change in our business. Just the month before, Conscious Company Media had been acquired by Intentional Media. We’d said goodbye to some coworkers while simultaneously welcoming new faces and ideas, both onto our core team and by way of our new parent and sister organizations (see the masthead at left for a glimpse of the family). This was Conscious Company 2.0, and it was ours to shape.

The moment felt like a special milestone, and at the same time, it was a symptom of the most common, natural thing in the world. Pulling this latest issue together has reinforced my conviction that Benjamin Franklin got it wrong when he said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” He forgot to add a third certainty to his list: change. As mission-driven companies, it’s usually our reason for existing: we want to change something about how the world is working, in a way that we think will make it better for ourselves and others. How exactly to effect that change in the world, how to convince others to come with us, how to stay grounded and strong along the path — these are the questions we all ponder, and exactly the ones Conscious Com-

pany hopes to help answer by creating places to connect with others who are on a similar path.

Sometimes those places are metaphorical ones; this magazine issue, for example. In these pages, you’ll find true stories and hard-won advice from business leaders who have weathered their share of challenges in the name of transformation and impact. For example, New Belgium Brewing co-founder and former CEO Kim Jordan offers lessons from transitioning her company to employee ownership (page 54), Barry-Wehmiller CEO Bob Chapman reveals the real knots he’s still learning to untie within his hugely successful culture-of-care model (page 42), and Nathan Havey offers an unprecedented deep dive into the realities of bringing conscious business practices to Biggby Coffee, an already successful 20-yearold business (page 26).

But as much as we love the power of our virtual gatherings, here and on our website, we can’t help but acknowledge that there’s something extra potent about gathering together in the flesh. Increasingly, those are the kinds of places and opportunities we’re creating. Our team is still glowing from the World-Changing Women’s Summit in February, where more than 175 female business leaders co-created what one participant called “the most extraordinary, inspiring, and transformative gathering I have attended in my life.” And we can’t wait for our next in-person event, the second-annual Conscious Company Leaders Forum, from June 6–8 at 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, California. A good number of the leaders featured in these pages will be there (look for the icon at the end of each story), both on stage and in the audience, as will many others eager to share their own stories from their paths through change.

We’re increasingly sold on the magic that emerges when we create a brave space for a diverse group of passionate leaders to be authentic about the challenges and opportunities they’re facing.

And of course there’s power in just gathering as a small team, as we experienced in that conference room a

few months ago. With the help of a facilitator, in just two days we managed to articulate a set of values, a purpose, a mission, and a vision that everyone in the company feels energized by. The difference was immediate — a testimony to the power of each of us having our voices heard, of articulating why we’re here and why we believe these actions will have that effect, and of intimately sharing our hopes and fears with each other. The renewed sense of possibility, energy, and commitment is palpable to each of us. And, in the true spirit of transformation, we hold the words we articulated not as a finished product but as a work in progress.

We all know it in our bones: transformation is what we need, as a society, as a planet, as individuals. We also know that change is inevitable — it’s how life itself functions. But in order to create the kinds of lives, the kinds of companies, and the kinds of impacts that these times demand, we need to work together to take charge of the transformation, to harness forces larger than ourselves to steer us in a direction of our choosing. We need to be conscious and intentional about our leadership (page 14), our company cultures, and our effects on the world. And we need to learn from each other, from successes and failures, in good times and while the going gets tough. It’s only by working both within ourselves and in community that we’ll have any hope of getting where we want to go. So thank you for being a part of it already just by virtue of having read this far. Next step: read the rest of this issue. And if you’re ready to add your voice, consider applying to join us in June, or become a contributor and share your own story of transformation. We’re here waiting, arms wide, ready to listen. And we hope to see you soon.

— Rachel Zurer, editor-in-chief

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HOW A TEXAS USED-CAR DEALERSHIP BECAME A

CONSCIOUS COMPANY

Entrepreneur Steve Hall describes how conscious leadership made him happier and helped his auto business thrive.

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teve Hall founded his Dallasbased used-car dealership at the perfect time. It was 2004, and the market was booming.

Everyone wanted a better car, and thanks to high liquidity in the marketplace, it was easy to get financing.

“We went from zero to about $70 million in revenue in our first three and a half years, and we were rated one of the fastest-growing companies in North Texas,” Hall says of the time after he founded driversselect.

From the outside, things were looking great, but it didn’t feel that way.

“My relationship with my wife was not good, and I hardly spent any time with my son,” Hall recalls. “I wasn’t doing anything socially. My sole focus was continuing to maximize the business in the short term, and I couldn’t figure out why I felt so drained despite the business success.”

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and all that rapid growth suddenly slammed to a halt. Hall says the gut-check helped him realize what

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matters. A singular focus on the bottom line was not fulfilling him. The constant search for “more” left him burned out and frustrated, and he had little left to offer his colleagues — let alone his family and friends. “I told my team, ‘Look, I won’t be around long enough mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually to build a great business if it doesn’t align with my values,’” Hall says. So he went looking for a better way — and found one in the Conscious Capitalism community.

Since 2010, driversselect’s purpose “to infect the world with highly contagious care” has sent revenues soaring. In fact, the strong values-driven performance was enough to grab the attention of Fortune 300 company Sonic Automotive, which acquired driversselect in September 2017.

“Now we get to take our purpose and infect their 10,000 associates with our culture of care,” Hall says.

While a used-car dealership may not be the first business that comes to

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mind when you think of a conscious company, driversselect demonstrates that a values-driven model can work in all kinds of sectors. We spoke with Hall to find out more about the recent acquisition, his transformational experience, and how other companies can follow suit.

What’s your elevator pitch for business leaders about the way you do business differently?

Steve Hall: Stakeholder orientation is the easiest way to start talking about it. Every company is connected to its employees, customers, suppliers, and communities. If one or more of those stakeholders is rooting for you to lose or go out of business, it’s going to be tougher. And you have a lot of control over how you invest in those relationships.

I ask people, “What’s the relationship you would love to have with your suppliers?” “What’s the relationship you would love to have with your cus-

DRIVERSSELECT AT A GLANCE • Location: Dallas, TX • Founded: 2004 • Team Members: 380 • Traction: Has served over 50,000 customers in the Dallas area • Impact: $45,000 donated in 2017 to nonprofit partners • Recognition: Dallas Business Journal Best Places to Work 2016 and 2017; Dallas Morning News Top Workplaces 2016 and 2017; Steve Hall was recently named to Conscious Capitalism International Board of Directors • Structure: For-profit subsidiary of Sonic Automotive • 2017 Revenue: Over $200 million • Purpose: “To infect the workplace with highly infectious CARE (caring acts randomly expressed).”

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tomers, beyond what you want them to do or buy?” If they start talking about these relationships, I can tell they’re interested in building a conscious company. I don’t want to spend too much energy trying to convince people this is a good thing for them, because it’s not for everybody, but people who are already on the journey often just need some encouragement or some more examples of what works.

I just tell skeptics, “Look, if you’re happy with the way your business is and you’re happy personally and professionally, keep doing what you’re doing. But if you think that person-

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a business that didn’t take me away from the people I care most about.

Another day, I was dropping off my middle child for his first day of kindergarten. He’s a little introverted, and I remember thinking: “I hope he has a great day. I hope he meets friends and has a good teacher who inspires him to learn.” Then I wondered how many kids made similar wishes for their parents: “I hope dad or mom has a good day at work. I hope their bosses are good to them so they won’t come home in a bad mood.” I started thinking about the conditions I was creating at my company. Was I sending people home in good moods

“It’s easy to be transparent when it’s favorable to the business, but are you willing to take the risk when there’s a lot of uncertainty?”

ally or professionally things could be a little better for you and you want something a little different, I’m happy to share our journey and tell you about how it’s been for us,” and then they can decide from there.

Would you tell us about your journey?

SH: When driversselect got started, I wanted to serve a disenfranchised consumer base — people with credit problems — who were subject to predatory practices elsewhere in the industry. Good people who encountered situational circumstances that damaged their credit, such as a divorce, illness, or personal bankruptcy, had a lot of trouble getting car loans and were often pushed into older, higher-mileage cars. With so much liquidity coming into the marketplace in 2004, banks were much more willing to lend, and I saw an opportunity to build a retail model in which 10

subprime consumers could drive the same nearly-new vehicles available to those with good credit.

But I quickly found that the banks were willing to finance anybody. It wasn’t just those who had fallen on tough times. People with multiple repossessions and a history of poor financial decisions were also getting loans, even if those loans were likely to result in another repossession.

Meanwhile, the type of employees I was hiring didn’t align with my values: they would sell a car to whomever just to get a transaction. We were all just chasing growth. It didn’t feel purposeful, but I didn’t know any other

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way. I figured, “This is just business.”

It was all about scale and getting big and locations and visibility. But the better the business did, the bigger it got, the worse I got. I wasn’t eating well, I wasn’t exercising, I was just pushing for more and more.

I have three sons, aged 11, 8, and 3, and I can think of two moments with them that really defined my mindset shift. For years, I came through my front door with a cell phone in my hand. When my sons ran up to me, I would shush them. One day, I didn’t have anything to do in the evening and I thought, “I’m going to go home, and I’m going to be with my family.” I walked in the door and opened up my arms, but no one was there to greet me. They were all doing their own thing. I realized how many times I’d come through the door and ignored all of them, and I wondered how many other life experiences I missed out on because I simply wasn’t present. I realized I needed to build

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that allowed them to be present with their families, or were they defeated, stressed, and burned out? That thought really opened my eyes to the impact I have on people’s home lives, because I had been there. I walked through that door, saw my family not react to me, and realized how I’d let work come between us.

Fortunately — not from a financial standpoint but from a wellbeing standpoint — the 2008 financial crisis hit. Having a crisis break your business apart allows you to look at the business in a different way. It’s frustrating, but at the same time, you get to put those pieces back together.

I got involved with the Stagen Leadership Academy and some integral leadership programs. I read Greg McKeown’s “Essentialism” and attended my first Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit.

All of those things woke me up to a different way to build a business: realigning the company with your

values, thinking about the long term. I realized there was a different way. A company’s people and its stakeholders can be more than the means to a profit. In fact, profits can be the means to creating value for stakeholders. It was almost a reversal of how I saw the business before.

And being the sole shareholder, founder, and CEO, I realized I could shape the business the way I wanted. It started around picking four core values that were important to me (see page 13). I didn’t want too many, because I knew I had to model them every single day.

How did you settle on those four core values? What was that process like?

SH: You can either decide “Who do I want to be?” and do aspirational values or you can look at it and say, “Who’s the person I believe I can commit to being every single day?” And that’s mainly who you already are.

I spent some time talking to my parents about who I was as a kid.

My wife was very influential. Close friends, mentors, coaches, people who know you really, really well, they know the best, they know the worst of you. They helped me really define who I was.

What makes something really a “core value” in regard to how you operate the business?

SH: Core values are values you’d uphold even if they become a disadvantage. For example, back in 2011 and 2012, auto dealerships largely refused to give out information. They’d barely tell customers the price of a car, and when the customers came in, the dealers undervalued their tradeins, overcharged them on financing, and added a whole bunch of unnecessary products. One of our

core values is transparency, and we decided to reveal the whole price up front — interest rates, down payments, monthly payments, tax and tag fees, warranties, everything — in order to be true to that tenet.

Some people thought it was crazy for us to show the full price — the good and the bad — while our competition was showing only the good stuff. For a short time, we lost business because people would say, “That looks good, but I got a better deal over here.” Through that process, we learned that trying to build a business model that adds value to everybody only results in bringing average value to a bunch of people. There’s a niche of customers who value having all the facts and figures up front, and that’s our customer. It’s a much smaller percentage of the market, but we’re able to speak directly to them.

Another more recent example was around the acquisition by Sonic Automotive — we called it the “Sonic Boom.” I spent a lot of time with our leadership team about how and when we were going to announce it internally.

All the advice we got was, “You can’t announce anything until it closes. If you tell the entire tribe” — that’s what we call our employees — “and it doesn’t go through, it could really put you in a bad shape.”

We wrestled with it. We asked, “How would we like to find out about this?” Eventually we decided that the risk of them hearing about it from anybody but me was just too high. It wasn’t the operational risk. It was the fact that one of our core values is to be transparent.

When you make a value core, it tests you to see how much you’re willing to do [to uphold it]. It’s easy to be transparent when it’s favorable to the business, but are you willing to take the risk when

Steve Hall’s Top 3 Pieces of Advice for CEOs 1. Make sure that the business is aligned with your personal values.

One of my mentors early on told me that as a CEO, your whispers come across as shouts. It’s true that the smallest thing I say or do has these huge ripple effects through the organization.

Your personal values have got to be aligned with the business.

2. Think long term. Think about the business in a decade, and your decisionmaking probably changes. Who you choose to join your tribe will matter more. The decisions you make about how to position the company, how to grow the company, how to treat each of your stakeholders changes when you have a longer time horizon. The way you make and invests profits changes.

3. Who you’re on the journey with matters a lot more than where you’re going. Nothing is going to have a bigger impact on your mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health than the people you have to be around every day. Whether that’s your customers or your employees or your suppliers, your consultants or whoever you identify as your stakeholders, it’s going to have a tremendous impact on you. Be very intentional on who you choose to bring along on the journey.

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there’s a lot of uncertainty?

It was a real test for me. At the end of the day, I made the decision that there was much more risk in not living the values than the risk of the deal falling through.

So as soon as we signed a letter of intent around the acquisition, even before the purchase agreement, the due diligence, or the close, we told the entire company.

We told them there was some risk that it may not go through, but we told them. Our attorneys just went crazy.

How did you decide to join forces with a bigger company after working so hard to build driversselect?

driversselect emphasizes celebration among its employees. “The way I’m building the business has been so much fun,” Hall says.

driversselect’s Culture Pyramid is modeled after Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

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SH: Sonic Automotive has over 100 newcar dealerships all over the country and a used-car brand called EchoPark. They were traveling to Dallas and a couple of their general managers told them about our operation. So their folks stopped by to do a tour, and that led into a six-hour conversation.

We were sharing with them how this culture of care really drives the success of the business. We believe that’s a big part of the metrics that we’re achieving. I can’t tell anyone else how it will impact their business; all I can tell you is how it’s impacted mine: net profit increased from $50 million to over $200 million in five years. The Dallas Business Journal and Dallas Morning News voted us a Best Place to Work, and our Glassdoor rating reflects how happy our employees are.

They were asking about where we’re buying our cars, how we’re pricing them, how we’re marketing them, and we kept taking them back to, “You guys know how to do all those things. We don’t have better access than a 10-billion-dollar company like yourself. We just take a different approach.”

We started talking a lot about the culture and Conscious Capitalism and how our stakeholder orientation allows us to drive more engagement from our tribe, more creativity and innovation from our key suppliers, how we use our culture of care to drive loyalty in our customers and gain the support of our community. They started to grasp the tenets.

A couple of weeks later, we went to Charlotte, where they’re based, and we

were just blown away by the technology they had built. One of the things about being an independent regional business is it’s cost prohibitive to build custom technology. You can do some limited customization, but [being an independent regional business] almost forces you to do business the way the other dealers are. We also saw that they had great training resources, real estate resources, some great benefits for their people. We were really intrigued.

That conversation led into talk of an acquisition.

The first thing we asked them was, “How can you be better stewards of our stakeholder community than we can doing it ourselves?” We went line by line with each stakeholder. And they gave very specific examples. Maybe they weren’t investing at the level that we were, but we could tell they placed high value on their stakeholder community.

Even though they’re a publicly traded company, they’re family-controlled by the founders and they talked a lot about the long game.

When we looked at our higher purpose of infecting the workplace with highly contagious care, we felt that the Sonic Group had a platform to help us scale at a much faster pace than what we could achieve individually. They had the resources to help us achieve a much bigger vision.

I’ve just been super impressed with their level of humility. It’s only been since late September, but they’re showing up with, “How can we support you, how can we learn from you?”

What’s really encouraging is they’re starting to adopt some of the language that we use. Things like tribes and rhythms and routines that we’re doing.

Vulnerability.

“What’s the impact a decision is going to have on the parent company?”

The real test for us will be, if they start to accelerate our growth, how will they balance growth and culture and making sure that we don’t grow revenues faster than culture for a long period of time? That’s going to be where I’m paying a lot of attention.

What’s the health of the culture? Are the values strong? Is the purpose clear?

Are people really buying into the mission and vision?

How has it been, letting go of control?

SH: One big difference is the timeframe in which I’m managing the business. I think I’m at my worst when I’m getting involved in day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, even quarter-to-quarter type initiatives and decisions. I make the biggest impact on the initiatives that are one to five years out — things like talent management, things like driving the culture, messag-

SH: I’m learning about myself. I’m learning there’s another stakeholder now — the shareholder — and I have to take their perspective into play. That doesn’t change the commitment to the purpose, but it does change possibly how I get there. I have to think,

What is it that you’re really trying to hold on to now? Can you pinpoint a secret to your success?

SH: The best strategies in the world won’t matter unless you have the right people supporting your company — and I mean all stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, communities, investors, consultants, and, if applicable, shareholders. Our company grew not only because we found a way to create value for our stakeholders, but also because of the work we’ve done culturally. Our four core values [see right] are a common purpose that drives engagement, loyalty, commitment, and support inside our company, and our other stakeholders respond to that.

This is how conscious leadership works. When people are vulnerable, they get the real issues on the table, even if they’re a little messy. Our tribe is willing to support each other and help each other grow, because they know we grow best together.

What’s the biggest leadership lesson you learned through your whole journey?

driversselect’s Core Values BE TRANSPARENT. Refuse to be normal.

Just be yourself.

TAKE OWNERSHIP. Apply your talents to owning something that creates impact.

LEARN TO EARN. There is opportunity to learn and grow inside every experience.

CELEBRATE SMALL SUCCESSES. Find someone or something to celebrate every day.

ing — the long-term strategy and key relationships that we form.

I also learned that it’s not all about me anymore. When I was working in a shareholder-driven model, I assessed every relationship based on how it could help me achieve my goals. When we as a company reversed that and strived to create value in each of our stakeholder relationships, people leaned in. They were more caring and more supportive.

They rooted for us and were willing to help us. It’s a completely different relationship, and that’s what creates the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual change.

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THE

TO CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

BY ERIC KAUFMANN

Discover the fundamental principles and practices that have awakened leaders to consciousness for millennia. att Lehrer, CEO of Teamwork Athletic Apparel, made it a practice to give lowinterest loans to his employees — more than 500 loans over 15 years. To get a loan, employees had to create a household budget and share their goals for the loan.

But Matt turned down a loan request from a single mother of three who wanted the money to help her ailing mother. Why? Because he was practicing true conscious leadership.

As he coached his employee Anna through the application and budget process, they realized three things: she was motivated by shame, she couldn’t afford the loan, and she needed the money because she was under-utilizing her skills.

Rather than giving money right away, Matt had a frank discussion with Anna about how she could be more connected in caring for her mother and relate more honestly with her sisters, how to better manage her budget, and how to increase

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her income by utilizing her strengths. Anna’s initial disappointment cleared away as she worked with Matt, improved her skills, and increased her income. Her efforts helped her shift from the mindset of a victim to one of empowerment.

Matt was practicing conscious leadership; he used his distance from the issue to perceive the situation clearly, he extended the discussion beyond his and Anna’s comfort zones, and he honored her intrinsic value. While 35 percent of workers in America claim they’d give up a pay raise — forgo money — to see their leader get fired, they’re not referring to the likes of Matt. Employees, investors, and other stakeholders are aching for leaders who can be clear, creative, and human-centered. In other words, they’re aching for conscious leaders. I’ve witnessed this hunger as an employee, as a leader, and as an executive coach, and I’ve been addressing how to satisfy it by weaving my two decades of leadership insights together with three decades of spiritual practice.

WHAT IS A CONSCIOUS LEADER? A conscious leader organizes and influences people to achieve meaningful results, but with a particular spirit and mode of conduct. More than being mindful, leaders become conscious when they nurture and practice three pillars of consciousness: wisdom, love, and courage.

These three elemental virtues represent a triune intelligence that shows up in biology and neurology (head, heart, and gut), in sociology, and in many wisdom traditions. In our quest to evolve as conscious people and leaders, we can’t just focus on one or another of them. Conscious leaders activate and align their thinking (wisdom), caring (love), and doing (courage).

THE THREE PILLARS OF CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP WISDOM

When I ask folks to describe wisdom, they typically mention such things as intellect, education, learned knowledge, and being smart. But for conscious leaders, wisdom shows up as a clear, inclusive, and integrated understanding of ourselves, other people, human and social circumstances, and the complexity of our problems. Simply put, wisdom is the ability to dive below the surface and reach beyond the obvious.

A leader who cultivates wisdom reaps the benefit of discernment. If, for example, you can drop below the acrimony of two team members in conflict and detect their deepest motives, you’re using discernment — wisely

separating what’s important or true from what’s not.

miliation and worthlessness. Courage is our commitment to acknowledge these fears, and take action nevertheless.

LOVE

Love is a powerful emotion, and in conscious leadership it’s also a verb.

This pillar is our doorway to expressing connection and to practicing inclusion and service. I propose that love is wanting to do things for others, not because we have to or because we owe something, but because we’re responding to an impulse to serve the wellbeing of another.

This heart-based quality feeds intimacy and care and yields trust and engagement.

At work, when we’re told to “be a professional,” we’re being trained to harden our hearts and retreat into a safety of cold and distant detachment. Love doesn’t exclude conflict, corrective action, or firing someone (see page 50). Allowing love to open the shutters to the heart enables us to engage in challenging interpersonal exchanges while maintaining safety and connection.

COURAGE

Please don’t confuse courage with brave action or foolhardiness. Courage is an embodied engagement with action even as your gut is gripped in anxiety and doubt. You might as well forget about being fearless, because the basic mood of the ego — our self-centered identity — is fear.

Courage is walking toward what you’d rather run away from.

Fear is the corollary to our deepest desires. Desire for control feeds fear of failure and powerlessness. Desire for connection and inclusion feeds fear of rejection and being unloved.

Desire for expression feeds fear of hu-

HOW TO CULTIVATE WISDOM, LOVE, & COURAGE Conscious leadership, like emotional intelligence or strategic thinking, can be cultivated. I’ve drawn on biology, psychology, leadership development, and wisdom traditions to identify leadership competencies that form the bricks within each pillar.

In the chart on the next page, the elements next to the plus signs are both the practices and the fruits of the pillar they support. The elements next to the minus signs are hindrances that get in the way of increasing the pillar virtue. All these elements are natural aspects of our experience, and practicing conscious leadership is neither inventing nor exorcising these polarities. Rather, we get to energize the ones that support consciousness, and shine light on the inevitable hindrances that arise. The negative elements are ego-driven survival tactics that keep the pillar from being fully expressed if we don’t become skillful at noticing and releasing them.

We’ll cover one pair of dualities from each pillar to see how they hinder and catalyze wisdom, courage, and love.

WISDOM HINDRANCE: DENIAL The refusal to acknowledge that something is wrong is a coping strategy to deal with emotional conflict, stress, or threatening information.

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THE CATALYSTS AND HINDRANCES OF CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP Each pillar of conscious leadership has practices that help catalyze that virtue and natural hindrances we must continually practice releasing.

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Curiosity Mindfulness Humor

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Exploration Authenticity Purpose

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Compassion Humility Gratitude

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-

Bias Denial Anger

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Comfort Pleasing Reactivity

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Judgment Arrogance Entitlement

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When I was told that an employee of mine was stealing funds, my first reaction was, “I don’t believe it!”

It shocked me, it ruined my opinion of that person, and it deeply challenged the accuracy of my judgment. I actually needed a brief period of denial to pause, digest the information at my own pace, and think carefully about how to move forward.

“Ignorance is bliss” is the motto of denial. When I deny reality, I don’t have to experience my negative emotions like frustration, fear, powerlessness, rejection, insecurity, shame, or hopelessness. But where wisdom is seeing reality as it is, denial is a narrow vision full of blind spots. So while a brief period of denial can be psychologically helpful, ongoing denial isn’t part of conscious leadership. A mindful attitude is.

WISDOM CATALYST: MINDFULNESS The first task in discussing mindfulness is to distinguish mindful practice and mindful presence: mindful practice (such as meditation) strengthens focus, concentration, and attention. But mindful presence is being aware of and attentive to reality as it is. The former is a helpful tool, but the latter is the real goal.

Mindful practices help us attend to reality. Classic practices include attending to your breath, noting and labeling your thoughts, and distinguishing nuanced physical sensations. These practices teach us to shift our attention from fantasy and history and to gracefully connect with current reality — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Mindful presence is the fruit of the labor of mindful practice that conscious leaders apply to their decisions, tasks, and relationships.

The second task in discussing mindfulness is to agree to let go of the dreamy-eyed version of it where it is a state of perfected equilibrium.

Leaders, even conscious ones, are going to be rattled by plans going sideways, missed goals, deadlines overdue, and misbehaving people.

Know that you can be angry and mindful, fearful and mindful, confused and mindful, and happy and mindful, and that you can reside in the fullness of the experience without denying it or being overcome by it.

LOVE HINDRANCE: ENTITLEMENT Maybe you’ve heard or thought something like, “I deserve this,” or “She better reply to my email today.” Or maybe, “This flat tire is totally unfair; these are new tires and I shouldn’t get a flat.” And perhaps, “He owes me an apology.” These are all entitlements — a belief that we inherently deserve privileges or a particular kind of treatment. When we’re caught in entitlement we crowd out the needs and circumstances of other people and narrowly focus on our own desires, comfort, and pleasure.

Zen teacher Ezra Bayda writes in “Beyond Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment,” “Perhaps the most basic belief underlying all of our feelings of entitlement, our ‘if onlies,’ and even our illusions, is the belief that life should please us, that life should be comfortable. …

Yet it’s the belief that we can’t be happy if we’re uncomfortable that is much more of a problem than the discomfort itself.”

As a leader, being caught in entitlement diminishes your connection to and care for others; it makes your heart small and inaccessible. Love is wanting to do good for others, and entitlement diminishes love.

LOVE CATALYST: GRATITUDE By contrast, gratitude feeds love and is one of the antidotes to entitlement. Mary, a VP of finance

whom I’ve worked with, shared this: “When I’m grateful, I naturally focus on the gifts I’m receiving and I’m moved to give energy and care to others. When I feel gratitude, I appreciate what’s already working in our team, even as we’re striving for more.”

Gratitude colors our lens of perception toward the positive and reduces our urges to complain and blame. As leaders we’re always striving, but without gratitude that reaching and driving becomes tense and unsatisfying.

Gratitude can be a spontaneous feeling, but it can also be cultivated

others, then you’re letting fear define you and, as a leader, you risk having only artificial harmony — a team or relationship that isn’t expressing its discontent, which can lead to passiveaggressive behavior.

Fear-based pleasing also generates false kindness: not a kindness that flows from the heart and focuses on the best for the other, but a false state that flows from the mind and focuses on the best for self. False kindness is pleasing, and while kindness energizes us, false kindness depletes us.

aspects of us rise and fall. The call of conscious leadership isn’t to take up a single aspect of self and protect it until the day you die, but to invite the spirit of change to help you clarify and refresh your values, ideas, and identity.

THE BOTTOM LINE Matt of Teamwork Athletic Apparel didn’t require special equipment to become a conscious leader, but he did have to pay specific attention. Conscious leaders have wisdom about life’s paradoxes, the courage to step out

“Conscious leaders accept that there’s enough pie to go around, for everyone, all the time.” deliberately. The more you establish your gratitude, the less you succumb to disappointment, and the more people feel encouraged to give back. Oh, and by the way, there’s some compelling science that affirms that gratitude increases resilience, improves self-esteem, improves sleep, reduces aggression, improves physical and psychological health, and strengthens relationships.

COURAGE HINDRANCE: PLEASING It’s human nature to want to be liked and included, and to be afraid of rejection. One way to avoid conflict and improve our odds of acceptance is to be pleasing. Pleasing can indeed reduce conflict, and of course there are times when being conciliatory and pleasing is necessary. As Brian, the CEO of a manufacturing firm, said, “When I make a mistake with a team member, or blow it with my wife, you bet I engage in pleasing behavior.”

But if you consistently hide your passion and brilliance in order to please

COURAGE CATALYST: AUTHENTICITY Being authentic isn’t the same as never changing. Was my self in my 20s more authentic than my self in my 50s? In my 20s I authentically believed that marriage and children were antispiritual (until a spiritual insight changed my heart in my 30s). In my 50s I’m authentically a husband and a father to teenage girls, and I believe that marriage and children are a spiritual gift. Asking which is more authentic is the wrong question.

Rather than defining an “authentic self,” conscious leaders are better served by pursuing “authentic expression.” As we grow and evolve, we change — heck, that’s the very definition of growing. There isn’t any static, unchanging, and elemental Self lodged somewhere deep inside us.

Authentic expression, rather, is a constant flow. As we mature and evolve, we integrate and express various elements of heart, mind, and spirit. Experience, insights, and wisdom shape us over time and different

of comfort, and a love that nurtures people. They attend to possibilities, see beyond the obvious, and accept that there’s enough pie to go around, for everyone, all the time. Conscious leaders notice their heart contracting when their ego moves toward gains that come at someone else’s expense.

Leadership of any kind is a discipline of strategy and execution. Conscious leadership adds a discipline of intention. By driving for results while applying wisdom, courage, and love, any leader can become a conscious leader serving and empowering themselves, others, and society.

Eric Kaufmann coaches leaders to make better decisions, think more creatively, and form deep relationships that uplevel their teams. He is the founder and president of Sagatica, and author of “The Four Virtues of a Leader: Navigating the Hero’s Journey Through Risk to Results.” Find him at sagatica.com.

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THE POWER OF TAKING CENTER STAGE Lynn Johnson’s social enterprise empowers women and girls through the arts — and helps them change their communities in the process.

“SPOTLIGHT: GIRLS” AT A GLANCE • Location: Oakland, CA • Founded: 2006 • Team Members: 4 year-round and 30 seasonal • Traction: Go Girls! Camp started as 17 girls in a church basement in 2008 and now works with over 500 girls each year in multiple Bay Area locations.

• Impact: 56% of parents report growth in their daughter’s overall confidence after just 2 weeks of camp.

• Awards: Winner of SheKnows Media’s #ThePitch: Live competition at BlogHer17; first investee of the Force for Good Fund (LIFT Economy) • Structure: For-profit benefit corporation • Certifications: B Corp with an initial score of 118; Social Venture Network Innovation Entrepreneur status 2018 • Mission Statement: “To educate, inspire, and activate girls and women to take center stage.”

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L

ynn Johnson started her professional career as theater teacher/artist. For years, she used the theater as a tool for community-building, social and emotional learning, and personal transformation. She and her wife, Allison Kenny, met while they were both teaching theater at a summer camp in 2002. “Almost as soon as we met, we decided that we wanted to create our own programming,” Johnson recalls.

The pair ran children’s summer camps in the San Francisco Bay Area for the next six years. Then, out of pure coincidence, all the enrollees at one of their 2008 camp sessions were girls. Both Johnson and Kenny had backgrounds in girls’ educational programming and thought, “Wow, this is cool,” Johnson says. “We decided to make the theme that summer all about the magic and power of being a girl.”

Held in a church basement in Oakland, California, the 2008 girls’ camp quickly became the most meaningful program for Johnson and Kenny. Over the years, the program conceived that summer also wound up being the most lucrative. “From a social-business standpoint, it hit all the buttons,” Johnson tells us. “We thought, ‘This is what we’re supposed to be doing.’ We rebranded our business and changed our mission to working with girls exclusively.”

The couple’s social enterprise, Spotlight: Girls, is now a certified B Corp with a mission “to educate,

inspire, and activate girls and women to take center stage.” Through enrichment programs and a multimedia platform, the Spotlight: Girls team teaches participants “to love ourselves and each other, and to become the leaders the world needs us to be,” Johnson says. Some of the girls who attended the fateful 2008 camp session where it all began even work for the company now.

We talked with Johnson about community development, social entrepreneurship, and how a little time in the spotlight can help girls become the leaders of tomorrow.

How would you describe the mission of Spotlight: Girls? What is the problem you’re trying to solve in your community and the world at large?

Lynn Johnson: I was a drama geek as a kid. Quite honestly, as a black girl, I learned early that I would have to be okay with taking supporting roles — both literally in theater and also figuratively in life. As I got older and learned more about women and girls from different cultures, backgrounds, and economic groups, I realized that so many of us learn that it’s only how you look as a girl that matters.

Appearance sets up the biggest measure of our success, rather than what we can invent or create. We rarely take up that space in history as creators.

It’s vitally important for us to solve that problem. We need to make sure every girl — no matter where she’s from — understands that she has the right to be in the starring role of her own life, and she has the right to take up space.

That’s not only important for her as an individual girl, but also for us as a society. I believe that so much of what’s happening in the world right now is based on the fact that we are grossly out of balance in terms of the feminine and masculine powers. This world needs a natural rebalancing of power in that way. When girls and women are able to step into the spotlight and take up that space, we will become a more compassionate planet.

You mentioned that the impact and the financial performance of your program both seemed strongest where they intersect with girls’ education. Can you talk a little bit more about the relationship between performance and purpose within your company?

Lynn Johnson (left) co-founded Spotlight: Girls with her wife, Allison Kenny (right).

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LJ: There is a real need for children’s enrichment programs in the marketplace. Working parents need something for their children to do after school, on holidays, and during the summer. Unfortunately, this country doesn’t have great childcare, so there’s a solid business case for

model in that way. At the same time, we have an incredible opportunity and responsibility having children in our circle. We’re not just caring for them while their parents are at work, we have a responsibility to give them an experience that can accelerate them as people.

opportunities in this space for a financial return as well as a vital social mission.

How did you decide to become a for-profit social enterprise rather than a nonprofit? Was it a tough decision?

“We need to make sure every girl — no matter where she’s from — understands that she has the right to be in the starring role of her own life, and she has the right to take up space.” creating high-quality, out-of-school children’s programming.

We were able to bootstrap our business with no seed money. Parents paid camp fees in advance, which we used to pay ourselves and fund the programming. It’s a lovely business

To compete in this space, you have to be a quality program, and quality means providing an opportunity that enriches kids’ lives. There are all kinds of ways to do that. We choose to work with girls and their internal empowerment, but there are so many

LJ: At first, it was a total no-brainer to start a social enterprise. My background is in nonprofit art and youth organizations, and I spent almost a decade working as a trainer, consultant, and coach for youth-serving nonprofits. Because I did so much

Spotlight: Girls teaches leadership skills through its theater camps and enrichment programs.

work in the nonprofit space, I knew I didn’t want to do that.

Working in the nonprofit space always put me in the position of having to ask other people with money to help me with a need.

Starting a nonprofit didn’t feel empowering. It was important to me as a woman of color and an artist that I build my own wealth and be able to lift up my own. I didn’t grow up poor — I grew up middle-class — but there was no sense of wealth-creation in my family.

They worked, made money, and spent it. I was empowered by the idea of building something with a lasting financial legacy that could lift up my children, my community, and other entrepreneurs. I’m in this almost as much for that as for the content of our business.

How do you approach culture at Spotlight: Girls, both for your team and your customers?

LJ: Initially, I was the primary teacher of the program, along with my co-founder and wife, Allison.

Once we started thinking a little bigger, we realized we needed to articulate our mission, what we were teaching the girls, and what it means to teach social and emotional skills through the arts.

Through both scientific research and artistic inquiry, we created our Culture Code — a five-point bible, as it were, for culture at Spotlight: Girls.

At first we used our Culture Code as a key methodology for what we teach girls, but it didn’t take us long to realize it was our code for everything. Those five values [see right] inform how we hire staff, how we run our meetings, and how we measure our professional development. They’re integrated into everything that we do, and the code has become something of a secret sauce. Of course, it’s not very secret, because we share it with everybody and anybody who asks.

How has the Culture Code influenced the way you run Spotlight: Girls as a business and engage your team?

LJ: We find that it’s especially important in hiring. Our small yearround team triples or quadruples during the summer, so we hire more often than most companies of our size. We interview a lot of people who teach drama, music, or art — and they may be great at that, but they also have to fit into our culture.

For example, our program started as a summer camp called “Go Girls!” so the idea of what it means to be a Go Girl is central to our culture, as is inspiring girls to “take center stage.” That means inspiring girls to make bold and brave choices, take power and ownership of their own voices, bodies, and imaginations, and contribute their unique talents and perspectives to a larger picture.

It’s important for the people who work with us to adopt this culture for themselves and recognize that they’re a part of it.

Getting trained in the practice of behavioral interviewing changed everything for us. To see how candidates match up, we ask them to tell us about a time in life when they took center stage and what it meant for them. The stories they tell in response make it clear whether or not they’ll stick into our culture. As a result, we find great matches, and the parents who bring their kids to the program are blown away by the quality of instruction.

THE GO GIRLS! CULTURE CODE 1. Say Yes!

• I am ready for anything.

• I say yes to keep the fun going.

• I say no to keep myself safe.

2. Give & Take

• I give to others and I am happy.

• I take in the good and I am healthy.

• I am a Go Girl! and I belong.

3. Make Mistakes

• I am not perfect.

• I celebrate myself for learning and trying.

4. Feel My Feelings

• I feel happy and angry and everything in between.

• I can act calm and confi dent even when I’m not.

• I’m just right as I am.

How would you describe the role of business in building communities, solving social problems, and creating a better world?

LJ: I’m reading a book by Father Greg Boyle. The social enterprise he founded, Homeboy Industries, in Los Angeles, provides job training and employment to

5. Take Center Stage

• I make brave, bold choices.

• I have the power of my voice, body and imagination.

• I am a part of the whole play.

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LYNN JOHNSON’S ADVICE FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS 1 Start a for-profit if you can.

It’s so much more fun than non-profit, and you have more control.

2 Get the help you need.

So many times we try to do everything ourselves, and we can’t. No single person can contribute the diverse skills and talents — not to mention the time and energy — that’s needed to start a business, so it’s important to surround yourself with people who can pick up the slack.

3 Don’t be afraid to raise money.

Entrepreneurs often think that a need for outside financing means our business is somehow not doing well, which isn’t true. Most businesses need money to grow, and entrepreneurs shouldn’t be afraid to go out there, get investors, and raise money so they can pay themselves and their people.

4 Once you figure out your mission — or your “why”— it’s time to figure out the “how.”

For us, that “how” is our Culture Code. It outlines how we hope to accomplish our mission and the culture that surrounds it. As a social entrepreneur, if you can create your own version of a Culture Code that’s integrated into all your operations, it will set you apart from everyone else. I’m most proud when our customers say, “Wow, you all really walk your talk,” and that’s important for any social entrepreneur. When you’re clear on authenticity and transparency, you can articulate that to your customers and everyone who works for you.

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young people formerly involved in gangs. In his latest book, “Barking to the Choir,” Boyle writes that if Jesus were around today, he would probably be an entrepreneur. I love that quote because I feel that business is the ideal space for solving social problems.

Yes, a lot of businesses say they’re solving social problems yet have little impact, but those businesses that do are shifting our society. They’re creating jobs and transforming the existing economics in communities.

Business has the potential to create equity in this way and at the same time connect to their consumers and everyday people. I’m so excited to be in this space because I feel like it’s in the middle of everything.

As business owners, it’s so important to learn from failure. Can you give us an example of a struggle or failure that turned into a teachable moment?

LJ: A big part of our Culture Code is that girls make mistakes, and we try to make sure our team and the kids understand that. But it’s hard for a lot of us. How do we celebrate our mistakes as an opportunity for growth when they feel so crappy while they’re happening?

Most recently, I made a big mistake in our efforts to grow the business and take on new investors. We’d secured a new investment, but it came in later than I expected. I spent the money before I got it, and it created a huge cash flow crisis. We couldn’t pay people on time, and I had to stop taking a salary. It was a horrible mess, but I learned a lot.

Often, businesswomen like me who are creative and have a social mission get tied up in thinking, “The money is important, but it’s all about the impact. It’s all about what we’re doing.”

But social entrepreneurs can’t have the impact they want to have without working with investors effectively, choosing the right advisors, and managing financials responsibly. We’re still learning and growing, and that’s just one example of how we learned

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the hard way.

As a social entrepreneur with a growing business, what keeps you up at night?

LJ: As we grow, we’re always looking for new ways to sustain our business while also serving girls whose parents can’t afford to send them to camp. Additionally, our next big step is expanding to other parts of the country. We’re becoming franchisers in California, and we’re seeking women and girl advocates from across the US who want to replicate Go Girls! in their communities. Part of our mission is to inspire more girls to embody the Go Girl culture and show up in their communities, which can make a huge difference, but I’m constantly thinking about how to better support people who want to get involved. I was up at 3:00 a.m. last night making myself a note.

What gives you hope?

LJ: 2017 felt pretty hopeless to me, as it did for a lot of us, but I came into 2018 feeling much more hopeful. The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements — while they have their problems — sparked a common conversation in our country around, “Wait a second.

There are a lot of spaces that aren’t safe for women and girls. How can we change that?” We should embrace those conversations and think about how to help young women stand up for themselves and help young men understand their privilege. Similar conversations are happening around race and spaces that may not be safe for people of color, and we need to keep those going, too.

At the same time, women and people of color across all backgrounds are running for office and making their voices heard. It feels like a collective energy is rising around lifting up our most vulnerable and centering those folks who have been on the outside for so long. It’s inspiring to see more people listen with intention and start discussing things that women and people of color have been talking about for a long time.

HOW BIGGBY COFFEE FOUND ITS

This $100 million Michigan coffee franchise was already a financial success. But its owners realized they wanted a deeper legacy —

and that’s when the hard work really began.

BY NATHAN HAVEY

Biggby Coffee co-CEOs Bob Fish (left) and Mike McFall are known around the company as BaM (Bob and Mike). No one uses their last names, so in this story we chose not to either.

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BIGGBY COFFEE AT A GLANCE • Location: Headquartered in East Lansing, MI • Founded: 1995 (began franchising in 1999) • Team Members: 63 in the home office • Traction: 260 stores in 9 states employing about 2,800 people • Structure: Private for-profit

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he waited until she was sure everyone had gone home for the weekend. Soon her office bore no sign that she had ever worked there.

Next to her keys, she left a note on her desk so they wouldn’t try to reach her. She knew she was severing her relationship to these people forever; she hadn’t even given her work friends a chance to say goodbye. They would simply find her note on Monday and realize she was gone. But that didn’t matter to her; she just absolutely could not spend another day in this job. She turned off the lights and drove out of the parking lot into the Michigan summer. She wasn’t the first manager to become fed up with the company’s culture and suddenly leave; just the latest.

It was 2014 and Biggby Coffee was on track to bring in $83 million in gross revenue. In less than two decades, co-CEOs Bob Fish and Mike McFall had grown the coffee franchise from a single store near the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing to more than 200 stores across nine states — and there was no end in sight. Annual growth had hovered

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around 20 percent for a decade. A few years before, the company had achieved its early vision of becoming one of the nation’s three largest specialty coffee franchises. The company tagline explained the philosophy Bob and Mike tried to infuse in the business: Be Happy, Have Fun, Make Friends, Love People, and Drink Great Coffee.

The company began when Bob’s desire to own a restaurant and maybe a franchise aligned with his affinity for good coffee. In the mid-1990s Starbucks was a force on the rise, and Bob saw a market opportunity. He opened his first coffee shop on March 15, 1995. Shortly after that, Mike was hired as a barista and Bob heard that Mike might be a good candidate to manage a planned second location.

The two met to talk about the idea on a gorgeous spring day and decided to go for a walk rather than sit inside.

Two hours later, they were no longer talking about Mike managing a second location; they were agreeing on terms for creating a new company committed to growing the brand. A handshake sealed the deal, and suddenly, they were partners.

At first blush, they seem like an odd couple. Bob is clean-shaven and

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wears a black T-shirt and jeans more days than not (adding a hoodie when the temperature drops). Mike strokes a full, well-groomed beard and is a fan of sport coats, loud pants, and louder socks. Bob grew up in a dozen places in Europe and beyond. Mike grew up in Milford, a small community in suburban Detroit. Bob can’t land a sports analogy to save his life. Mike loves sports, even inventing new ones like a devilishly fun variation of table tennis he calls sting pong. But despite all of their differences, they made a powerful team.

They are also, however, alike in some important ways. They once participated in an exercise with a group of their franchise owner–operators in which a facilitator gave everyone a deck of 50 cards listing possible life priorities such as trust, health, or money. First, each person quickly chose their top 10 priorities and discarded the rest. They then chose the top five, three, and finally the top two. Though seated on opposite sides of the room, Bob and Mike kept the same two cards for their top priorities in life: loyalty and legacy.

For both men, legacy meant building a great company, one that’s both huge and good for people. Biggby’s growth rate had them on track for achieving the huge part, and to work toward the good for people part Bob and Mike deliberately designed what they considered to be a very progressive workplace. The corporate office was outfitted with video games, a room full of bean-bag chairs, and a fully stocked Biggby cafe, helpful for training but also open for anyone to make any drink they’d like, for anyone. They were most proud of a sabbatical program to reward loyalty: for every five years of service to Biggby Coffee’s corporate office, employees got three paid months off to do whatever they wanted.

Bob and Mike had led Biggby through survival mode to stability to aggressive growth, but they began to realize they had done it by being

autocrats. Their track record of success had taught them that they were uniquely capable of calling the shots, and they insisted that every decision had to go through them. But as they moved deep into the company’s second decade, it was becoming clearer to both that a legacy that dies with you is not a legacy. They needed to build up a leadership team that could run the company without their direct involvement.

So Bob and Mike built a walledoff private suite in the office in an effort to force people to take questions to a manager or director, not to the CEOs. They further limited access to themselves by staying out of the office altogether several days each week. But unlike at their franchise stores, Biggby had never created formal training systems and protocols for their corporate office. They hired people on personality and threw them into the proverbial deep end. Those who could swim stayed and were likely to be promoted. Those who could not swim left.

Bob and Mike did not make it easy for employees, and they knew it. Those who survived grew thick skin. But Bob and Mike were loyal to people. Unless someone had a hand in the till, no one was ever fired. So when they discovered another unexplained management departure that summer day in 2014, their response was, “I wonder what’s the matter with her!”

In an unguarded moment, the leaders might have confessed to a suspicion that something was wrong with their company culture — that despite the impressive performance, the wheels might be coming off the bus. But in the Biggby office, there were no unguarded moments. *Full disclosure: The consultant is also the author of this article.

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n October 2014, Mike took a weekend camping trip to nearby South Manitou Island with his brother and son.

After a day of hiking sand dunes and relaxing on the beach, the party settled in for dinner around a campfire ring that served several sites. Before long, a couple from a neighboring site joined them. In the first few minutes of pleasantries, Mike remembers learning that the woman was a lawyer and the man was “some kind of consultant.”* When the conversation turned to workplace culture, Mike started listening carefully. The consultant talked about a group of companies that had outperformed the S&P 500 by 14 to 1 over the previous 15 years. They had done it in part by demonstrating deep care for their employees and other stakeholders and by pursuing a clear purpose beyond profit. As Mike listened, he learned about a bread company that was helping former inmates successfully rejoin society, and manufacturers that were helping their employees become more emotionally intelligent, measuring things like divorce rate in addition to how many widgets were made each day. He heard the case for how it makes business sense to offer people real meaning through their work, increasing engagement and productivity. He also heard about how positively it affects the legacies of companies that aim for such a high bar.

That night, Mike lay awake in his sleeping bag. He thought about his and Bob’s beginnings with those first stores, about the unlikely success of a couple of class clowns who had both been told repeatedly that they would never amount to anything. He thought about how proud he was to prove his teachers wrong. He’d shown the world that you don’t have get good grades and work your way

“

HIS VISION AND ANY FUTURE GROWTH TARGET FOR BIGGBY FELT HOLLOW. WHAT COULD BIGGBY DO THAT WOULD CHANGE THE WORLD?”

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up some corporate ladder to find success. He had proven, at least to himself, that success could come from following passion and desire, and doing cool shit. He was even pretty sure that following his passion hadn’t just been an alternative path to success, it might just be the key to success. But he had been beginning to suspect that at some point, adding another increment of income to his tax return could no longer be called “doing cool shit.”

At some point, that probably had to be called “greedy.”

Mike reflected on Biggby’s higher purpose. He and Bob had already achieved their vision of becoming one of the biggest specialty coffee franchises, and they had never set a new one. Mike had a very clear personal vision: to become the owner of the Detroit Red Wings.

But something was gnawing at him.

Compared to the examples he’d heard that night, his vision and any future growth target for Biggby felt hollow. What could Biggby do that would change the world?

The next morning, Mike gave the consultant a business card. When they connected again by phone a few weeks later, he ended the call after only 15 minutes: he was in. He just needed to get Bob on board.

Bob met Mike’s enthusiasm with his usual cynicism. Bob would not have described himself as warm and fuzzy. He had a chip on his shoulder for “tree huggers” and “the twigs and nuts crowd,” and this culture and purpose stuff had the same smell. Still, he trusted Mike, and consented to undertaking a culture assessment to see how Biggby was performing in the eyes of its employees and other stakeholders. The process began, and Bob and Mike braced themselves for the results.

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he report arrived in Bob and Mike’s inboxes in February of 2015, and it pulled no punches. The

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employees in the corporate office reported that any error or a failure to reach the same conclusion as the CEOs was met with F-bomb– laden tirades; verbal abuse; harsh dressings-down; and occasionally, thrown objects and punched walls.

The analysis revealed a toxic lack of care and appreciation. It uncovered a pervasive sentiment of being undervalued and underpaid, and it included scores of scathing direct quotes from employees: “Working at Biggby … is like an abusive relationship you can’t get out of.”

“Biggby is a Jenga tower built on a single brick foundation, and it’s at risk of toppling over.”

“The level of stress is so high that ‘Be happy’ has become a sarcastic joke in the Home Office.”

The report concluded by recommending leadership training for Bob, Mike, and four key directorlevel employees, plus creating a new employee committee to improve the company’s compensation structure.

It also recommended that Bob and Mike read the worst parts of the report out loud in front of the staff to let everyone know they had been heard.

When Mike first read the report, he set his glasses on his desk and wiped tears from his eyes. He could not believe he was leading a company where people thought those things. It was the hardest thing he had ever had to read. When they discussed it, Bob and Mike realized they faced two options: throw the report in the garbage and carry on like it had never happened, or embrace its recommendations and the chaos that would follow. They both agreed that the right thing to do was clear, and that the right time to start would be at the monthly staff social the following Friday.

Staff socials were mostly designed to help employees have fun and blow off steam. Departments took turns planning activities and games, and usually, only 30 minutes

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were reserved for work discussions.

So it was that an office full of more than 50 people, with their hearts still pumping from a silly game, abruptly had their anonymous words read back to them by the very people they had not dared tell how bad the situation really was.

When Bob and Mike finished speaking, the silence was deafening.

There is power in saying things out loud and committing to something in public. For Bob and Mike, a weight had been lifted and it felt good — like when someone finally admits to being an alcoholic. The leadership team was shocked that it was all out in the open. No one knew what was about to happen, what change would look like, or how long it would take.

That was particularly true for Bob and Mike. At that moment, only one thing was clear to them, and to everyone in that room: the genie was out of the bottle and there was no putting it back in now.

B

ob and Mike immediately relinquished their unilateral decision-making authority to a new leadership team consisting of themselves and the four director-level employees. The leadership training began the following month, with the consultant observing their meetings and sending the group detailed notes on how they had each performed. The group also read “Multipliers,” by Liz Wiseman, a careful study of leadership styles that either diminish or multiply the intelligence of a team. The book helped Bob and Mike see the dramatic impact they had on people.

They had never considered that by behaving as if their opinions were the only ones that mattered, they had ensured that they would never get any pushback, discussion, or free thought in their company.

To their credit, they changed quickly; almost overnight, they went from command-and-control to

saying virtually nothing in meetings.

But a long history of dysfunction doesn’t just disappear, and deep trust issues still plagued the team.

The co-CEOs’ new silence was agonizing for everyone, as the four directors attempted to fill the void while keeping a nervous eye on Bob and Mike like gazelles in tall grass watching for the slightest sign of danger. They had traded one form of dysfunction for another.

Next, the group read Simon Sinek’s “Leaders Eat Last,” which focuses on creating safety and driving fear out of the workplace. The best way to do this, Sinek argues, is to build relationships with people as people and not just as employees. At the time, Bob and Mike didn’t know most employees’ names — they believed that was for someone else to know. Your team, your people was the unwritten rule, and Bob had become a master at the quick, name-

less greeting as he passed people in the hall. Mike began to call directors and others in a deliberate effort to build relationships, but people on the receiving end of these calls were highly suspicious of his motives.

Bob’s efforts to improve communication and trust met people unwilling to give straight answers because they feared consequences for admitting a mistake. Signs of progress were scarce, but the study had given Bob and Mike a new vision for what they could build, and they wanted it more than ever.

The leadership team also experimented with two practices that began to show promise. The first was a personal high/low check-in at the beginning of meetings, an effort to get to know the personal ups and downs that were happening outside of the office. They started timidly, but before long, some of the leadership team shared deeply personal

Biggby Coffee changed its name from Beaner’s Coffee in 2007; the name “Biggby” comes from a description of the logo — a “big B.”

struggles, demonstrating vulnerability that made it safe for others to let down their own guard in turn.

The second practice was to reserve a few minutes at the end of meetings to debrief. This created an opportunity to express feelings and resolve frustrations in something closer to real-time. There were plenty of frustrations, but with the consultant watching their every move, the team worked to stay on their best behavior. It was very intense, but old ways of relating to each other were giving way to a more authentic connection and, to the leadership team at least, the personal growth of each team member was obvious.

The leadership team also read “Everybody Matters,” by Bob Chapman (see page 42) and Raj Sisodia.

The book profiles a company that buys struggling manufacturing firms and turns them around almost exclusively through culture trans-

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formation — without firing anyone. One passage in this book hit Mike particularly hard.

It describes CEO Bob Chapman’s awakening to what he calls “the awesome responsibility of leadership to care for the lives entrusted to you as though they were family.” Mike realized that he would never have treated his children the way he treated people at work, because he cares about his children’s emotional stability and development. He cares about them growing and learning. He loves his kids.

Mike would never before have said that he loved somebody at work, but suddenly, that changed — and so did the way he treated people. He began to see that the future of his people was the future of his company — and his future too.

Mike began experimenting with a practice he had never tried before: telling people they were doing a good job. He thought of the way he’d taught his son to walk, not by yelling at him and calling him stupid when he fell, but by encouraging every shaky step. Mike watched people light up as he offered them even minor praise, and it quickly became a highlight of his role.

Slowly, things began to improve. Mike’s phone calls with employees became more normal, and not only did people pick up more regularly, but he also thought he could hear the beginnings of warmth on the other end of the phone. As for Bob, after a period of providing constant reassurance to people that their jobs were not in danger and that he was just trying to get to the truth, he was catching glimpses of honesty and transparency. One of the directors even confessed that despite having built a strong relationship with Bob and Mike, he had been fearful that he could be terminated at any time. He had been living with that fear

for 15 years, and after months of participating in the leadership training, he finally felt safe enough to risk saying so.

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ix months had passed, and while the management team was still in the thick of finding a new way to lead together, the employee compensation committee had stalled after some initially impressive work redesigning the company’s system for promotions and raises. The group had many detailed questions about how the compensation budget Mike had given them at the beginning of the process was calculated and what might happen in a variety of future scenarios. In short, the committee wanted to see the company’s full budget and understand how the total expenditure on salaries and benefits was calculated.

Mike had always believed that companies should be transparent because the more people understand the finances, the more motivated they are to keep costs down and revenues up. For its first few years, company management had proactively shared the finances with employees so they would know what was happening. As the company grew, though, that transparency began to feel awkward because of how much money Bob and Mike, the sole owners, were making compared to everyone else. So with no official announcement or formal policy change, Mike simply stopped sharing, and soon the budget became his sole domain.

Anyone wanting to spend a dime on anything had to get his approval, and he said no to virtually everything.

Mike had always known that he would eventually open the books up again. After all, if you’re a big public company, you

have to disclose all of that stuff anyway, and Mike wanted to build a big company. But Mike was understandably conflicted about the committee’s request. On one hand, the direction the culture was heading seemed to demand transparency, but on the other hand, his and Bob’s total compensation had never been higher. He was also concerned that people wouldn’t understand the way an organization’s value is measured — that you can’t grow a company and not grow value, and that value is all about positive cash flow. Were the employees ready for this kind of information? Mike decided that the long-term benefits outweighed the short-term risks, and he stayed up late for several days preparing a detailed presentation to help the staff understand what he was about to share.

At the August 2015 staff social, everyone in the corporate office, from the directors to new hires, crowded into the big, colorful meeting room.

Mike stepped onto the small stage at the front, cued up his presentation, and began to show them everything.

He revealed how company revenue was spent across all categories. He walked everyone through the investments in benefits from medical insurance to the in-house cafe to his prized sabbatical program. He laid bare the salaries of directors, managers, supervisors, and entry-level staff in each department, and he revealed the sizeable amount left over for the co-CEOs. When the presentation was over, Mike drew in and held a nervous breath and scanned the room for the criticism he expected would follow.

He opened the floor for questions.

But there was no cascade of comments, angry or otherwise. As the meeting adjourned, he found himself bewildered and frustrated. He had exposed himself and there had been no discernable reaction. Desperate for feedback, Mike pulled aside a director who had been with the company for more than a decade to ask the question at the root of his anxiety: “What does that total compensation number for Bob and me mean to you?”

“Nothing,” said the director.

“I would expect that the guys who founded a company of this size should be making a ton of money. And I think the rest of the world would expect that too.”

Mike felt a wave of relief course through him. Over the next 24 hours, the relief blossomed into liberation.

BIGGBY’S CULTURE OF CHANGE

The results from three years of culture assessments asking the question, “How well does Biggby Coffee treat its employees?”

Terrible

Not Great

Pretty Well

Really Well

80

60

40

20

0

None

2015

None

2016

2017

WORKPLACE CULTURE

The budget was not his burden to carry alone any longer. After the move to transparency, Mike observed no negative consequences.

There was no drama over who was paid what. But the transparent budget did produce positive consequences for the company. The most immediate benefit was empowering the compensation committee to complete its work and prepare its recommendation, which would have to get through the leadership team for final approval.

One October morning in 2015, a nervous compensation committee filed into the conference room that had borne witness to the worst of Bob and Mike’s behavior over the

tation ended, there was a long moment of tense silence. Mike broke it with carefully measured words.

He told the committee that he could not recall, in all his time receiving employee presentations, an occasion before — ever before — on which a group had done such impeccable work. While the proposal involved a significant increase in the overall cost of compensation, he, for one, was quite comfortable approving it as it stood, with no modifications.

The rest of the leadership team concurred. A sense of relief and triumph filled the room and spilled out to the employees waiting outside the glass windows doing their best to look disinterested in the proceedings.

and Mike could do alone.

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he anonymous culture survey that had made Bob and Mike face the truth in 2015 was repeated in the spring of 2016 and it showed substantial improvement. There was plenty more to do, but the cultural detox was working. It had been 18 months since Mike wrestled with Biggby’s purpose in his sleeping bag on South Manitou Island, and it was now time to focus on defining one.

The process began in July of 2016 and it was maddeningly slow. The leadership team opened a full hour

A LEGACY THAT DIES WITH YOU IS NOT A LEGACY.” years. They had rehearsed their presentation over and over to make sure they had an airtight proposal, battering each other with questions in their best old-school Bob and Mike impressions. They felt that they had to get this right — the entire office was counting on them.

The leadership team had also spent time preparing for the meeting. They felt tremendous pressure to accept the compensation committee’s plan and feared what would happen to the culture (and the company) if they could not. Everyone tried to hide their nerves as the door clicked shut behind them. Conversations in the conference room were inaudible to the rest of the office outside — unless, as was common in the past, someone started shouting.

When the committee’s presen34

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The details of the deal were shared the following week at the November staff social and a new compensation structure took effect on January 1, 2016.

It was a quantum leap for the company. The new compensation structure not only provided evidence to the staff that they had a real voice in changing things for the better, but the process of debating it had dramatically increased the financial sophistication of the office. Employees who came into the process feeling they were entitled to bonuses and raises were now savvy stewards of company finances, and they were eager to educate their peers when necessary. Most important, it was proof that the new leadership style could produce a result for the company that was better than what Bob

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during its weekly meeting for the conversation about purpose, and dozens of staff members attended and engaged in deep philosophical debate that left their brains hurting.

Again and again, meeting debriefs revealed frustration that just as progress seemed within the group’s grasp, the meeting had ended. This went on for months, but even as the purpose process appeared to be getting nowhere, it was creating some unexpected benefits.

Mike was surprised to find that the process of discussing their purpose had finally created a structure for people to disagree with him and push back firmly. Mike and Bob had learned to want a team that would challenge them, and in the purpose meetings that team began to show up. Once it happened a few times in

Biggby Coffee has long-term plans to help all employees, including its baristas, live a life they love.

purpose meetings, people felt safer disagreeing in other meetings, too.

As the heat of summer gave way to the brilliance of fall, a new company purpose began to emerge: “Biggby Coffee Exists to Support You in Building a Life You Love.” The phrase itself didn’t take long to gain support, but the nettlesome question was how to define “a life you love.”

The debate eventually refined four essential components: 1) a sense of belonging, 2) emotional and physical vitality, 3) knowing who you want to be, and 4) being able to exceed your basic needs.

Articulating the components of “a life you love” was one thing, but measuring them was another, and in order to be operationalized, a purpose must be measurable. So the debate continued, once per week, an hour at a time, as the leaves fell and the frost came. Finally, the leadership team settled on indicators they could use to measure each of the four elements through a self-assessment.

For example, they would score a person’s self-reported sense of belonging in relationship to family, friends, and work, and they’d evaluate ex-

ceeding basic needs by determining whether a person invests 10 percent of their income for their future.

The self-assessment was the key to operationalizing the purpose.

The leadership team planned to use the self-assessment to help Biggby Coffee stakeholders look at their own lives and identify specific areas for improvement. Biggby would then use these results to develop practical tools to help people improve their scores, thereby supporting them in building a life they love.

It had taken six months, but when the leadership team officially adopted the purpose in December 2016, Bob and Mike were very proud of it.

It felt good to say it out loud, and it would give people a compelling reason to show up to work besides the paycheck. And for Mike, it finally answered the question he had wrestled with: What could Biggby do that would change the world? Mike believed that the self-assessment would help unshackle people and get them to trust themselves to work on what they dreamed they could do. Having that kind of an impact on the more than 2,800 high school

and college-age baristas across the Biggby system, not to mention all of Biggby’s franchise owner–operators and other stakeholders … that was the grandest purpose Mike could think of.

Up to that point, Bob wouldn’t have said he was just role-playing in the culture-change effort at his company. He understood the training materials and he had been an active participant in the transformation process from the beginning. But it wasn’t until more than two years after Mike’s fateful camping trip that Bob experienced the promise of the purpose his company had just adopted.

As the self-assessment was being finalized, Bob found himself reading the projector screen full of questions that everyone in Biggby Coffee would soon be asked to answer, and mentally responding as he read. The first section of the self-assessment was “a sense of belonging” and it drilled into specific areas of life.

Work. “Sure, I belong here,” Bob thought — but then, he was the boss and it was possible that he had built this world to suit his personality, so

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Bob Fish (left) and Mike McFall share a commitment to the core values of loyalty and legacy.

maybe that didn’t count.

Friends. Of course Bob had friends, but the question called to mind a surprisingly thin Rolodex of relationships deep enough to feel like belonging.

Family. Well … Bob’s thoughts drifted as the discussion continued around him. His childhood had unfolded as his family moved 13 times in 17 years. He had learned early to build an emotional wall around himself for protection against the pain of leaving people behind again and again.

In time, the wall protected him from everyone.

Bob’s father, who lived in San Diego with his second wife, would call on occasion and suggest that they take a vacation somewhere with their families. “Not a chance,” Bob always thought. Bob’s brother lived in Berlin, and Bob lost no sleep in between rare updates from him. Bob’s mother lived in Pensacola, Florida, and Bob, consciously or not, leveraged geographical distance as an excuse for limited

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engagement.

Still, when Bob permitted himself a moment of sentimental reflection, he realized that he had never experienced the warmth of an extended family, and now that he was married and the stepfather to an incredible son, he wanted to — for his son’s sake as much as his own. As Bob pondered the self-assessment section on belonging, a realization dawned on him: his father, his brother, and his mother couldn’t all be separate causes of his lack of belonging in his family. No, it couldn’t be them. “It must be me,” he realized.

Bob didn’t say anything at the time, but he had felt the power of the tool his team was creating. It was the moment Bob Fish went all in. The meeting ended and Bob went back to his office and closed the door. He knew what he had to do. He sat at his desk for a moment, took a breath, and reached for his phone.

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ne morning in early December 2017, the employees of the Biggby Coffee corporate office received an all-staff email instructing everyone to report to the big meeting room for a mandatory special meeting. No one had ever seen anything like it. Not since Bob and Mike had read the survey results during the staff meeting nearly three years before had the tension in the building been so palpable. The room filled quickly, and after extra chairs had been found, the four directors took the stage. Their words sounded rehearsed as they explained that in another room, six people, 10 percent of the team, were being laid off.

The team explained that they had built the 2017 budget based on a 16 percent growth target, and spending followed suit, but by the middle of the year, growth had slowed dramatically.

A series of factors had contributed.

For one, out of loyalty to their Michigan owner–operators, Bob and Mike had led a charge to temporarily close the Michigan market to new stores.

There were still overall performance issues in the corporate office. And yes, the time invested in fixing the culture and defining a purpose meant there was less time for everything else.

Bob and Mike had seen the problem emerging that summer and had tried to fix it with tactical financial cuts, but by year-end it was clear that their efforts had not been enough. Growth would be just north of 7 percent and projections showed a $250,000 loss in the first two months of 2018 alone. Bob and Mike had shared this information with the leadership team several weeks before. In a franchise’s corporate office, budget cuts mean layoffs — there just isn’t anything else to cut.

Layoffs had been necessary only twice before in the company’s history.

The first time was early on, when the first and only store was seeing just four customers an hour. Bob had emptied his savings, maxed out his

credit cards, and sold his car to try to make it work, but it hadn’t been enough. The second time was when growth stalled roughly 10 years later. On both occasions, when people were cut, they’d get walked out and no one would talk about it.

This time was different. The leadership team had agonized over what to do, and how to do it in a way that was consistent with Biggby’s hard-won cultural gains and its not-quite-one-year-old purpose.

At the time of the previous layoffs, no one had known, for example, whether a departing person had just bought a home or had a baby on the way. But due to the culture work the corporate office had been doing, everyone knew a lot about everyone else. That made the decision to lay anyone off exponentially harder.

After a series of tortured conversations, the leadership team determined that each of the departing employees would be thanked for their contribution with a payout of any unused vacation time, plus a week of pay for each year they had been with the company. They also decided to share the decision with the entire company at the same time, creating an opportunity for people to ask questions and understand what had happened and why, share the sadness of the moment, and together decide what to do to prevent layoffs in the future.

As the directors explained all of this in the big room, reactions were mixed. One or two people ventured comments like, “My mom was laid off last month and all she got was a margarita from her coworkers. Her managers didn’t care.” There was also a conversation about how everyone had known that Biggby was lagging in its performance, and because of all the talk about supporting people in building a life they love, no one had wanted to hold anyone

else accountable for underperformance. But it became clear in the room that looking the other way is not the same as really supporting people.

Despite some appreciation for the learning moment and the care the leadership team had shown, damage was done. For many, the layoffs had shattered a sense of safety and dramatically reduced their trust in leadership.

Some found fresh evidence for an assertion that Biggby was not supporting them in building a life they loved. One of the directors took it upon herself to walk one of her departing employees out to her car. Before she drove away, the employee turned to the director and asked, “How could you do this to me?”

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he next week was bitterly cold and Bob spent Monday evening at his house in Douglas, Michigan, while a persistent snow fell outside. The smell of garlic and tomatoes filled the air while Bob arranged place settings on the table: one for him, one for his wife, who was singing to herself as she cooked, one for his stepson, home from college for winter break, and one for his mother.

After his all-in moment the previous winter, Bob made very intentional efforts to build relationships with his family. He had finally taken that vacation with his father, and recently he had invited his mother to move to Michigan, into a house less than two miles from his. Now she joins Bob and his family for dinner regularly.

The next morning, Bob drove through the snow back to the office. One big item had been left undone during the purpose process the year before, and the leadership team had given itself until the end of 2017 to complete it: articulating a new vision for the company.

“

ARTICULATING THE COMPONENTS OF ‘A LIFE YOU LOVE’ WAS ONE THING, BUT MEASURING THEM WAS ANOTHER, AND IN ORDER TO BE OPERATIONALIZED, A PURPOSE MUST BE MEASURABLE.”

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They’d been debating the vision in open meetings for the previous three months, and with the year quickly drawing to a close, the pressure was on.

A vision would need to answer the question “What will we achieve by when?” With a purpose as subjective as “Support people in building a life they love,” at first it was difficult to find a good approach to the question, let alone an answer. How would Biggby expand its impact? Offer Life You Love training to customers who came in for a cup of coffee? That seemed cultish. Open a training center and sell courses to people? That was a different business altogether. Further, how would the world change if Biggby was successful? Could the company measure reductions in homelessness, poverty, crime, depression, and suicide? Bob felt at times like the process was going around in circles or veering

Biggby Coffee has stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas.

out of control entirely.

At some point, someone had suggested that the purpose could behave like a ripple effect. If Biggby created a culture that effectively supported people in building a life they loved, word would get out, and other business leaders would want to see what Biggby was doing. Then someone else pointed out that this ripple wouldn’t work unless Biggby was also growing at an impressive rate. Not only was lackluster growth an obstacle to incubating the Life You Love culture within Biggby itself — the recent layoffs made that clear — but it wasn’t a very good sales tool for the concept, either.

If another company leader, who didn’t yet grasp the importance of a caring culture or a strong purpose, had a higher rate of growth than Biggby, the case for change was weakened.

So to scale its purpose, Biggby would have to build a culture that

reliably delivered both exemplary human and financial results. The team started calling this the Biggby Effect.

With the intellectual framework in place, all that was left to do was to determine the specific numbers. The human side came first: “by December 31, 2028, 90 percent of people who have been working for Biggby Coffee for at least a year will have a positive personal score on the Life You Love self-assessment.” Biggby would roll the purpose out to the entire franchise system over the next four years and begin measuring the extent to which people love their lives (as defined by the criteria they had established the prior year). They would tweak their training and development protocols and other internal systems until they achieved the goal.

But the leadership team entered its final meeting of the year not yet aligned on a growth goal that was

both sufficiently ambitious to power the Biggby Effect and even remotely realistic. The pain from the layoffs the previous week demanded a kind of rigor and passionate debate the team had not seen before. The meeting almost ended several times as people fought both frustration and flagging mental energy.

As the clock wound down and the team faced the real possibility that they would fail to keep their word to finish the process that year, the tone of the meeting shifted. Someone made a call to reach for greatness, not because it seemed within reach, but

ovation because it would be filled with thousands of people who credit Biggby with supporting them in building a life they love. Mike would walk out of that room and into retirement knowing that it had all been worth it.

Back in the big meeting room, he waited silently until several others expressed support for the $1 billion target before enthusiastically adding that he refused to believe that a team this talented wouldn’t be able to figure out how to reach such a goal. They called the vote and the proposal passed.

It was 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 14th, 2017, and the meeting

a life we love. That culture will reach beyond Biggby Nation to our families, friends, and communities.

As Biggby Nation grows, this impact expands. The world will take notice, and the workplace will begin to change.

To achieve this, we must grow, and we must lead by example. By 2028, Biggby Coffee will be a billion-dollar company, and its Home Office employees, Owner/Operators, and Baristas will all be building a life they love.

The workplace will change. It all starts with Biggby.”

Reading the vision was humbling.

LOOKING THE OTHER WAY IS NOT THE SAME AS REALLY SUPPORTING PEOPLE IN BUILDING A LIFE THEY LOVE.”

precisely because it didn’t yet. The leaders grounded these sentiments with data on what other franchises had achieved and how fast they had done it. Finally, one of the managers proposed setting the target at crossing $1 billion in gross revenue for all retail cafe sales within 10 years.

Mike couldn’t believe his ears. The truth was, he’d been doing some of his own personal visioning work lately, and so he felt in touch with the power of an ambitious goal. He’d decided he still wanted to own the Red Wings, but now he had another legacy in mind. In thirty years, he would be 76 years old and ready to retire. He’d be in Orlando or Las Vegas because those are the only two cities with venues large enough for the more than 10,000 people who will then attend Biggby Coffee annual franchise meetings. Mike would make a final presentation and the room would give him a steady and sustained standing

stood adjourned. The leadership team was exhausted. But before leaving, they paused to savor the moment.

Mike, Bob, and the whole Biggby family read the words projected on the screen in front of them: “Most people go to work because they have to, not because they want to. They feel that their employer doesn’t care about them beyond the work they do for the company. This heartless workplace environment reduces the quality of life for them, their families, and their communities, contributing to chronic illness, domestic strife, and many of the other tough problems we face.

The workplace needs to change.

Biggby can help.

Biggby Coffee exists to support people in building a life they love. United behind this purpose, our Baristas, Owner/Operators, and Home Office employees will create a culture that empowers us all to intentionally build

Mike especially felt aware that Biggby was still in the middle of its own transformation; that there would be no point at which the company would become fully “conscious.” But he also believed that if they were loyal to the journey, always seeking to do the best they could today and learning to do even better tomorrow, then they were making a path for others to follow.

The journey hadn’t been and wouldn’t be smooth or easy, and in fact it might be much harder than not starting the journey at all — but he had no doubt it was the right choice.

Biggby Coffee had found its purpose.

Now the real work could begin.

Meet Bob and Mike at the Conscious Company Leaders Forum June 6–8: consciouscompanyleadersforum.com

Nathan Havey is the founding partner at Thrive, a training company working to advance the adoption of conscious business practices.

He has been honored to guide Biggby Coffee for the past three years. Start your conscious business journey with the culture assessment process at thriveconsultinggroup.com.

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In 1975, 30-year-old Bob Chapman took over as chairman and CEO of Barry-Wehmiller after his father, the previous CEO, died of a heart attack.

At Barry-Wehmiller, Bob Chapman’s Truly Human Leadership has created a new paradigm for success for nearly 12,000 employees.

I

f once is luck, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a trend, what should we call an idea that has worked more than a hundred times? That’s how often Barry-Wehmiller, a St. Louis-based global supplier of manufacturing technology and services, has deployed its culture-based turnarounds within companies it acquires — typically failing ones. The idea is simple: create a workplace culture that truly values and cares for employees, and the rest of the transformation will take care of itself.

When Barry-Wehmiller acquires a struggling company, chairman and CEO Bob Chapman almost never fires anybody. Instead, he comes in and says, “You are safe here. We’re going to train you on leadership and culture, and we’re going to be patient.”

He’s not expecting returns in the first quarter or even the first year.

Yet, reliably, if he gives his Truly Human Leadership principles three to five years to take hold, the acquired

companies turn around to be more profitable than they had ever been before — with the same people.

Chapman’s strategy was inspired by two light-bulb moments he had in the early 2000s. First, he was sitting at a wedding, watching a crowd of people brim with emotion as a father walked the bride down the aisle, when it hit him that every single person who worked at his company was as precious as that bride. What would it mean to accept responsibility for those lives as part of his corporate leadership?

Then, a few years later, he flew in for an executive team meeting at a plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The night before, he had received an email suggesting that he might want to recognize a few plant employees for the good work they’d done on a continuous improvement project.

He invited them to come present to the execs, and as he heard them talk about their achievements in improving quality, cutting lead time,

BARRY-WEHMILLER AT A GLANCE • Location: Headquartered in St. Louis, MO; 100 locations total • Founded: 1885 • Team Members: Nearly 12,000 • Traction: The company just acquired its 101st business, and since 1987 has experienced 18% compound revenue growth and 14% compound share price growth • Impact: The company has provided leadership training to more than 50% of employees plus 14,000 non-employees.

• Structure: Privately owned for-profit • 2017 Revenue: $2.8 billion • Mission Statement: “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”

and reducing inventory, he suddenly thought to ask one of them, “How did this affect your life?” A guy named Steve gave a surprising answer: “I’m talking to my wife more.”

Chapman asked him to elaborate.

“Since we’ve embraced the idea where I have a chance to make my role better and people ask me what I think, I go home feeling valued and better about myself,” Steve explained. “And when I go home feeling better about myself, I’m nicer to my wife. And when I’m nicer to her, she talks to me more.” It then hit Chapman that his company’s performance should primarily be measured by its impact on people’s lives.

Over the past 15 years or so, Chapman has deployed his insights on the power of caring for employees in every company Barry-Wehmiller has acquired, and well beyond. The company is featured in Simon Sinek’s 2014 book “Leaders Eat Last”; Chapman’s 2012 TEDx Talk has been viewed 150,000 times; and in 2015, Chapman published his own book, co-authored with Raj Sisodia, called “Everybody Matters.” Meanwhile, the Barry-Wehmiller Leadership Institute now offers training to other leaders, while Chapman speaks all around the globe.

We caught up with Chapman to talk about the lessons he’s learned about caring for employees and the legacy he’s hoping to leave behind.

What’s your mission in life right now — your personal big, audacious goal?

Bob Chapman: I hope that in the time that I have left, as long as I have a voice that people will listen to, I can get people to embrace that what we need is a human revolution. We had an industrial revolution, and it created the brokenness we’re now feeling, because it was never founded on the principles of human dignity and human thriving. It was never about creating meaning and purpose. It was around economic wealth through

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WORKPLACE CULTURE

mass production and industrializing the country. It began around economic greed.

My granddaughter graduated from Aspen High School a year ago. I watched 158 of these talented young men and women walk across the stage to get their diploma. The mothers and fathers and grandparents and brothers and sisters and neighbors were all applauding with joy, and I had tears in my eyes. Because I knew where we were sending these young men

BC: Our leadership model emanated from my wife Cynthia and I raising six kids. I was trying to fix this 100-yearold business with what I learned in business school and graduate school, which is management practices. At the same time, I was trying to be a good steward to six kids, and I had to learn to be a good parent.

Over the ’80s and ’90s, everything I learned in business school and what I saw out in the workforce was what I call “management.” I took man-

everything I had learned about parenting was leadership. And everything I had learned in business school was wrong, because it was about manipulation of others for my success.

These are very simple concepts.

They’re just hard to do. But this work touches people’s hearts. People get very emotional when they feel cared for. Remember, 88 percent of the people in this country feel they work for an organization that does not care about them. And three out of four

“Once you begin the journey,

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU GO BACK, because once you feed them caring,

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU TAKE IT AWAY” and women. We were sending them out into a brutal world where they were going to be degraded and used for somebody else’s gain. I know we could solve that tomorrow if we simply embraced the profound opportunity we have to shape people’s lives when we are given the privilege of leadership.

Life to me now is about making sure I take the message we have been blessed with — I’m astounded that some higher power gave us this message, because there is no way I thought of this — and share it in a world that desperately needs it. That message is: “Business could be the most powerful force for good in the world if it simply genuinely cared about the people it had the privilege to lead.” It’s not a job, it’s not a role, it’s a higher calling.

It’s taken a very good life and made it exponentially more meaningful.

Tell us more of the story of how you came to be the bearer of this message.

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agement classes, got a management degree, and got a job in management, so what did I try and do? I tried to manage the people.

I have come to define the word management as “the manipulation of others for your success.” Remember, we define success as money, power, and position, and you get them by serving yourself. You get a good degree, you get a good job, you make a good income, you get the attributes of success.

I thought that with my education and my experience, I was smarter.

And I felt good when people came to ask me what to do and I told them.

But when we’re raising kids, we’re taught just the opposite. Kids need to grow and experience and make their own decisions as they’re able to, which shapes their ability to be an adult. What I learned about being a good parent, I discovered, was about leadership.

So by the late ’90s I realized that

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people in this country are disengaged in what they’re doing.

We know for a fact now that the way people are treated at work, what they’re subjected to for 40 hours a week, has a material impact on the way they go home and treat their family. When we teach people how to be good leaders and care for their people, they don’t tell us about how they ran a better manufacturing operation, they tell us how it’s improved their marriage and the relationship with their children. Because leadership occurs in our homes, it occurs in our communities, and it occurs in our companies.

Leaders are everywhere.

We who run organizations could profoundly change the world tomorrow without raising taxes, without changing laws, if we just simply cared about the people we have the privilege of leading, and we had the courage to demonstrate our care through the initiatives we take.

What’s been your biggest failure along the way?

BC: Probably my biggest failure is to not learn this when I was much younger. I’m 72. This began about fifteen years ago. So more than half of my career was very traditional.

Now I’m racing the clock to make sure that this gets institutionalized and embraced. About ten years ago, a young man who had just joined us asked me, “What is your greatest fear?” I said, “That we create this exceptional, caring organization, and it would be too dependent upon me; if something were to happen to me, it would go away.”

The next morning, I got up and said, “Okay, I’ve identified a fear I didn’t even know I had. What are we going to do about it?” What do religions do to exist over centuries?

They articulate their beliefs, they tell stories that affirm their beliefs, and they create disciples who share those stories so that it lives on

beyond their time. So I said, “How are we going to create disciples? We can’t send people back to universities to learn to care, because our universities teach people to use others for their personal success. We have to create our own university.”

Which we did.

We began internally, to help our own frontline leaders learn how to care for the people they had the privilege of leading. But then we started getting more and more and more interest, and finally we decided to create classes — a twoday deep dive to feel and touch our culture.

Then, because we had such an overwhelming response, we decided to create a Barry-Wehmiller Leadership Institute to find people who believe what we believe, who want to join us in this walk across the bridge from management to leadership.

A few years later, at a conference in Colorado Springs, I sat there and looked at this team of ours teach-

ing CEOs of major hospitals and I thought, “Oh, my God. It’s not going to die with me because they’ve turned it into teachable, reputable content that makes impact.” I’m not interested in people being enamored of Barry-Wehmiller. I’m interested in lighting up their lights so that they can shine brightly.

We are thrilled that we have a very high level of interest with some major corporations to embrace these principles. We know it’s making an impact, but we’re early in the journey. Some of these corporations have 70,000 people, so it’s not a week-long or a month-long or a year-long process. It will take years to transform, but they’re on the journey and they’ve joined us.

As you talk to other executives about practicing Truly Human Leadership and the type of company cultures Barry-Wehmiller creates, what’s the most compelling way of convincing them to try it?

Barry-Wehmiller’s businesses serve a diverse set of industries: packaging, paper converting, sheeting, corrugating, engineering, and IT consulting.

WORKPLACE CULTURE

BC: I don’t really try to convince them. We’ve decided that we’re looking for the early adopters. We’re looking for people who believe what we believe and want to join us in this journey of healing, of fulfillment, of meaning for the people whose lives are entrusted to us.

I guess probably the cutest story is that when I was speaking to 150 CEOs in Los Angeles, at the end of my speech I said, “Does anybody disagree with anything I just said?” Not a single hand went up. I said, “How many of you agree with what I just said?”

Every hand in the room went up enthusiastically. I said, “Okay. Appreciate that. Now ask me a question.”

A gentleman stands up in the back of the room and says, “Mr. Chapman, I raised my hand. I agree with everything you said. But by God, I would think it would be hard to do that.”

I said to this guy who I’ve never met, “Are you married?” He said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “I’m curious, do you find being married easy?” He

The key to leadership is treating everyone with respect and dignity,” says Chapman (right).

puts his head down and says, “No, it’s really hard to be married.” And I said, “You’re right. Name any human relationship that’s easy. Is it easy to fulfill your vows daily that you said with your wife before God and your friends and family? No. Is it easy to raise kids? No. Is it easy to care for our 12,000 people? No. What is the alternative?”

The top partners at McKinsey [& Company], at Ernst & Young [EY], at Harvard, Case Western [Reserve University], London School of Economics, Stanford, Kellogg [School of Management] — nobody debates what you and I are talking about. It’s like debating motherhood and apple pie.

Nobody says, “Now Bob, you don’t understand something.” Everybody just says, “Wow. Wow!” We’ve been doing this for ten years, and not one single person has ever said, “This just doesn’t make sense.”

Because what’s to argue with, caring for people? I always tell people I don’t need to justify caring. I think you have

to justify not caring.

But the problem is our traditional education system doesn’t give people the tools to care, and it doesn’t give them the courage to go out into a world that is focused on money, power, and position and bring caring into that equation. It is such a far journey, and one that takes courage.

It’s hard for people to break that pattern. It takes real courage to believe that you’re not going to spend more money, be a softer business. It’s really hard for people to join us on this journey even though we are finding people rapidly who do want to do this.

What’s the most frustrating thing people misunderstand about what you do?

BC: We’re not trying to be nice. We’re trying to care.

Tell me more about the difference between being nice and caring.

BC: Nice is if somebody’s team member has a baby, you’d send a note. Or you know everybody by their first name. That’s being nice, and that means a lot to people, but that’s not our style.

Our style is to empower those frontline leaders to look at the responsibility they have for the men and women in their care and embrace what we call our leadership checklist [see right], things you need to do every day in service of the men and women in your care. It’s a discipline. We teach our leaders how to apply this in communication, in listening, in trying to organize work to eliminate frustration.

How does a company know if they’re ready for your ideas?

BC: I remember a guy saying to me one time, “I’m not sure my people are ready for this.” I said, “Oh, my God. Your people are ready for it tomorrow. You’re not ready for it.”

You can have some of these initial classes and see how you react. You can tiptoe into the wilderness without going all the way in and see if it’s really a place you want to go or not.

Though once you begin the journey, I don’t know how you go back, because once you feed them caring, I don’t know how you take it away.

What do you do about the people within a company who don’t want to get on board with a new way of doing things?

BC: That’s the most common question I get. The first time somebody asked me that, I said, “I just gave a talk about goodness and you want to know about the badness.”

Now remember, I’m an eternal optimist. When I was a young man, people used to say, “Bob’s

the kind of guy who could walk into a room with piles of shit and say, ‘There must be a pony in here someplace!’” I walk with my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds. So what we do is practice courageous patience. How do you know that the problem is an issue with the person you’re dealing with? Is it the fact that the leader has not effectively connected with that person?

We understand that every single person’s journey is different.

How they’re treated as a child, their predisposition of personality, the way they’ve been treated by leaders in other organizations, their perception of life ... it’s a complex formula. We are not here to judge. We are here to invite them into our journey.

Here’s an example. We had a gentleman who worked up in Northern Wisconsin who I think was a Navy Seal. Muscular, tough, worked in the back of our plant. Basically, you just wanted to stay away from this guy.

When [Barry-Wehmiller took over and our culture transformation work] began, he was very much against it because it was just another corporate program to him. But through our practice of courageous patience, he is now one of our biggest advocates. He’s a professor in our university. He had no interest in change and was perfectly comfortable, and today he’s one of the most positive forces in our company. We have courageous patience as long as a person is not hurting other people.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any of the Barry-Wehmiller companies have employee ownership or profit-sharing programs. Have you thought about that? Why is that not a part of how you demonstrate caring?

THE BARRY-WEHMILLER LEADERSHIP CHECKLIST I accept the awesome responsibility of leadership. The following describe my essential actions as a leader: I practice stewardship of the Guiding Principles of Leadership through my time, conversations, and personal development.

I advocate safety and wellness through my actions and words.

I reflect to lead my team in Achieving Principled Results on Purpose.

I inspire passion, optimism, and purpose.

My personal communication cultivates fulfilling relationships.

I foster a team community in which we are committed to each other and to the pursuit of a common goal.

I exercise responsible freedom, empowering each of us to achieve our potential.

I proactively engage in the personal growth of individuals on my team.

I facilitate meaningful group interactions.

I set, coach to, and measure goals that define winning.

I recognize and celebrate the greatness in others.

I commit to daily continuous improvement.

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BC: For a couple of our large plants, we have been trying to move to a compensation program that engages team members in creating value and participating in the value they create.

It’s complicated to do that. We are working towards it. I would say probably half of our people are in some kind of gain-share program. If they’re not, they’re getting fair wages. We have very low turnover. Walk through our plants and people are extremely happy. Salary does not create happiness.

We have this attitude in our political system that if we create tax cuts and stimulate business and create jobs, then everything is going to be okay because we got jobs. We’ve got low unemployment, moderate inflation, everything’s fine. But Americans have never been more frustrated than they are right now. They’ve got jobs and they’re taking vacations, they’re driving decent cars, they’re buying things at the store. This should be the happiest time in the world for our country, and yet the misery index is at a record high. Why? Because of the way people are treated for 40 hours a week in their jobs.

From our standpoint, the key is not to create jobs that pay x amount of money. It’s only when everything else is crappy that that becomes the common denominator. “What are you making and how much more can I get?”

Gallup has found that the number one determiner of happiness in the world is “a good job working with people you enjoy.” It doesn’t say “the highest-paid job.” As a matter of fact, Gallup was surprised at how people said that after a certain amount, [salary] doesn’t have any effect on happiness.

We have found that the way you treat people is more important than

exactly what their salary is. We’re going to pay people fairly and treat them superbly. That is the key to happiness. And you know what? It works.

It’s unbelievable how much our culture attracts talent into our company now. We were interviewing a senior guy for one of our operations in the North Minnesota area. He was being considered, so he went and

of margins.”

Our operating margins are below industry norms because of the nature of the deals we’ve done, not because we don’t have great people. Yet we have to validate our culture with performance at or above industry norms. So the biggest thing we’re focused on is how we can make sure that, as we strive to perform at or above industry norms to validate our culture, we never compromise what we stand for in terms of treating people with respect and dignity. Because sometimes people perceive challenges like that as, “Right now we’ve got to go lay off some people,” and that’s exactly the opposite [of our take]. We never do anything that compromises our culture.

“We’re going to pay people fairly and treat them superbly.

THAT IS THE KEY TO HAPPINESS.”

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listened to my TED Talk, and he had to pull the car over because he got so emotional listening. He realized how miserable he was and how much he wanted to be part of an organization where he felt valued.

But we [as a society] have this theory that it’s all about pay. Better pay, better jobs, and everybody will be happy. It’s really about giving people the opportunity to be valued and to work with other people who they enjoy. Compensation is still important, but it’s not what creates happiness.

What would you say BarryWehmiller’s growth edges are right now? What are you still trying to figure out and fine-tune around this model?

BC: We tend to buy struggling companies and make them better. Since 1997, I think Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stocks have gone up a compound growth rate of 7 or 9 percent, and ours has been 14 percent. But even though our share price is strong, if you look at our EBITDA [Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization] percentage or operating profit percentage, you would say, “I’d get fired if I had those kinds

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What’s giving you hope?

BC: Ours has been an evolutionary journey that’s picked up immense speed and credibility. How could I possibly be so blessed as to have the opportunity to leave the world so significantly different? When I hear voices like Simon Sinek and Raj Sisodia and the McKinsey researchers and the Harvard voices start to join us in this chorus of freedom, of human dignity and human thriving, it gives me hope.

Simon Sinek came to visit one of our companies, and at the end of the first day he said, “I’m no longer a nutty idealist. I am seeing what I dreamed of.” And then William Ury, the world peace negotiator who started Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, heard about it through Simon and came to visit us. At the end of his first day, he said, “What I see here is the answer to world peace.” Because a world in which people feel valued and care for each other is a world of peace. That gives me hope.

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HOW TO FIRE A COLLEAGUE IN A

CONSCIOUS WAY

BY DIANA CHAPMAN

Even the most difficult of work conversations can still incorporate kindness and integrity.

Here’s what to do when it’s time to let someone go.

Someone on your team is not performing at the level you want, isn’t mission-aligned, is challenging for other team members to work with, or simply isn’t a good fit for the role.

When it’s time to consider letting them go, there are two ways to do so: consciously or unconsciously. Here’s how to move through the firing process consciously.

1

DROP THE BLAME AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

Rather than blaming the team member for being a poor performer and making it all about them, a conscious leader looks first at their own part in creating the result, asking themselves, “What was my role in co-creating this outcome?”

• Did I do a thorough job vetting this employee when I hired them?

• Did I clearly define their role and responsibilities?

• Did I give them regular feedback along the way to point out their challenges?

• Did I edit any of my thoughts or feelings along the way and thereby wasn’t fully honest?

• Did I provide them with a strong manager?

• Did I help them identify their strengths and provide work that brought them forward?

• Did I write a performance review to let them know what was not working and define action steps to change the behavior and results?

These and other questions support you in seeing your part. They can help you to stop placing blame and start owning your results. From here you have options. The first option is to sit down with the colleague and have an honest conversation.

It might sound like this: “Brian, the results show that you have not been completing the tasks you have agreed to do with the quality I have wanted.

I’d like each of us to take ownership for how we have co-created this result. I’ll start first by acknowledging that I did not give you feedback this year that could likely have made

“Keeping your heart open requires you to see the other person as an ally, someone who is in service of your learning and growth — even if it seems clear that you can’t keep them on the team.” a difference in your success. I also acknowledge that I did not create the time in my schedule to have regular one-on-one meetings with you. I also wanted to avoid having difficult conversations and can see how that did not serve either of us.”

You might then ask Brian to own his part in not being a high performer. If Brian is willing to own his part, you can design a very clear plan together for how to create the results you most want, including regularly touching base to monitor progress.

If Brian is unwilling to fully own his part and to stop blaming and complaining, you’ll likely choose to let him go since the pattern won’t shift unless all parties take responsibility.

Another option is that you’ll find that you are unwilling to do what it would take to resolve the issue. Perhaps your heart isn’t in it because you’re unwilling to take the time required. In this case, you’ll have to own your unwillingness and work through the difficult decisions and conversations required to let the employee go.

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3

2

OPEN YOUR HEART

When people are in the midst of creating successful teams and businesses, everything can start to feel serious. From this place it’s easy to see one another, especially “underperforming team members,” simply as obstacles to getting to where we want to be. When this happens, we often close our hearts to one another.

Keeping your heart open requires you to see the other person as an ally, someone who is in service of your learning and growth — even if it seems clear that you can’t keep them on the team. Open hearts can also easily appreciate. Ask yourself what you most appreciate about the person you want to let go:

“How would you want the colleagues of your loved ones to treat them if they were going to fire them?”

• What strengths do you appreciate about them?

• What contributions have they made that you appreciate?

• What can you appreciate about the challenges you have been having with them?

It also helps to imagine that this colleague is your sibling or parent or child or spouse. How would you want the colleagues of your loved ones to treat them if they were going to fire them? This mindset inspires kindness and supports you to help them find a new role that will allow them to give their greatest gifts to the world.

STAND FOR A WIN FOR ALL

How can you stand for your needs, the needs of the team, the needs of the organization, and the needs of the person you are firing? The key is to discover what those needs are and make sure that you stand for all of them equally.

Some leaders stand too much for the needs of the person getting fired at the expense of the wellbeing of the organization; for example, by allowing the team member to stay too long when they are not effective in their role.

Other leaders can get too focused on the needs of the team and be insensitive to what will most support the colleague in finding a new position someplace else. When leaders are caught in beliefs of scarcity, such as not having enough time or money, they can play a zero-sum game.

These questions can support you to make sure you’re firing consciously: • What would it look like to have this transition be as free of stress as possible for our colleague and for us?

• What resources can we offer to help this person be successful at finding another position, while also valuing our time and money?

• What feedback can we offer to help this team member be more aware of their strengths and challenges in order to make them more successful moving forward?

• How do we honor our HR and legal* requirements, while also treating our colleague with support and kindness?

• How do we stand for the mental and emotional needs of all of our team members as one of them is being asked to leave, especially if that person has been a part of the team for a long time?

The more you as a leader can stay vulnerable, honest, and devoted to learning through the firing process, the more likely it is that you will be able to take responsibility, keep your heart open, and create a win-for-all situation. It’s courageous to be a conscious leader day-to-day, and even more so when the challenge of needing to fire someone arises.

*Note: The legal folks in your organization may not agree with some of our recommendations. Most legal advice is in service of avoiding lawsuits, not in supporting us to be more conscious with one another. I encourage you to keep that in mind as you move through the firing process.

Meet Diana Chapman at the Conscious Company Leaders Forum June 6–8: consciouscompanyleadersforum.com

Diana Chapman is the co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.” Find her online at conscious.is.

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OPERATIONS

Building a

Beloved Brand

New Belgium Brewing co-founder and former CEO Kim Jordan shares key lessons from running the US’s fourth-largest craft brewery as a conscious workplace.

Kim Jordan was a social worker before co-founding New Belgium Brewing in 1991.

NEW BELGIUM BREWING AT A GLANCE • Locations: Fort Collins, CO, and Asheville, NC • Founded: 1991 • Team Members: 752 • Traction: Fourth-largest craft brewery in the US • Impact: Through its tasting rooms, Tour De Fat festival, and philanthropy fund, the company has donated almost $15 million to nonprofit organizations in the communities it serves.

• Recognition: Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work; Bicycling magazine’s 25 Best Companies for Cyclists; designated a Platinum-level Bicycle-Friendly Business by the League of American Bicyclists • Structure: 100% employee-owned for-profit • Certifications/Memberships: World Blu’s most democratic US businesses, certified B Corp, 1% for the Planet, Conservation Alliance, American Sustainable Business Council, thrice awarded LEED certifications, Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, Glass Recycling Coalition, Brewers Association, Brewers for Clean Water • Mission statement: “To manifest our love and talent by crafting our customers’ favorite brands and proving business can be a force for good.”

I

n late 2012, New Belgium Brewing’s employees all gathered for a major announcement from company leadership. The business had been sold, co-founder and CEO Kim Jordan told them, and she asked each employee to open the envelope in front of them to learn who the new owners were. Inside, the 450 coworkers each found a mirror. Their Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which already owned 42 percent of the company, was now taking possession of it all.

When Jordan and her then-husband, Jeff Lebesch, started New Belgium in their Colorado basement in 1991, they knew

they wanted to do things a little differently. Lebesch became obsessed with craft beer from Belgium on a bike tour through that country in 1988. Jordan had worked as a social worker, and it became clear she would bring that human-centered perspective to her new role. Even in the early days, the pair spent time articulating the way they hoped the business would enact their values. “We thought about who we wanted to be as a company, why we existed at all, what we were going to stretch ourselves to do, and how we were going to behave as we did that,” Jordan says. Though “triple bottom line” wasn’t a well-known phrase at the time, the framework the pair articulated involved paying attention to the company’s environmental footprint and the relationship they wanted to have with their coworkers, and, of course, how to make sure the company stayed profitable. As Jordan often says, “You can be as groovy as you want to be, but if you can’t keep the doors open … Profitability in a business does become the ultimate form of sustainability.”

Luckily for New Belgium, its beers — including its best-known offering, Fat Tire — were a hit, and the company has grown to be one of the biggest and most successful craft brewers in the US. These days, the company diverts 99.9 percent of its waste from landfills, produces 12 percent of its energy via on-site renewables, and is actively working to reduce its carbon emissions and water usage.

Meanwhile, all employees are enrolled in the company’s ESOP after a year of employment (at which point they also receive a cruiser bike), and become fully vested after six years (bonus perk at year five: a trip to Belgium). The company’s participative ownership culture includes open-book management, continuous learning programs, annual opportunities to inform the company’s strategy, monthly opportunities to hear updates and provide input on the operations, and daily opportunities to ask questions about the business, all of which is rolled out to new hires during a 120-day orientation program. When a co-worker leaves New Belgium, their shares are purchased back from them (their payout) and redistributed into the ESOP. The payout can be scheduled over a number of years, and there are no variables based on how one leaves the business.

Jordan has stepped down as CEO, but as chair of the board, she is, as she puts it, “in the happy circumstance of being able to get out of the dayto-day and work on New Belgium strategically as a brewery and as a sustainable business role model.”

We spoke with her about New Belgium’s employee ownership experience and her journey as a leader

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NEW BELGIUM’S COMPANY VALUES 1 // Remembering we are incredibly lucky to create something fine that enhances people’s lives while surpassing our consumers’ expectations 2 // Producing world-class beer 3 // Promoting beer culture and the responsible enjoyment of beer 4 // Kindling social, environmental, and cultural change as a business role model 5 // Environmental stewardship: Honoring nature at every turn of the business 6 // Cultivating potential through learning, high-involvement culture, and the pursuit of opportunities 7 // Balancing the myriad needs of the company, our co-workers, and their families 8 // Trusting each other and committing to authentic relationships and communications 9 // Continuous, innovative quality and efficiency improvements 10 // Having fun

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You’ve built a strong employeeownership and empowerment culture at New Belgium. What would you say to a fellow CEO considering transitioning to employee ownership?

Kim Jordan: My viewpoint is more nuanced than it was in the beginning. First, ask, “Does our business model support this elegantly?” For instance, at New Belgium, we’re pretty asset-heavy. Brewing beer requires that we invest millions in breweries. So between growing the company by investing in assets and also making sure we have enough capital on hand to pay employees when they leave the organization, we have a lot of mouths to feed.

Second, ask, “Is there a way to get our coworkers enthusiastic and engaged in this?” I work with a lot of people who are extraordinarily committed and into the idea of employee ownership. Having said that, I also sometimes think that having real skin in the game could make a difference in how people think about ownership. Another reality of our business is that we hire a breadth of people, from unskilled and semi-skilled labor all the way through PhDs. If we said, “We would love for you to be an owner!

You only have to figure out how you can come up with $5,000 to do that,” we would have a lot of people for whom that’s out of reach. Is there another way? For instance, by doing profit sharing, and letting people decide whether to keep the money or invest it in the company?

I’m not sure that’s the exact model, but I do think about how people come to ownership in a way that underscores skin in the game.

Finally, ask, “Am I really willing to share and receive information?”

It’s one thing to say you want people to be engaged in the business, but sometimes people tell you stuff you don’t want to hear. I actually find that really useful. I’m indebted to my coworkers for their bravery in talking to all of us in management

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over the years about where they think we’re doing well and where they think we’re falling down. But if you decide you’re going to have the kind of employee ownership we have, which includes a high degree of employee engagement, you have to want that.

You just mentioned increased feedback from employees as a potential benefit of employee ownership.

What other upsides have you seen?

What has you convinced that this is not only something worth doing, but something worth spreading?

KJ: People who visit New Belgium almost without exception will say, “I’m amazed at how much the person who gave me the tour knew about what the whole company does.” It’s my belief that that kind of broadly shared understanding of where we are and where we’re going creates a more successful company.

I’ve also been told, and see every day, that there’s a palpable energy: “We own this, we’re in this together, and it matters to us.”

And I think about all the people whose lives we’ve changed because, at whatever time they left New Belgium, they had amassed enough wealth to feel like they could put a couple of kids through college, buy a second home, save for their own retirement. Whatever they’re trying to do, we’ve helped a lot of people get closer, and that’s a great success.

How have you had to change as a leader since you implemented employee ownership in the business?

KJ: Leadership is a combination of being open to learning and listening to feedback and trying things and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. You accrue those skills over time.

But I used to think anybody could be a leader; now I think it’s a personality trait not everyone possesses.

New Belgium is the fourth-largest brewer of craft beer and the eighth-largest brewery in the United States.

“Broadly shared understanding of where we are and where we’re going createsa more successful company.”

There are certainly some parts of leadership, like being able to be firm, that lots of people can do. But people who tend to be comfortable with leading are often systems thinkers, and they’re able to synthesize both the longer-term horizon and the situation at hand.

One of the places I’ve had to significantly rethink my leadership has been transitioning from CEO to board chair. I’ve actually done that twice. It requires finesse and nuance and really, a talking-to. You’ve got to make sure your motivations are clear to yourself, and that you’re trying to be in the right position on the leadership spectrum. So you’re not trying to be the CEO, you’re trying to be the longer-term capability builder.

It’s unusual to get to make that transition out of the CEO role twice. You did it once in 2015 as Christine Perich took over, then you stepped back into the CEO role in 2016. In 2017, you handed the reigns to Steve Fechheimer. Do you have any clear lessons from those experiences?

KJ: I was super lucky that I got to do it twice. What I’ve learned is just make sure the personalities involved are all enthusiastic about co-creating. It sounds so simple, but when everyone is working to the best outcome of the organization and there’s respect and care between people, the process of succession can go smoothly, and even be joyful.

What is your point of view on the role of business in solving social problems and creating a better world?

KJ: We have to pull every lever we can, especially in these times. One of those levers is CEOs and boards of directors deciding to care about the planet, care about community. ...

First, they need to use their practice to care about their coworkers and the environment and communities where they do business.

The next step is to advocate. In the mid-2000s, about the same time that we started our sustainability management system work, we realized we were squandering opportunities to be a business role model.

We went from “our practice makes

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a splash” to “our advocacy makes a ripple.” We now understand the importance of signing on to the Clean Power Plan or Watersheds of the US or advocating for B Corps, for example.

Advocacy is another way that business can put its shoulder to the wheel.

Then there is also the work of [deploying capital through investing and philanthropy]. Both through New

big-level strategy. They’re in charge of getting clear on the metrics to indicate we’ve achieved those things.

They’re charged with communicating that to the next level down, and the next level, and with helping people develop plans that are powerful and on target.

I don’t order forklift tires because I have no idea what the best kinds

The thing that’s been great about it, and the reason that we decided to grow at all, is that it provides opportunity for the organization.

Fifteen years ago, when we were talking about whether we wanted to grow, the only thing that made us feel enthusiastic was that everybody got to have new opportunities and new projects. That sounded more fun than

“I’m indebted to my coworkers for their bravery in talking to all of us in management over the years about where they think we’re doing well and where they think we’re falling down.”

Belgium and through the New Belgium Family Foundation, we do a lot of impact investing in companies that are working on things we think are likely to be for-profit businesses that help to make a better world.

What is the most frustrating thing that people get wrong or misunderstand about what you built and how you built it at New Belgium?

KJ: Sometimes people will say, “Oh, we could never do high-involvement culture at my company because we just can’t imagine having everybody making every decision.” I find that frustrating because it feels like an excuse for not wanting to create a different kind of energy in your organization. It’s entirely possible to be connected to people and to have them feel empowered and in the know.

We manage New Belgium in a progressive but fairly [hierarchical] way.

Executive management makes the

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of forklift tires are, but I do look at the long-term trends in the industry, because that’s my job: to scan the horizon and be aware of that. It’s possible to empower people and to run a business that runs smoothly and with a lot of alignment and autonomy.

everybody just sitting in their same old positions.

As human beings we have a lot of ambivalence about growing. It’s a matter of focusing on what you want to grow — to get a level of alignment with your values.

How do you feel about the pace of the company’s scaling? What was great and what was hard about it?

What do you mean, “what you want to grow”?

KJ: We’ve taken 26 years to be national, in part because we have a business model that requires a lot of CapEx [capital expenditure]. You can’t just build a brewery in a week, especially if you’re trying to build a technologically sophisticated brewery. In my mind, we’ve grown at just the right pace, and it’s been a clip. But we may seem slow, depending on what your core business capability and needs are. You talk to people who are in tech, and some of them aren’t even 26 years old as founders.

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KJ: Do you want to grow your capability as a business role model or do you just want to get more cases out the door? Do you want to grow your skills in management competency, or the size of your distribution footprint? They’re not mutually exclusive.

You can do all those things, but part of how you feel enthusiastic about growth is by making sure the totality of it fits in good alignment with your values.

Tell me a leadership lesson that you’ve had to learn the hard way.

KJ: Listening well to other people and understanding that if I speak first, they are likely to just agree with what I say.

Then the other side is, I think it’s a chump move to say, “Well, let’s think about all the possibilities” if you have a definitive sense of the outcome that you’re going for and you already know what you want to have happen.

At the same time, if you always know what you want to have happen, then I would suggest that you’re squandering the native intelligence of the room.

Sometimes when you’re the boss, it’s easy to feel: “I have the answer. I have a good idea and I want to tell you about it.” I’ve had to be very purposeful about stopping myself and paying attention to the process of getting other people’s voices in the room — which I’m not real proud of, by the way, but there you have it.

You’ve had a big job for a long time.

What keeps you balanced and sustainable in your own being?

KJ: I try to remind myself that very few things are unsolvable. There’s a human development theory about recycling that says that you may not have mastered the issue or solved the problem on the first pass, but that you will often get other opportunities to try again.

Years ago, we were having some issue … It’s funny because now I can’t even tell you what it was, but in the moment it seemed like a great big deal. The president of our distributor group said to me, “Kim, pros don’t panic.” I find it useful to remind myself of that, and that “we are right where we are supposed to be.” That keeps me from perseverating about something all night long.

I try to take breaks and I try to make sure that I’m having some fun, taking

opportunities for contemplation. But years ago I heard Lynne Twist speak, and somebody asked her about work-life balance. She said, “I’m not really that into work-life balance. I’m racing to the very edge of the thing I’m doing in the moment, doing it with everything I have, and then going on to the next thing.” And I’m with her. You have to have work-life effectiveness, and awareness of not overworking, but I don’t know that we do ourselves a big service by setting ourselves up to think that if it doesn’t all feel balanced, somehow we’re failing.

What is giving you hope?

KJ: I talk with a lot of people who are committed to making a better world in their own way, and that makes me hopeful. There’s a lot of good intentions.

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HOW TO CREATE A

COMPELLING PURPOSE FOR YOUR BUSINESS

These questions excerpted from the “Conscious Capitalism Field Guide” will help you get clear on your business’s reason for being — and help it thrive.

BY RAJ SISODIA, TIMOTHY HENRY, AND THOMAS ECKSCHMIDT, WITH JESSICA AGNEESSENS AND HALEY RUSHING

F

or far too long, the conventional wisdom has been that the purpose of business is to maximize returns for shareholders. Business thinkers and leaders of highly successful companies are coming to realize that this way of thinking is flawed and harmful. The first tenet of Conscious Capitalism — a philosophy that provides an alternative approach to the essential pursuit of profits, one that emphasizes ideas like trust, collaboration, and compassion — is that a business must have a higher purpose, distinct from making money. The simplest way to explain purpose is that it is a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world.

Purpose fosters meaningful innovations and visionary ideas and helps your business navigate turbulent times. It injects greater power into your

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brand’s message, helps attract [and retain] the right talent, contributes to personal fulfillment and a life well lived, and generates higher financial results in the long run.

THE QUALITIES OF A COMPELLING PURPOSE While there are as many potential purposes as there are companies, great purposes have some common characteristics. We capture several of these qualities in the acronym HEALING (heroic, evolving, aligning, loving, inspiring, natural, and galvanizing).

In a world filled with suffering and ill health, healing is noble work. A conscious business creates value by

states of being, companies will have to adapt and elevate their purposes to remain in harmony with our evolving aspirations and motivations.

ALIGNING: A great purpose acts like a powerful magnet that aligns all stakeholders. Stakeholders retain their distinctive roles and identities, but also voluntarily become part of a harmonious whole. The aligning power of a great purpose largely eliminates the conflicts that commonly arise between stakeholders and enables the discovery of win–win resolutions when conflicts do crop up.

When they share a common purpose, stakeholders literally cease to be at cross-purposes with one another.

scious business is akin to a sailor who continuously adapts to the environment. Such a sailor draws the power to move the vessel forward from the wind and current, whose energy is boundless. Yet, he or she can move the vessel in any direction desired.

GALVANIZING: A great purpose is not just conceptually and emotionally appealing; it moves people to action.

It embodies “the fierce urgency of now,” to use a phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s.

DISCOVERING YOUR PURPOSE Here is a series of exercises to help you uncover your organization’s

“A great purpose inspires all the stakeholders of an enterprise to rise above their self-imposed limitations and self-serving agendas and strive for the seemingly impossible. ” meeting some real, tangible needs of its stakeholders. By doing so, it improves the quality of their existence and makes them better off than they were before. It alleviates suffering and brings more joy, with positive impacts on stakeholders’ physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.

Ultimately, we believe, every great purpose must be a healing purpose.

HEALING also represents seven essential qualities of a great purpose:

LOVING: People are increasingly recognizing the tremendous power and centrality of love in all human endeavors, especially in business.

A company’s purpose must emanate from the deep reservoir of love and caring largely untapped in most of us. A purpose built on love and care creates a powerful and vital force throughout the organization. It is in harmony with the deepest essence of what it means to be human.

HEROIC: Any worthy purpose has

INSPIRING: A great purpose

the potential to be heroic, to have a positive transformational impact on the world, affecting not only the company’s stakeholders but also its industry and perhaps even society at large.

inspires all the stakeholders of an enterprise to rise above their selfimposed limitations and self-serving agendas and strive for the seemingly impossible. It electrifies and animates the organization, giving it a sense of urgency and focus.

EVOLVING: A conscious business aligns its purpose with the evolutionary impulses of its times. As we humans progress on our journey toward greater consciousness and higher

NATURAL: Every great purpose must reflect a mindset of living in harmony with nature rather than conquering or dominating it. A con-

purpose. These exercises will get you and your team to think creatively and broadly and to analyze and understand what’s really special about your company. With a little excavating, some structured questioning, and a little inspiration, you can discover (or rediscover) the authentic purpose at the heart of your organization.

You should do this exercise in conjunction with your leadership team.

Each member of the team should answer the questions individually first; you should then come together to discuss and integrate your perspectives into a single set of responses.

As the leader, you need to listen more than speak. If you state your opinion or position too soon, other members of the team might be tempted to fall in line with your thinking. Such groupthink diminishes the value of bringing in diverse perspectives from all the members of the team.

For the purpose-discovery exercises here, we recommend reaching

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beyond the leadership team to include a cross-section of 20 to 30 highly engaged people from across the organization. For some of the questions, you should include long-term customers and suppliers as well (these questions will be evident).

Let’s start this journey from the past forward and explore the origins of what you do.

1 // REVISIT YOUR PAST Explore the genesis of the organization. Talk to the founders, review the founding documents, look for news and recordings from the time the company was created, and find the motivation that was present at the inception. If the founders are no longer part of the leadership team but are still alive, this is a great opportunity

to invite them to share their story of why they created the business.

Explore the following questions to revisit your past: • Why was the organization originally founded?

• What were the guiding principles that this organization was founded on?

• What spirit or intention must be preserved and captured in our purpose at all cost?

2 // CONTRAST YOUR SUCCESSES AND FAILURES Deconstruct your successes and failures — move beyond obvious variables to find both the tangible and intangible factors that are present when you

WHERE PURPOSE RESIDES What are you most passionate

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What would people reward you for doing?

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Where can you have meaningful impact?

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Where are your core strengths?

is si

i ss Pa

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about?

are at your best and when your people are proudest of the organization.

Notice where your energy and talent naturally tend to gravitate.

Answer the following questions to explore insights from your successes and failures: • When we are at our absolute best, what is going on?

• When we love what we are doing, what is going on?

• When we’re failing, just getting by, in a slump, or not that interested in our work, what is going on?

3 // DON’T THINK DIFFERENT — THINK DIFFERENCE Very often, companies spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to differentiate themselves from the competition through their unique selling propositions. Rather than battling it out in the land of attributes, turn your attention away from being different just for the sake of being different, and focus on what difference you’re trying to make. What difference are you ultimately trying to make in the world? When you can clearly answer that question, it becomes a powerful filter to determine where you should or shouldn’t be spending your time, energy, and resources.

Ask yourself the following questions: • What is the ultimate impact we hope to make?

• When we’re at our best, what difference do we make in the lives of the people we serve?

4 // FIND THE INTERSECTION OF STRENGTHS, PASSION, IMPACT, AND REWARD Your purpose resides in the intersection of your strengths, your passions, the company’s impact, and the rewards your stakeholders receive from your company. Knowing what intrin-

sically motivates your people, what you’re built to do better than anyone else, and where you can deploy that passion and talent to serve a need or solve a problem in the world is extremely powerful.

Ask yourself several questions: • What is our organization’s greatest strength; what do we have the potential to be the best at in the world?

• What are we most passionate about? What do we love the most about what we do?

• Where can we have the most meaningful impact? Which big problems or needs in the world are we capable of and passionate about solving?

• What would people reward us for?

What products and services would our customers happily purchase from us?

exist, what would be lost? What would you miss the most?

Look back at your answers, and make sure the ideas collected are what the fans believe you offer and not what your team would like to hear from them or what you think you are selling them. The truth in these answers could lead you to a much stronger position. Consider using independent researchers to collect this feedback.

6 // LADDER UP What’s the ultimate value of what you’re offering? At the most basic level, describe what you do. Moving up the ladder, identify the functional benefits of what you offer. Next, identify the emotional benefits of what you deliver. With these benefits mapped out, ask yourself,

issue do you have a burning desire to address through your business?

No market research study or SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis can dictate what your purpose should be. A purpose is only right and effective if it resonates with the leaders and employees of an organization in a deep and meaningful way.

To better listen to your heart, ask yourself these questions: • What is your heart calling you to do?

• What is absolutely essential for the purpose to be truly meaningful?

NEXT STEPS In these exercises, you explored the different dimensions of your organization’s purpose. This is preparation

“People are increasingly recognizing the tremendous power and centrality of love in all human endeavors, especially in business.”

5 // TALK TO YOUR FANS Talk to your most evangelical employees, your most loyal die-hard customers, your vendor–partners who would do anything for you, and community leaders who love having your business in their community.

Find out why they love your organization. What do they believe you stand for? What difference do they believe you make in their lives?

These stakeholders know the real deal and are ultimately the heartbeat of the organization.

Ask your fans several questions: • What do you love most about this company or this brand?

• What does this company or brand do for you that no one else does?

• If this company or brand ceased to

“What’s the ultimate value of these benefits in the life of the customers we’re trying to serve?”

Ask yourself these questions: • At the most basic level, what do we have to offer people?

• Functional benefit: what does our offering enable people to do?

• Emotional benefit: how does our offering make people feel?

• Ultimate value: what is the ultimate value of these functional and emotional benefits in their lives?

— a warm-up to work on articulating your purpose. For the next steps and to dive into a deeper expression of purpose, check out “Conscious Capitalism Field Guide: Tools for Transforming Your Organization.”

This article was adapted from the new Harvard Business Review Press book “Conscious Capitalism Field Guide: Tools for Transforming Your Organization” by Raj Sisodia, Timothy Henry, and Thomas Eckschmidt, with Jessica Agneessens and Haley Rushing (co-founder and chief “purposologist” of the Purpose Institute, Austin, Texas; thepurposeinstitute.com).

7 // LISTEN TO YOUR HEART In the end, purpose is a heart thing.

What is your heart calling you to do? What problem, need, or other

Meet co-author Raj Sisodia at the Conscious Company Leaders Forum June 6–8: consciouscompanyleadersforum.com

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THE SUPPLY-CHAIN

MATCHMAKER Rod Robinson’s ConnXus software leverages the power of information to help large corporations create positive impact via their supply chains.

CONNXUS AT A GLANCE • Location: Mason, OH • Founded: 2010 • Team Members: 30 full-time • Traction: ConnXus has attracted $10 million in venture capital, including from Techstars Ventures, Impact America Fund, and Serious Change LP; revenue grew 120% in 2017; customers include Coca-Cola, Cummins, Fifth Third Bank, and McDonald’s Corp.

• Impact: In 2017, nearly 1,100 companies reported $82 billion in spending with disadvantaged businesses via the ConnXus platform.

• Awards: Named Early Stage Company of Year by VentureOhio and a Best Places to Work finalist by the Cincinnati Business Courier; in 2012, Ernst & Young Rod Robinson a regional finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year • Structure: Private for-profit • Certifications: Certified minority-owned business enterprise by the National Minority Supplier Development Council, Canadian Aboriginal & Minority Supplier Council, California Public Utilities Commission, and the State of Ohio; pursuing B Corp certification • Mission: “Enable corporate buyers to achieve responsible, sustainable, and inclusive strategic sourcing goals.”

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onnXus founder and CEO Rod Robinson wasn’t thinking about social impact when he conceived of his supplier management software business a decade ago; he just had a work problem that he thought someone should solve. But the fast-growing business he created might offer just what the corporate world needs to level-up its positive impact on society.

As a chief procurement officer, Robinson struggled to do more business with supplier companies owned by women, people of color, LBGTQ+ people, and veterans, even though contracts often mandated that he do so, and as a black man he wanted to support businesses owned by disadvantaged groups. While suppliers can obtain third-party certifications for their diversity status, fragmented resources made it hard for purchasing officers to find them. “I wondered, ‘With all of the technology at our disposal, why isn’t someone leveraging these tools to provide visibility down and across supply chains?’” Robinson recalls. “I wanted to solve that problem and help companies quickly identify and measure diversity within their supply chains.”

He had an idea for a service that would play matchmaker between small and medium diverse suppliers and large companies’ procurement divisions. At first, he tried to get another company to create it, but with no luck. So he eventually began prototyping a solution himself.

Robinson debuted his supplier management platform, ConnXus, in 2010. With customized data analysis and access to a database of nearly 2 million vetted supplier certifications, large companies can begin to build more inclusive, transparent, and compliant supply chains made up of small businesses that match their values, he tells Conscious Company.

Rod Robinson is CEO of ConnXus.

“

I may have started it, but it’s not my company; it’s our company.

And while ConnXus didn’t start with a mission to change the world, it may be on track to. As Donnella Meadows writes in “Thinking In Systems,” one of the classic studies of how systems change, “Information is power. … You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.” As consumers increasingly demand that companies account for their impact on the world and ConnXus begins tracking more and more supplier characteristics, ConnXus and businesses like it could be important players in reshaping business’s role in society, simply by helping companies connect.

Already, its service promotes opportunities among minority-owned businesses, fostering growth and development on an equitable scale that has for too long been systemi-

cally impeded. The platform also enables businesses to ensure that their suppliers are in turn doing their part to hire a diverse workforce, which is another way of promoting opportunity equity among members of minority groups.

We spoke with Robinson to find out more about supplier diversity and how platforms like ConnXus can help change the world.

ConnXus landed its first big corporate client, McDonald’s, in 2012. For those of us who haven’t worked in corporate procurement, can you describe how platforms like yours can help a company like McDonald’s better understand its supply chain?

Rod Robinson: Our product provides companies like McDonald’s with validated data enrichment.

”

Essentially, we scrub their vendor records to better understand their suppliers. For example, let’s say McDonald’s has 100,000 vendors.

With our software, we can go into their system and identify any third-party certification each of those 100,000 vendors may have, including diversity and sustainability certifications. We then report to the company what we find.

Additionally, companies often require their top vendors to complete Tier II reports on diversity spends — meaning the money those vendors spend with smaller diverse suppliers. When I was a chief procurement officer, I had people sending out spreadsheets and doing manual processes to collect data from our top suppliers — it was a big pain. Automated solutions like our Tier Tracker make it much easier for companies to aggregate data

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from their suppliers and gain more visibility down the supply chain.

Companies can also find new suppliers through our search database.

If you’re looking for a woman-owned print company in Dayton, Ohio, for example, you can search on that basis. At first, we focused solely on diversity, but now we’ve incorporated other elements of a supplier’s sustainability — including financial stability, sustainability ratings, and business risk.

What do you see as the role of business in solving social problems and creating a better world? How does ConnXus fit in?

RR: I didn’t think of us as a missiondriven, socially responsible company until I worked with impact investors who helped me see that we are. I take pride in the fact that the ConnXus platform not only enables small companies to connect with corporate buyers, but also helps large companies tell their story about how their procurement dollars impact the communities where they do business.

How would you describe the culture at ConnXus? RR: It’s almost as good as being at home. We have a very inclusive, entrepreneurial culture, and we want everyone to feel like this is their company. I may have started it, but it’s not my company; it’s our company.

Since our initial focus was diversity, we also felt it was important to walk the walk. Our employees are 40 percent women and 30 percent minorities, and we were fortunate enough to find people who matched our values. When you attract an early core group of people who reflect the values and culture you want to build, they tell other people. They help you recruit, and that’s what happened for us. Everyone continues to be involved in the recruiting process.

What do people most often misunderstand about what you do?

RR: People often interpret supplier diversity as something different than what it is. It’s just really good

ConnXus’ workforce is 40 percent female and 30 percent people of color.

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procurement. One of our clients, Procter and Gamble, will talk all day about how their diverse suppliers outperform their general market suppliers by a large margin, and there’s a lot of data around that.

With our data, we can actually show how women- and minorityowned businesses perform at high levels and bring higher levels of service to the table. Leading companies notice this, too, and they’re pushing diversity requirements down their supply chains because they get it.

Supplier management, risk management, and supplier diversity should all be a part of corporate strategy and integrated into day-to-day procurement activities. We’re finally getting there, and my goal is for our technology to continue to be a catalyst in making that happen.

You became somewhat of an accidental founder and CEO in response to a problem. What’s the best leadership advice you received along the way, and what does being a good leader mean to you?

RR: The best leadership advice I

“Companies are now viewing their suppliers as an extension of their company,” says Robinson.

His platform helps manage that relationship.

ever received is, “Hire people who are smarter than you, and create an environment where they can do their best work.” Great leaders want to work themselves out of a job. Whenever I hire someone who will report directly to me, I look for someone I’d want to work for. I want people who want my job and people who could do my job.

Once I made a couple of hires who complemented my blind spots, I realized how much the right people enabled me to truly be a CEO. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with great people, which frees up my time to work outside the business, focus on thought leadership, and think about where I see the market moving in five or ten years.

What’s your number one piece of advice for up-and-coming small-business owners?

RR: Focus on differentiation. Continue to be innovative, and think

about what sets you apart from your competition. A lot of small businesses are reactive. They follow the market as it moves, but they don’t stay ahead of the market — and it’s so important to focus on where the market is moving.

That gets back to surrounding yourself with smart people.

Small-business owners often try to wear too many hats and never give themselves time to think strategically about building a scalable business. They think, “I’m engaged and excited when I wake up in the morning, but then I get so exhausted because I have so much to do.”

In that sense, there’s really no substitute for hiring great people, because when you know the day-today is taken care of, you can make more strategic decisions about the business you want to build.

Relationships are also very important. When I was a chief procurement officer, I noticed that the most successful suppliers were

the ones who reached out to me before there was an RFP. They were trying to build relationships before they needed business, and often small businesses don’t focus on that relationship piece enough. People want to do business with people they know and trust — that goes for suppliers, banking, financing, or anything else.

What’s giving you hope?

RR: This next generation of corporate and procurement leaders cares about transparency. They want to know their suppliers and what their social and sustainability practices are. They want to know their supplier network operates ethically, hires diverse teams, and isn’t tied to slave labor, racism, and other social ills. Given the times we’re in today, it’s encouraging to see these trends in transparency growing stronger among young leaders.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

GOING

How a multinational public company is becoming a B Corp

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n 2017, Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber told shareholders about the company’s plan to obtain B Corp certification. The public statement was the first of its kind from a multinational company and signaled the next phase of an already ambitious sustainability journey at Danone.

Based in Paris, the $26 billion multinational counts Evian bottled water, Dannon yogurt, and Blédina baby foods among the well-known brands in its portfolio. With the recent acquisition of WhiteWave Foods, its North American subsidiary now includes the likes of Horizon Organic, Earthbound Farm organic produce, and So Delicious Dairy-Free beverages, cheeses, and desserts. In 2017, DanoneWave, the newly combined entity of WhiteWave Foods and Danone’s American dairy business, incorporated as the largest public benefit corporation in the United States.

Over half of all US states now allow companies to register as benefit corps — a move that requires boards to consider environmental and social impacts alongside shareholder value. B Corp certification, on the other hand, is entirely elective and independent of state regulation. Instead, companies go through the rigorous B Impact

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Assessment (BIA), which ranks social and environmental performance on a scale of 0 to 200. Any score higher than 0 points is a good score, as a positive score indicates that the company is doing something positive for society and the environment beyond standard business practice. Most companies that take the BIA score between 40 and 100 points, but only those scoring 80 or higher are eligible to become B Corps.

Danone started a partnership with B Lab, the nonprofit behind B Corp certification, back in 2015 — the first public multinational company to do so. Shortly after, it joined other conglomerates like Unilever and the Campbell Soup Company on B Lab’s Multinationals and Public Markets Advisory Council — tasked with setting a manageable path to B Corp certification for large multinational corporations. Now, as it starts sending its subsidiaries through the BIA process, the company is one step closer to earning the coveted mark for its entire operations by 2020.

“What’s inspiring about the B Corp movement is that it’s not prescriptive,” says Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab, who is personally working with Danone on its certification. “It’s not a regulatory framework from govern-

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ment, nor is it a bunch of activists telling you how the world ought to be. Instead, it’s opportunity-driven.

It asks companies to examine the opportunities they have to use business as a force for good and invites them to pursue what they find most exciting.”

As part of the 2018 Conscious Business World Summit virtual event, Lorna Davis, senior advisor to Danone’s CEO and global ambassador for B Lab, joined Coen Gilbert and Conscious Company contributor Nathan Havey to talk about becoming the world’s first multinational B Corp. What follows is excerpted from their conversation.

Danone is no stranger to embracing purpose as well as profit. For starters, can you tell us about Danone’s background in sustainability and how it influences the company today?

Lorna Davis: In 1972, Danone founder Antoine Riboud famously told executives, “The responsibility of the company doesn’t end at the factory gate.”

That was a pretty revolutionary thing to say in those days, and it paved the way for a new vision of corporate responsibility. Over the years, we upped the ante and expanded the definition of what responsibility means to us.

DANONE AT A GLANCE • Location (HQ): Paris • Founded: 1919; refounded in 1973 by Antoine Riboud • Employees: More than 100,000 worldwide • Structure: Publicly traded for-profit • 2017 revenue: $26 billion • Mission: “Bring health through food to as many people as possible.”

When it comes to the B Corp movement, we are hungry to take our role as leaders in the multinational world and say, “This is the future of business. Come join us.”

Why did Danone feel it was important to reach for B Corp status?

LD: We believe very strongly that you are the average of the people you hang around with most — at a personal level and at a corporate level — and we wanted to be part of this peer group that shares our values. With this type of goal, success boils down to two things. First, you’re the total of the people with whom you surround yourself. Second, a tiered set of goals carries clear implications for your behavior. If I, for example, decided I wanted to run a marathon, it would be clever for me to join a running club and hang around with other people who run marathons. It wouldn’t be clever for me to start smoking and sit in pubs. That goal also carries real implications for what I eat and drink, how often I run, and how I treat my body. The same is true for business.

In late 2015, through an agreement with B Lab, we committed to take 10 of our business units through the B Impact Assessment and be completely transparent about the results. The BIA rigorously evaluates a company’s impact on its stakeholders, and it’s an extraordinary tool for understanding where you are and how to get better.

The B Impact Assessment often reveals what a company is doing well while also illuminating areas that may need to be improved. For some, this can be a scary process. How did you get your team on board?

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LD: Business is an achievement system — and that’s what makes business so powerful. When doing the BIA, you’ll go through the normal stages of contentment, denial, confusion, and renewal that organizations face all the time. As a leader, I feel my number one job is to snap us out of contentment and denial quickly, understand what the facts are and where we need to improve, and organize a system to go after those goals.

For example, while going through the BIA at DanoneWave, one of the questions was about paying a living wage.

At the time, we didn’t even collect data on wages, and it became a scramble to figure out how to get that information.

LD: There is a minimum standard for becoming a B Corp, but then there are places you can choose to excel — and that’s where the process becomes magical. I recently spoke with Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia — which has an outstanding B Impact score of 150 that few companies can achieve. While it’s not necessarily a game about who’s got the highest score, again, businesses are achievement systems. When we hear about a company with such excellent performance, we ask, “How did you get that score, and how can we do better?”

You can then have a strategic conversation about where you’re going to double down, and you can choose to double

context in which you choose to operate, the more the implications become obvious. And over time, navigating those implications becomes embedded in your strategy and ultimately makes its way into your behaviors in a virtuous cycle.

Where do you see Danone and the broader business community in 20 years?

LD: Today, we’re shocked that people used to smoke in offices. Likewise, in 20 years, people will look back and say, “Can believe there was a time when business didn’t care about anything other than making money?” We’re

“in 20 years, people will look back and say, ‘Can believe there was a time when business didn’t care about anything other than making money?’”

We ultimately learned that 152 North American employees, out of 6,500, were paid below their local living wage [which is usually well above the minimum wage]. On one hand, that’s pretty good, but then you think of those 152 people who are struggling to make ends meet. The good thing is that then we knew who those people were and could tackle the problem quickly.

What I love most about this journey is that when you make a public statement and commit yourselves to this path, you invite everyone in your organization into the game. Everybody starts holding everybody else accountable. Even though the metrics, standards, and conversations with B Lab are incredibly difficult, those challenges are offset by the generosity of the B Corp movement and the willingness of companies to share best practices with one another.

In that way, it becomes fun.

Can you give us an example of how the B Corp movement inspires companies to help each other improve sustainability and social impact performance?

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down on anything, really. Although you’re being graded, it’s not like school.

It’s more like a sports game that allows you to play to your strengths. The process provides opportunity to excel in a way that’s consistent with the organization’s strategy.

The B Corp movement is out to use business as “a force for good.” How is Danone doing this, and what purpose does the company pursue beyond profit?

LD: Our overall mission is to bring health through food to as many people as possible. In that very simple statement, you’ve got health, you’ve got food, and you’ve got as many people as possible. When you drill down what that means, there’s a lot of there there.

Once you make a statement like “My goal is to bring health through food to as many people as possible,” that carries implications for your pricing, the product categories you choose to work in, and the way you treat people and the planet. The more you broaden the

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heading toward a future in which it will be normal and obvious for businesses to establish a purpose that’s much broader than that — and to embed that purpose into their strategy.

What should businesspeople do in 2018 to make that future happen?

LD: Ask the most junior people in your company about the kind of organization they’d like to work for. I’ve noticed that when I think I know certain things, I get myself into trouble. When I ask junior people about what they know, what they think, and what they hope for, a whole lot of things become clear to me. It may seem counterintuitive that less-experienced people could help you find your path, but businesses will succeed if they can do a better job with that.

Meet Lorna Davis at the Conscious Company Leaders Forum June 6–8: consciouscompanyleadersforum.com

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Can Mindfulness Create

More Impactful Workplaces?

Building emotional awareness and resilience at work makes for happier employees, allowing companies to create more positive impact on society, says serial social entrepreneur and Wisdom Labs co-founder Cory Smith.

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C

ory Smith, who founded five businesses over the course of more than 20 years, wasn’t always focused on using business to create impact in the world.

But while documenting World Heritage Sites in the 1990s, a life-altering experience changed his outlook.

“When I was in Jerusalem, I got caught in a suicide bomb,” he says.

“That totally changed my dynamic in terms of the way I was thinking about my purpose and what I’m here to do.

From that point on, I shifted from entrepreneurship to social entrepreneurship and began focusing on the impact of what I do and how to scale that impact.”

Smith’s latest venture, Wisdom Labs, provides training on mindfulness, resilience, and emotional awareness to companies in an effort to help them boost positive impact on people and the planet. We sat down with Smith to talk about how to foster meaning- and purpose-driven workplaces that support a healthy bottom line.

As we dive into discussing purpose-driven businesses, let’s start with your own. How would you describe Wisdom Labs’ purpose as a company?

Cory Smith: The Nobel Prizewinning biologist E.O. Wilson once said, “We’re starving for wisdom, and we’re drowning in information.” When Rich Fernandez and I founded the company, we asked ourselves: How can we scale wisdom? How can business be a vehicle for positive social change, and how do we align our purpose, the best of entrepreneurial practices, and that social mission together?

That’s what we call aligned entrepreneurship, and that’s what we’re doing here.

We see business as one of the best vehicles for positive social change, especially now, when the political sphere is so polarized that it’s tearing at our cultural fabric in a lot of ways and challenging our core shared values.

At Wisdom Labs, you focus on teaching mindfulness in the workplace.

How does this foster purpose-driven companies and increase the positive impact business can have on the world?

CS: Lasting change will be an inside job, but two common factors can hold businesses back. The first is chronic stress and burnout — 83 percent of US workers say they’re stressed at work.

Additionally, our work environments are more volatile, uncertain, complex, and faster-paced than ever before, not to mention the digital demand.

Chronic stress creates the conditions for a range of lifestyle diseases that generate massive healthcare costs for companies. At the same time, faster, more complex, and more uncertain work environments take a significant toll on employee engagement and performance.

We think the solution to both of these issues is self-regulation, self-awareness, and connection — and the foundation of these skills is based in mindfulness and compassion training that includes science-based methods to manage stress, build resilience, and increase emotional awareness.

These, we find, are the skills that address both chronic stress and the increasing pace and complexity that workers face. Emotional awareness and mindfulness training meet peoples’ needs at work, which can increase engagement and performance.

This is exciting news in a lot of ways because introducing these skills is in the best interest of a company, and we know companies do things that are in their best interest.

We see a growing number of entrepreneurs who are interested in creating positive social change, but we also know that the majority of startups fail. What do you wish more entrepreneurs understood about the mindfulness practices you teach?

CS: As a former CEO of the Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) conference and Hub Bay Area, a co-working space

in San Francisco, I’ve spent a lot of time around social entrepreneurs. They do amazing work, but the problem is they’re getting burned out. This often happens because they’re working in service of other people but not tending to themselves.

We need to turn this around so we’re actually taking care of ourselves, our organizations, our teams, and our culture — which enables us to better serve our clients and customers in the long term. The research indicates that the best way to practice better self-care and better organizational care is to bring mindfulness practices into an organization and, if at all possible, embed them into the culture so they begin to take hold.

It’s easy to imagine how a one-day mindfulness workshop or training may play out, but making mindfulness a part of company culture sounds more challenging. What needs to happen in order for that cultural piece to take root?

CS: After working with companies over the last five years or so, we see that the best way to achieve scale is through a multimodal approach that includes in-person, community-based, and digital tools.

It’s helpful to kick off your program with an in-person training, in which a mindfulness expert leads evidence-based lessons and teaches employees about practices they can experience firsthand.

Then, leverage the employee community by empowering people within the organization who are already passionate about this. We’ve built an ambassador program, for example, which supports early adopters and lets them lead from the inside out.

Finally, digital is where these programs really begin to scale. We offer web and mobile tools to help people manage specific work situations. These short lessons improve coping skills and teach tactics that can be applied in particular circumstances, which improves resilience and emotional intelligence over time.

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By working in a suite of solutions, you start to build programs that are much more holistic, and the resulting changes become systemic and rooted in the organization.

Tell us a little more about the culture at Wisdom Labs. How do these mindfulness practices and values show up for you personally and for your team?

CS: We all have our own practices, and they vary. Most of our team members practice meditation, and we bring that into the workplace. Our team meetings always start with a guided meditation, for example. People who aren’t ready to lead that can use a recorded meditation

like these are a nice-to-have or only a West Coast thing — when in fact, if you look at the evidence, things like chronic stress are real issues that people are dealing with.

Still, there’s a pervasive idea that “this is not for me,” and I don’t blame people for that. It’s hard for people to understand the benefits unless they have an objective experience that helps them realize: “This can help me to respond to work situations instead of react, and it allows me to take a minute between a situation, a trigger, and my response.” Those skills are huge in a fast-paced work environment where there’s a premium on collaboration and teamwork.

best solutions for those, they are rooted in mindfulness and compassion at their core.

We certainly don’t have all the answers here. That’s why we call ourselves a lab, because it’s all about learning, being inquisitive, and being humble in the process.

Are you hopeful that mindfulness will continue to catch on in organizations?

Do you think more mindful organizations will become more purposedriven?

CS: Yes, organizations are becoming much more receptive to building emotional awareness and resilience, and

“How can we scale wisdom? How can business be a vehicle for positive social change, and how do we align our purpose, the best of entrepreneurial practices, and that social mission together?” or just take a few minutes of silence to ground themselves.

From there, we do regular check-ins with our team members. This seems obvious in some ways, but being intentional about it helps us understand where people are and what they have on their plate — not just at work but also in life. If we know something is going on, we can help support the person who is having a tough time.

We also realize that people have full lives and seek to empower that. We work remotely on Mondays and Fridays, and we come together as a team on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and some Wednesdays — which fosters work-life balance.

What do business leaders most often misunderstand about mindfulness programs?

CS: A growing number of business leaders are beginning to see the benefits of mindfulness, but some people don’t take it seriously. They think programs 76

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Managing stress and uncertainty on an individual level is crucial. But some may say that businesspeople should hone these skills on their off time, while Wisdom Labs seems to suggest it can happen in the workplace. That may be a leap for leaders who think emotions should be checked at the door. Why do you feel the workplace can be a fruitful laboratory for developing these skills?

CS: That was our challenge from the beginning. For some, our proposal of scaling wisdom in the workplace seemed ridiculous. We recognized that the workplace has the biggest potential for massive, positive social change, but having these conversations at work isn’t a natural fit for some people.

Our whole journey as a lab has been to stay at the front edge of learning about the problems that people face at work and how to scale solutions.

Chronic stress and volatile work environments were the biggest problems we observed, and when we look at the

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we’re starting to see that this is really working. Our clients now include Salesforce, Starbucks, Facebook, BlackRock, Ford, GoPro, and Kaiser. I’m super excited to see these skills become part of the fabric of these larger companies, because those are the organizations that influence our global culture and values.

As we see mindfulness take root in some of these organizations, it makes me hopeful that we’re moving in the right direction — especially against the backdrop of today’s political environment. We may not be able to change everything that’s happening politically, but most of us work in companies, and that’s where we can have the most impact — right where we work. That’s really encouraging.

Meet Cory Smith at the Conscious Company Leaders Forum June 6–8: consciouscompanyleadersforum.com

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THE MOST IMPORTANT IMPACT INVESTMENT Is Not What You Think GINO D. BORGES

To affect the greatest change, impact investors must first invest in knowing themselves.

I

mpact investors were once a rare breed who inevitably raised eyebrows at the financial advisor’s office.

These forward-thinking pioneers asked tough questions about how their money impacted people and the planet and paved the way for expansive growth in impact investing over the past 15 years. They proved the heart can collaborate with the head and that it is indeed possible to get a competitive return without sacrificing core values.

With Millennials beginning to inherit the fortunes of yesteryear and awareness of global concerns everincreasing, impact investing is at an all-time high. And thank goodness — we need purpose-driven enterprises now more than ever. Commerce as a vehicle for positive social, environmental, and political reform is an integral part of finding solutions to global challenges, as it encourages and rewards true innovation. Of course, that innovation must be financed, but luckily impact investors are in search of somewhere smart to put their money.

The number of options for impact investors continues to skyrocket, but just like their traditional counterparts, not all impact investment opportunities are created equal. It’s well known that 90 percent of startups fail — increasing the risk for impact investors who, on the whole, tend to support early-stage social entrepreneurs.

In short: impact investors must choose wisely.

Deciding where to invest our money is a more personal journey than it may initially appear to be. The most common approach to creating an investment portfolio is to evaluate the standard metrics for risk and market assessment, typically outlined in an array of statistics and graphs. This detailed analysis certainly satisfies the

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mind, but rarely does it meet the needs of the heart.

Despite my mentioning it more than once already in this article, heart isn’t a word often exchanged at impact investor gatherings — but it is implied. The bottom line is that impact investors care. They care about making a difference. They care about the next seven generations.

They care about the role they play in this pivotal chapter of human history.

Surprisingly, though, amid all of this caring about global challenges, few impact investors have deciphered which causes they’re meant to serve. While they may be engaged on a number of issues, they haven’t pinpointed one that enlivens them or keeps them up at night. Part of this confusion is due to the overwhelming number of urgent problems begging for solutions, but a more pervasive reason is a lack of investment in self.

Too few impact investors spend the necessary time, energy, and even money required to dive deeply into self-reflection and inner excavation — the kind of work that gives us real answers about why we’re here at all.

Becoming clear about our purpose is a process that typically requires unraveling conditioned notions of what we “should” be doing. It is similar to choosing a major in college or a career path in life, and selecting our investments with the same care and consideration means taking the time to thoroughly inquire within. We need to be clear about the values and ideals that most fulfill us. We must constantly cross-check our choices with these pillars, and perhaps most importantly, we have to explore the uncertain terrain beyond our minds and venture into the wisdom of the heart.

As we push past layers of discerning logic and the endless train of cognitive processing, we enter a realm

of awareness that’s less concerned with labels and form and more focused on sensation in its raw state. Accessing this unprocessed data can give us insight into our alignment with various situations, people, and information, before the reasoning of the mind takes over. The journey to this level of realization looks different for everyone, but it always requires dedicated time, energy, and intention.

Investors who want to be driven by their authentic self — to go beyond the cultural chatter about what they should be doing — would benefit by practicing a “sensory baseline” each morning, before the secular world weighs in on the day. This is primarily a stillness practice, where you find a quiet place in your house or nature to scan bodily sensations for 10–20 minutes — understanding that the body is the home to authentic insights into our being. Once still, scan the body for what’s alive, what’s constricting, and what’s moving through you. Just witness the sensations.

Then reflect on your findings and allow them to influence your path as you bring your “whole self.”

The irony of moving beyond the mind to help with making investment decisions is that our choices become inherently more impactful, and thus more successful.

We might end up defining success in different terms, however, as rates of return begin to pale in comparison to the evidence of positive change in the issues closest to our hearts.

As impact investors aligned with our greatest callings, we become less satisfied with transferring funds to distant mission-oriented endeavors.

We find ourselves moved to be more involved and more invested in what we finance. We end up advising, encouraging, and committing to the end goal throughout the ups and downs. We become a sincere partner in a mission for good and may even laugh to discover that we forget to look at our return statements at all.

The intrinsic returns prove to be much more satisfying, but only when derived from a place of deep alignment. That begins with investing in our own self-exploration to discover where those alignments lie.

As partner and director of impact at OpenPath Investments (openpathinvestments.com), Gino D. Borges, Ph.D., works to transform apartment complexes into connected villages and strangers into friends. Gino is passionate about selfexploration as a means of unearthing our full power and potential. Learn more about his work at MakingMoneyMore.com.

parting thought...

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"IT WAS THE BEST THING I DID IN 2017."

— Bethany D.

Featured 2018 Speakers

MICHAEL C. BUSH CEO, Great Place To Work®

DANIELLE KRETTEK Principal & Founder, Google Empathy Lab

MARK RAMPOLLA CEO, Beanfields Snacks; Managing Partner, PowerPlant Ventures; Founder & former CEO, ZICO Beverages

JUNE 6–8, 2018 1440 MULTIVERSITY, SCOTTS VALLEY, CA

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DEEPA PURUSHOTHAMAN National Managing Principal, Inclusion, Deloitte

RODNEY FOXWORTH Executive Director, BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies)