Expert Interview: Laura Stone
In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by leadership consultant Laura Stone to explore the topic of leading with purpose.
Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essentials Series. I'm Mari Ryan. I'm the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Laura Stone.
Laura is an experienced strategy and leadership development consultant, an executive coach, and a sought after keynote speaker and author. She's the founder and CEO of Purpose Stone. She brings more than three decades of experience to her work, helping executives, teams, and organizations harness the power of their own purpose to create effective and sustainable change. Her first book, A Pocket Guide to Purpose … let me make sure I've got that right there … A Pocket Guide to Purpose: A Quick and Simple Way to Assess and Advance Your Purpose was published in 2017, and her new book is coming in 2021. Laura, welcome.
Laura Stone: Thank you, Mari. I’m so excited to be here with you.
Mari Ryan: Oh, thank you. I'm excited to have you here as well. Our conversation today is around purpose and when we think about this from an organizational perspective, do organizations exist solely to create profit? Is there something bigger and more aspirational at work within organizations? So as we explore the topic of purpose, we're going to look at the reasons an organization's purpose is so important. But, Laura, to start, I'm curious about how did you come to focus your work in the area of purpose?
Laura Stone: Thank you. It's not something I walked out of undergraduate school and said, okay, I'm going to study this. This evolved over time because my career has been dedicated to leaders and leadership development and specifically understanding what makes them great. Early on in my career I had a fortunate opportunity to work with some colleagues who helped me be participating in research based out of the Harvard School of Social Relations, and the research was all about what differentiated average from superior leaders, specifically, what do they think about in order to make superior results occur? So one of the main areas was specifically pride in work. What makes me proud? What makes you proud? What makes us collectively proud? And that began my real journey probably about 20-plus years ago, specifically around .. and I that's where I narrowed in on purpose specifically.
Mari Ryan: Well, that's so interesting. And I'm curious from your research, why should employers care about purpose? What is the benefit to an employer of even caring about this?
Laura Stone: Well, so many of you all, you can think of your own experience where organizations talk about vision, for example. and a lot of times that's a marketing role. It’s the marketers who will then make the nice plaques, the mugs, it goes on walls. And it's a disconnect between senior leadership and the rest of the team members. When we do purpose, work with specifically teams, different than doing with individual leaders, is something where that actually is far more important about the dialogue that gets created from thinking about what's going to make us proud, which incorporates vision as the ideal future state. That's what the definition is compared to mission, which is why we are here.
Purpose and specifically purpose statements the way we do them is wrapped all around how we imbibe meaning and intention and impact to the world we want to be impacting overall. So that's the main thrust of it, and the why organizations want to do this and need to do it is a lot of times they get caught into objectives and thinking that this is what our strategy is versus what's the overarching reason for our existence. What I love about Collins's work, he talks about. If you disappear tomorrow, would it matter? And purpose really is all about what matters. Why are we really here? What's the difference we want to make? What's the legacy we want to leave? When employees are proud of their work, they work harder, they're more connected. They're more willing to bring their friends to interview at the company. They stay longer, they're healthier, they're happier. They're more focused. So, those are just a few.
Mari Ryan: Well, all good ones. And let's just unpack that a little bit. So creating that meaning as you described it, both the meaning and impact it can have for the world, but also the meaning that it can have for the individual employees.
Laura Stone: Yes.
Mari Ryan: Okay, so it's really how that impact is going to be seen, so the legacy, but it would seem like the meaning from the employee perspective is got to be really important. I mean, after all, that's one of the key things that people say they want, or employees or candidates say they want in a job today.
Laura Stone: Yeah. And this is where it's all about the dialogue compared to the plaque that gets put on the wall, and the dialogue between a leader and their direct report and team members. If you think about team members having the conversation of like, what is it? Why are you at this company? You have choices, and especially in this job market, talent is a parallel challenge right now, finding key talent. It’s not about looking in the want ads, it's about stealing employees from other companies and luring them in and creating such an opportunity, and looking at how they are going to have the dialogue about making it meaningful is what's been the differentiator, especially with GenXers who are looking at not just the paycheck that they want to make and be out there for the 70-80 hours a week. They want to know their work matters.
Mari Ryan: For sure. I get it. It absolutely has to. I'm curious, how do organizations actually create this sense of purpose and help employees connect to that? Is this done sort of at the organizational level? Is it done at the team level? Tell us a little bit about when you're working with an organization, how do you make this happen?
Laura Stone: So the first answer is yes, because it's wherever it's possible, wherever there is interest. One of my clients had a great saying. He goes, GWYFA, and it stands for Go Where Your Friends Are. And the intention was, if there is a leader who's interested in purpose and I'll give a quick example. I have a client of mine who is one level down from the CEO. She wanted to do this work. She was a new president or new GM of her division and she knew that this was going to be a really important way to help align her team. So that was the way in to have an interested business leader. Another way in is around having a CHRO or head of talent or one of the areas around human resources come in and say, we need to think about how we bring our talent in connection for our talent closer to something more meaningful. So it come in that route. It can also come in a third route around strategy, specifically we need to do our alignment work for this next coming year, and this is a rallying cry. Why are we really here? What is the work that's going to make us proud and differentiate us to helping do strategic line work? So I always answer the question. It depends how this stuff starts happening.
Mari Ryan: Well, that's a good answer, because it does depend. Yeah, I love that. I know that a lot of your work is with leaders, and I'm curious, what does it mean to lead with purpose?
Laura Stone: I think most important is about impact and intention. They're very conscious and awake to their role and the power they hold and how they wield and use that power for good and to help elevate others and help facilitate the growth and development of their people who are the closest to the front lines, especially to enable customers to be happy. So if we think about it, I'm always talking about inversing the hierarchical org chart. Instead of a CEO thinking that they're on top, they really have to look at themselves at the bottom and say, how do we serve our people? Because the people on the front lines are really the most important constituents that we have to make sure are taking care of and we remove the obstacles for them to be successful.
Mari Ryan: Exactly. And that makes a perfect connection to wellbeing because we have to make sure those people are cared for. In our model that we use, which is sort of thinking about wellbeing at the individual level, and when you bring your individual wellbeing to an organization, the organization can either support that wellbeing or diminish it. But purpose is actually at the center of that model. How can having a clear sense of purpose support wellbeing for the individual?
Laura Stone: That’s such a good question. I'll give a quick example. So we were doing work, colleagues and I, over in London with Unilever and they made a very clear case that they were going to dedicate the top 300 to helping them figure out their individual purpose. In doing that work, we would get cohorts put together from around the world. What was interesting is what I'm about to share with you crosses culture, gender, religion. It really cuts to the heart of the essence of someone's energy, specifically on an energy level when you know that you are on to something and you feel like you are in flow, it’s paying attention to those things. And when we are in that way, we're actually working at a more efficient and heart-centered and effective place compared to if we think about when time is ticking and we hear every tick, tick, tick. It's painful, right? No one wants that. We want to be in flow, we want to be generating and be effortless and out there.
So when it comes to wellbeing what we know is purpose drives us when we are spending even time thinking about it, working on it, working towards it. It's something – and even it is just on a personal place where it is not what you do for a vocation, even if you're spending just a couple of percentages more of your time in that arena. The research is showing that you are happier, you are performing better. You're more focused. Also on the downside is when you don't have it, there's a higher level of depression, anxiety, fear. Purpose also gives you clarity around direction. What I also know with all my clients is when you have fear, fear stems from an indecision. You start taking action, you feel better. And purpose helps give you the clarity of where you are going with those decisions and aligning them accordingly.
Mari Ryan: Wow, that is really rich. Thank you for sharing that, and it just makes me think why wouldn't everybody want to be focused on purpose? It's not just us thinking this. Everybody should be focused on purpose.
Laura Stone: I happen to agree. And that's why when I started writing this book, I wrote the first book and was actually for a taxi driver. I had just literally been at an executive leadership conference where I was leading the alumni through all this purpose work, three days. I get into the cab and it was right around election time, our last round of election, and it was a very difficult time for people of color. It was a very difficult time in Texas specifically. When I got into the Uber, the driver said, why are you, what are you doing here? And I said, we happen to be doing a purpose conference. Oh, my God, God has brought you to me. And I'm like, okay, don't hear that very often in the first few minutes of a taxi ride. And he said, I need your help. And I'm like, tell me what's going on. He says, not only today has it been very difficult for people who used to take buses. They're taking Ubers and they were getting attacked, literally. Also a place where he was seeing and realizing he has to do something more and he wants to do something more.
So in six minutes that I had left before I get into the Dallas Fort Worth airport, I started realizing I don't have one book because I was doing work at Harvard and we have a whole curriculum, 12 weeks, and there's a list of the syllabus and then all this work for the privileged people who get to spend time on us. Well, what about people who are driving the taxi? How do we make this easy and accessible?
So the next morning I woke up and I started drawing pictures and I did a storyboard of if Walter could get this, what would it be that it could help and help him advance his thinking on and emerge the pictures, the visuals, the things that were important to him. And that's how the book came about. It was because I also realized it could not be a book of two hundred pages. Walter just doesn't have time for that. Nor do most of my executive clients because there's so many stories and anecdotes – great -- that we can get more to them, but get them off and running was most important. That's why it's a picture book that actually could be read in seven minutes.
Mari Ryan: And I love that it's just such a beautiful book. I mean, look at how wonderful and beautiful it is. So thank you for sharing all that. Again, it's a great. Tell us a little bit about your next book. What's in your next book?
Laura Stone: Oh, I'm so excited because I feel like everything keeps coming back to this next book. The next book is also a pocket guide to purpose, but is actually for leaders. And the reason why it’s for leaders, it's geared to helping a leader think about it for themselves, and also, why are their employees there, their team members, their direct reports there? What makes them tick?. The more that a leader is clear about what makes this person unique, what's their unique fingerprint, what gets them energized, the more that leader can be very conscious, aware and intentional with the kind of projects that they are being asked to bring their people to do. The more they can connect those projects with a person's excitement, energy, purpose, the better off everyone is and more productive, and the outcomes are phenomenal.
So I created a process called the rapid performance process, and it's a way to help leaders think about how do I actually have a dialogue so that no matter which organization or the processes you use in your company, all this is a really clear cut set of questions that you as a leader think about ahead of time and walk through your own mental prep. You give it also to your direct reports. They think about this and then you walk in and you say, okay, what does it mean to get a ten out of ten or an A+ in this job? All of a sudden the leader starts unloading and realizing, here's what I have thought of, then you start realizing how actually it got interpreted. So the connection points happen much faster, and then you use it as not just a once a year annual review, but it's really intended to create, at a minimum quarterly. Ideally, you start using subsets of it on a weekly every other week time frame and you start monitoring the progress that matters most.
Mari Ryan: Well, those sound like wonderful tools and certainly things that can help people move to action in a short time to be able to make progress on their purpose. I can't wait to see your next book. If our audience wants to learn more about you and the work that you're doing or to find where they can get your first book, where can they find you, Laura?
Laura Stone: Well, first and foremost, we have a new website that's about to be launched and it's at laurastone.com. Easy peasy. if you remember or you want to think about purpose, Purpose Stone will also get you there. Amazon has the book. The next book will be on Amazon as well. And we just make it easy for people to order it for Christmas and buy it for their teammates and it's been a really beautiful gift the people have been giving to each other for a number of years now.
Mari Ryan: Well, it's wonderful. I can't wait to be one of the preorders for your next book and certainly something that I can use to gift as well. Laura, as always, it's wonderful spending time with you. Thanks so much for being here for this conversation today.
Laura Stone: Thank you so much. And I appreciate the opportunity to be with you and all your people on this. Thank you.
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