The Business of Fighting Hunger
Read More
New Year, New Perspective: Interview with Shane Jackson on Aligning Work and Life Values
The 2024 Business Generosity Report found that a staggering 95% of employees see positive culture as a crucial element of business generosity – with “purpose” topping the list of what creates a positive culture. But what’s the difference between a company purpose and personal purpose? Are employees confusing the two and placing unrealistic expectations on Chief Executives?
We sat down with Shane Jackson, president of Jackson Healthcare, to discuss his latest book that delves into the importance of personal purpose and what role, if any, a business can play.
In this interview, Shane Jackson explores how defining one’s personal purpose – the joyful experience of life – can guide Chief Executives in their decision-making, foster authentic leadership, and create a more fulfilling career.
While business cannot provide a personal purpose to employees, Jackson explains how clarifying your company’s purpose can offer individuals the space to find alignment with their own purpose, leading to a more thriving workplace culture.
Searching for Purpose in Business and Life
Seven years ago, when I wrote my first book, “Fostering Culture,” it was exclusively intended for our leadership team here at Jackson Healthcare. The purpose of the book was to outline the company’s culture for all our leaders, specifically the values and beliefs behind why we do what we do.
The more I talked about culture and encouraged other leaders to be intentional about the culture they were creating, one thing became clear. As a leader, if I want to be intentional about the atmosphere you’re creating for the people it leads back to some very personal questions about my values and beliefs and things that are important to me and what I want to outcome of my leadership to be. Which really is a reflection of what do I want the outcome of my life to be.
So, the second book, “This Is The Thing: About Life, Joy, and Owning Your Purpose,” is not a business book, it’s not even a leadership book. Although it has implications for both business and leaders, it is written for anyone who is thinking about some of the deeper questions of life and thinking about how they can live out their purpose in their life.
Defining Personal Purpose
My definition of purpose is simply the way you experience the most joyful version of your life. Most people think about being happy, but I think happiness is this elusive thing that nobody can really pinpoint exactly what it is. What most people are looking for when they talk about happiness is a desire to experience the emotion of happiness, or what psychologists call joy.
Therefore, purpose is the most joyful version of your life, which requires an understanding of what causes you joy and how to choose joy in every part of your life. Discovering one’s purpose requires an understanding of oneself. This includes identifying one’s passions, strengths, and those activities that naturally bring joy.
Building a Lasting Legacy Fueled by Purpose
When considering legacy, I prefer to focus not on what will happen years after I am gone, but rather on the impact I can have on the people I care about today and in the future, including my future self. What kind of legacy do I want to leave for myself? What kind of life experience do I desire to have twenty years from now and how that impacts the choices I make today about how I spend my time, what I eat and drink and do, how I invest in my relationships, what I do at my job, and how I work. All these things are building a legacy for my future self.
Defining the Role of Purpose in Business
An organization can’t create personal purpose. What you want to experience in your life, what you’re passionate about, that’s an intrinsic thing.
As a company, and as a leader, what I can do is create an environment and a clarity on what we are trying to do as an organization and the way that I’m going to lead. This allows employees to decide if their personal purpose and beliefs align with what we’re doing as a company, enabling them to choose to join or opt out.
As a company, and as a leader, what I can do is create an environment and a clarity on what we are trying to do as an organization and the way that I’m going to lead.
Over the last several years I think there’s been some misunderstanding in leadership circles around purpose. Leaders think they must create a lofty purpose that they are going to change the world to provide employees with a sense of personal purpose, but I believe this approach is misguided.
It all goes back to the idea of authenticity as a leader. Don’t come up with a grandiose sounding corporate purpose that’s altruistic that you think will make people feel good but has nothing to do with the way you’re going to lead. It’s better to not even talk about purpose because people will quickly see past the nice poster on the wall if none of those things are part of how the business operates. If those values on the wall in the conference center don’t actually guide decisions, then people are going to turn against you.
Whatever your company’s purpose is, whatever you’re trying to accomplish, be clear about it and let people decide if they want to opt or opt out.
Leadership Starts with Personal Purpose
If you want to be intentional and authentic about the way that you lead, about your decisions, about what you incentivize or punish in your culture, or about the atmosphere that you want to create, I don’t know how you do that effectively without an understanding of your personal purpose.
If you don’t have clarity on your personal purpose, your personal values, beliefs, then you will likely substitute it with someone else’s. You will create a purpose based on what you think the organization wants from you or what you think society expects of you. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point where you look around and say, this is not what I was hoping for. This is not the experience I want my people to have. This is not leading. All the decisions that I’ve made has not led to where I hoped I was going.
If you don’t have clarity on your personal purpose, your personal values, beliefs, then you will likely substitute it with someone else’s.
To be an effective leader, but also to lead in a way that you’re going to be glad you did, it’s vital to really ask yourself some deep questions about what you want the experience of your life to be. The good news is that the people who resonate with the way that you’re leading, the purpose that you have, they’re going to be all in. When there’s an alignment between the personal you and the work you, the personal you and you as a leader, then you start to build a tremendous culture.
How Purpose Clarifies When to Say “No”
One of the hardest just questions as a leader is “what do I say no to?” How do you tell someone no? Sorry, I’m not going to do that. Sorry, I’m not going to talk about that. Sorry, I’m not going to take that meeting.
I don’t know how you make that decision without a clear sense of purpose. As a business, when you don’t have clarity on that, you don’t know what’s a distraction or not. With a clear purpose, you can determine what is an opportunity or what doesn’t fit with what we’re trying to accomplish, and then you can say no to that.
Knowing my personal purpose, not only in what I’m trying to accomplish through the business, but in my life and the impact I want to have on the people that I work with, offers more clarity and enables me to know what to say no to and what to say yes to.
If I have more clarity around my personal purpose, it enables me to have a framework to view all decisions.
Helping Employees Find Their Purpose
We invite every single person that comes to work in Jackson Healthcare to spend some time thinking about their personal values to determine if there’s alignment between their values and the way we run the business.
Through our Leadership Development Program, we also invite all our leaders to go into a much more in-depth process to understand their personal purpose and how they experience the most joyful version of their life. We do this so that they can decide if they can experience that life as a leader at Jackson Healthcare.
If you have leaders who have alignment between what they want to do in their personal life and what the company is doing, then they feel like they can live out their individual purpose much better. This creates much more engaged leaders.
People are always looking around to see if they fit in, can I live and work here in a way that is consistent with the way things I think ought to be done?
As a leader, in the more in touch you are with your purpose and the way that you want to experience life, the easier it is to see if the place you are working at is a good fit for that life, allowing you to stay or leave. I think that’s true for anyone in the organization, but especially for leaders, which is why we want leaders with a tremendous understanding of their personal purpose and really see a path to living that out here.
A New Generation Redefines Work
We’re seeing an earlier shift in people being purposeful around the tradeoff between greater earnings and the time to be able to explore other parts of their life.
Normally, as people age, they start making that choice – “I could accept that promotion, but that’s going to mean less time with my kids, or I could keep working, but I want to retire.”
We can no longer rely on higher salaries to make people satisfied in their work. People are looking at their job as part of the tapestry of their life, and they’re making trade-offs earlier on.
What’s interesting is you’re having younger people be more conscious about making that choice earlier in their life than some previous generations did. I think as leaders, we must realize that that’s where so much of our workforce is. We can no longer rely on higher salaries to make people satisfied in their work. People are looking at their job, their career, as part of the tapestry of their life, and they’re making trade-offs earlier on, and I think that’s wonderful thing.
The Myth of Work-Life Balance
Understanding purpose enables you to choose joy in the moment you are in, regardless of the season that you’re in, regardless of the changes that are happening.
The danger in the idea of work-life balance is that we will be constantly disappointed if we expect our lives to exist in this place where everything is perfectly balanced, because that almost never occurs.
What you see in life, just like in nature, is that things are constantly changing. You have seasons of your life where you’re working a lot and then seasons of your life where you have a lot more time to invest in relationships and focus on you as an individual and making yourself better. That doesn’t occur just over the decades of your life, it occurs over the course of a year, sometimes over the course of a week and even a day.
Instead of thinking about how I perfectly balance my work and my life, it is more helpful to think about the different parts of your life and how the weight and the emphasis and the time and energy you spend in different parts of your life is going to vary and embracing that change. This enables you to embrace the journey of your life.
Understanding purpose enables you to choose joy in the moment you are in, regardless of the season that you’re in, regardless of the changes that are happening.