When everyone in a team is aligned with the core purpose of a business, it should be much easier to make decisions and collaborate. But each individual has different values, so is it even possible for them all to be aligned?
Sarah:
Welcome to the Spirit of Business, episode number 82, Aligning Around Purpose with Matt Murphy and Sarah McCrumb.
Matt:
Hi Sarah.
Sarah:
Hi Matt.
Matt:
I had an interesting workshop the other day that I did with some business owners around purpose. And one of the things that I like to do is get strong alignment around purpose in a business. And there were multiple business owners in the room and so therefore the trick was, to actually honor everybody’s feelings about what the purpose of the business was. And whilst we ended up getting a purpose statement or a why they actually do what they do in an alignment, I could still sense that there was a variation to it. There wasn’t a complete unanimous one hundred percent alignment to a particular purpose. And I could feel that everybody comes from a different background or a different lens that then creates a different I suppose, nuance to the actual understanding of what the purpose of the business was. So I’d really like to talk about that because I think that if we actually are able to align, there’s strong power in that. And when we don’t have alignment, then that can actually cause businesses not to perform, to the level that they want to perform to. So I see purpose has been a really important element of business, as we’ve discussed it before in previous podcasts, but really talking about, can you have complete alignment between multiple business owners at the same time?
Sarah:
Or team members?
Matt:
Or team members?
Sarah:
Well, I suspect that it links very much with something that I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently, which is around values, that we each have our own unique set of core values, and I don’t believe that any two people have exactly the same values. And of course our values determine what we do to such a large extent. And so I think what’s really interesting is how do my values align with the values of the business? How do your values align with the values of the business? So what is it that we are looking for in the center of it? Is it like one thing? And what is our relationship with the purpose of the business?
Matt:
It’s really interesting you talk about values because when I go through purpose, the next thing I do is I talk about the values of the organization and what values do we want to have demonstrated in the organization. I tend not to have too many arguments or too many disagreements around values interestingly enough, when you talk about that, so I think we’re talking about values at a different level. Because when I talk about values in a business, you might talk about things like trust, honesty, respect, teamwork, those sorts of core values that you have in a business. And most people say, yes, I want integrity, which is doing what you say you’re going to do, or I want to make sure that people are personable, that they’re friendly and easy to deal with and those sorts of things, their values that we all go, yes, we sign up for these particular things and that’s how we behave in the organization. But I get a sense you’re talking about something deeper than that.
Sarah:
Well, John D Martini actually has a really interesting values exercise, which I looked at again recently. And so he looks at values really in terms of where do you put your time and energy and money? Where do you apply the most discipline? So what you really value, you’ll apply the most discipline to, for example, what you don’t value so much, you’ll kind of let go of at the edges. What you spend money on is what you value. And you might find that you’re spending a lot of money on things that you don’t want to value. So you’re valuing that at the moment. You might find you wanted to change your values. So that’s looking at values really as the driver for how we express ourselves as human beings. So I might believe that teamwork is a good value in the business, but is teamwork one of my fundamental values? Or am I actually somebody who’s really into personal achievement? Some of those people who say yes, I tick the box for teamwork, they’re actually really driven perhaps by excellence and personal achievement, not really teamwork at all. So they might like the idea of it, but in the way they live their life and conduct themselves in business, they’re actually living by a different value.
Matt:
Yes. What you said then is interesting too though, because you spoke about values and value. Okay, and they’re so linked, but they’re also very different concepts too at the same time, because you spoke about value in terms of what we spend money on, we value as opposed to a behavior. So in terms of values we value teamwork. But we place a value on an item in terms of purchasing.
Sarah:
But that item, let’s say somebody buys a lot of books then probably, depending on the type of books they might value, knowledge for example. So one of their values will be gaining knowledge, or it might be they read a lot of, I don’t know romance novels or something, and then what they value, perhaps it might be entertainment or it might be romance, so that is one of their values, which is what they value, which is therefore what they invest in.
Matt:
It’s really interesting, the way you just put that together then though, in terms of the values and what you ultimately value, so to speak.
Sarah:
And then of course that ties into business because business is all about value. And actually as businesses, we create things or sell things that other people or other businesses value. And so it all connects this whole thing to me, businesses completely about value. And it actually, ultimately always ties back to what people value or people in groups which make businesses value. So this very much ties in with what you started off with, which is about purpose and alignment.
Matt:
Because what you value will be the alignment piece about the purpose. What’s the purpose of the organization or the business is to provide value in some form.
Sarah:
In some specific specified form. Yes.
Matt:
Exactly. And so then the values explain further the purpose associated with it. And if we’ve all got different value propositions and values, then that’s where it’s hard to actually settle on one common purpose or common value at the end of the day.
Sarah:
And also, you know, you might have an organization that really values teamwork in the pursuit of the purpose of that organization, but let’s say as the business owner, I might actually really value having one of those people who’s a very high achiever and perhaps not that good at teamwork in the organization because of what they can give to it, even though they’re not fully aligned with some of the values of the business because any of those values are not total, you know, teamwork is great, but it’s not the only thing. You can’t only have teamwork, you need to be able to stir the team up a bit as well. And that usually takes somebody who’s not necessarily great at teamwork to do it. So it’s quite interesting, like we always say we want to have perfect alignment in this, but actually often the friction in life is what creates a lot of the spark. Of course, if the friction is too harsh or there’s too much of it, it just makes people unhappy, but without any friction it gets really boring.
Matt:
And we spoke about that in a previous podcast around making sure that you surround yourself with people that aren’t just, you know, frictionless, that you want them to actually rub against you to be able to then get the best out of you. And the same principle applies with what you’re talking about there. And this is an interesting point because is it unreasonable to think that we’re ever going to get a hundred percent alignment? Because everybody comes from a different value proposition and they value things differently because of their own personal circumstances. And it might be that they’re coming from you know, being the breadwinner in a family and therefore one of their, their strong values is around protection and support of their family. And the other person might be coming from a completely different sort of background and angle, and therefore they’re coming together and their ultimate purposes might be slightly skewed because they’re coming from a completely different lens.
Sarah:
But I see that as a good thing. I don’t expect everyone in a team to have the same values. I think what I would look for, and, you know, that might change through discussion even, what I would look for is that somebody is able to express their values, like participating in this business in their particular role, enables them to express their values in the kind of service of the business values and therefore they can actually gain a lot of fulfillment from being part of that organization. But they might not, like the ultimate purpose of the organization might not be one of their values. It might be a place where they can express their values, so for example, let’s say this business, my business, like if somebody doesn’t care about education, about, you know, the energy of money or something, maybe they just care about education in general, or maybe they just care about being in a business that’s doing something positive and they want to bring their skill and their energy and their contribution to that business. They don’t need to totally believe in the purpose of the business. They need to believe in their ability to contribute to the purpose of that business.
Matt:
So what I’m hearing there is, it’s like you believe in a subset of the complete set. If you’re saying that if this business is about education and about education and money, for example, or about, you know, better life or you know, better planet or whatever, you know, the belief system is, ultimately if they believe in a subset or an element of that and they feel they can contribute to that subset or element like education or, like, you know, bettering people’s life or the ultimate betterment of the world, then they go, well, I feel aligned to that. It might not be the complete alignment, but it’s alignment to a subset that’s part of the collective.
Sarah:
Yes, exactly and that feels more likely to be doable. But to me, this is really interesting because where you have different people running a business and they will always have different values, but maybe where they have a lot of responsibility, there are places where those values will hit up against each other. And that’s where tension builds up very easily. I think from my experience is also where a lot of good can come out if it’s well managed. I think in most businesses, people have no clue how to manage the tensions that come up from differing value systems. And so they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know how much can come out of that. So I’ve gradually been learning how to use those tension points as a place where a lot of creativity can grow because it shows where things are not aligned or where things are not worked out. But it’s quite challenging territory that.
Matt:
It’s massively challenging because I start to then really go back in time, the conversation I’ve had, you know, thousands of conversations with business owners around this particular topic on purpose and try to find purpose and, and some of the interesting conversations people going, I don’t care about the business to have a purpose. I do it because I wanna make money to look after my family. Like that. It can go from that extreme, you know, about a very self-serving, selfish thing around sort of, I just want to make money.
Sarah:
And that’s not really selfish, is it? Because in a way they’re saying, I want to take care of my family.
Matt:
Correct. Which is, from that perspective all the way through to an altruistic, I want to save the world, so to speak. You know, and you see, and you know, they’re getting sort of personal benefit from that because the fact that they feel good about themselves as well. So there’s, there’s still that element of it. But even inside of businesses, I see this constantly where you’ve got one person that, that might be very strongly egocentric around performance. And the ultimate goal of creating a really strong, viable business, doesn’t matter what business it is, it’s just, you know, it’s the element of being in business, so to speak, to as a, as an example of that. And the good that it’s doing for people to employ them and the services and the benefits through to, you know the person that’s in the business that’s going, actually, I feel good about the ultimate benefit that people are getting from this business, which is about a betterment of life. And you see that, I see that a lot with, and that’s where the tension lies. As you say, it’s not a bad thing, it’s actually a good thing because the tension can create friction, which can create a better outcome. I think where it falls down is where there’s a conflict with the values and the way that you go about it.
Sarah:
Yes. And I suspect that it doesn’t need to fall down there. I think things fall down, like personal relationships, business relationships, they fall down because people lack knowledge about how to deal with relationships. They like knowledge about how to deal with the tensions that arise when your values are not the same, which they’re not. They’re never going to be the same. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable because it doesn’t matter. You just both get on and do your thing. Sometimes it is really noticeable because there’s a direct clash of values. But when we know how to manage relationships, that’s very fertile territory. When we don’t know how to manage relationships very well, that’s very destructive territory. And it’s, you know, the basis of many divorces, business breakups, people getting fired, sometimes it’s good that somebody gets fired or it breaks up. You know, it really is a relationship that doesn’t work together. But I think a great deal of suffering is relationship suffering is caused by people actually just not knowing how to deal with tension and conflicts in values.
Matt:
And that makes so much sense when you start to break it down to that level to say, well it’s actually about the relationship, not necessarily about the alignment piece, because you’re not always going to be aligned. And I think what we’re talking about today is the unrealistic expectation that everybody’s going to be a hundred percent aligned and therefore when they’re not a hundred percent aligned, things start to fall apart. And then when things start to fall apart, things break up. But what you are saying is they don’t have to break up. If you can manage your relationships really well and actually start to understand the concept that it’s unrealistic to have a hundred percent alignment of values.
Sarah:
Well it’s a bit like romantic relationships. You know, people often in, in modern society, you often hear people saying, I’m looking for somebody who believes the same things as me, they’re really saying, I’m looking for somebody who has the same values as me. What’s the expression people use? They’re, well they’re always looking for somebody who’s almost the same as them. And actually the good relationships that I see is very, very rare that the partners are the same or similar. It’s often that they’re really quite different. They have different pacing, they have different ways of going about life. And there’s a creativity in the friction of that, which is not always easy. You know, there are challenges in those relationships, but there’s so much that can come out of it when you have this, you know, it’s like masculine and feminine. You don’t want masculine and masculine, feminine and feminine in just in terms of the creativity of something. You need the masculine and feminine or the positive and negative polarities.
Matt:
Which is Right. But without acknowledgement of that, and the unrealistic expectation of that people are going to act as the way that you think that they should be acting based on your own specific lens.
Sarah:
And your personal values
Matt:
And your personal values, the thing’s going to break apart.
Sarah:
Yes, I reckon whenever somebody’s behaving in a way that you really wish they weren’t, if you look at it underneath, you’ll start to see their values, what it is that they really care about. And you’ll normally find something really sensible there. You’ll realize that they care a lot, maybe about their family, for example, and there’s a way in which their family is threatened in the current situation, they don’t how to deal with it. And so they start acting in ways that seem very irresponsible or stupid to you. But when you get down to it, you see that’s what it is and it’s like, oh, hold on a moment, my family’s really valuable as well. I can understand that. So there is a way also in which our value, we don’t usually value bad things, we value good things, we don’t always know how to value them. So sometimes we do stupid irresponsible things in the name of valuing, but, I don’t see people who really fundamentally, like even people who maybe like take drugs or drink too much to deal with stuff that they’re not managing their life very well. But if you look underneath the surface, they’re valuing something and not knowing how to express that or not knowing how to resolve conflict around it.
Matt:
So in some ways bad behaviors coming from good intentions. Or the right intentions for valuing the right things. It’s just that they’re going about it in a unproductive way sometimes.
Sarah:
Yeah. Or sometimes it’s a way that gives you a short term hit and long term damage. You know, that you can see that maybe even people just value being relaxed or being uninhibited, feeling free. I’ve seen that a lot with people who drink that there’s just a freedom that it gives them, you can see the value of that and you know, and they know that in the long term it’s doesn’t give them freedom, but they crave it so much and don’t how to find it another way.
Matt:
That’s funny, the word freedom, I was thinking while you’re talking about freedom, I was thinking about the word protection, right? Because you’re talking about family and protecting family and ultimately what we’re trying to do is provide freedom to our families by protecting them at the same time. The same with businesses, we’re trying to provide a freedom to our lives and we’re trying to protect that freedom.
Sarah:
And control, often trying to find freedom through control.
Matt:
That’s right. And so therefore all these things actually are the opposite to get the opposite result. So any wonder the things start to get a little bit difficult in businesses if you’ve got one person trying to protect the other one trying to be free. The other one trying to, you know, protect to become free and vice versa. You can imagine why things start to, you know, get a little bit out of whack.
Sarah:
Yes, and so then it does come back to relationships because it is about values fundamentally. The purpose is about values, which are shared values or values to which we’re going to contribute. And we’re all about values as individuals. We’re in a way, we’re a kind of walking expression of values. And then how do we manage that? To me, that’s where having ability with relationships, being able to apply wisdom, for example, in decision making, being conscious therefore, very aware of options, expanding our awareness so that we can make good decisions. These become very important skills. Otherwise we run around on a kind of default programming where wherever somebody upsets us, we are just instantly hurt. We become a victim of that other person. We lose all our emotional sovereignty and control. And then we start to think uncontrollable thoughts. And you get crazy, like mad situations arising. And again, we see it in families and we see it in businesses like that’s not that person. And yet that person is in that situation because of a lack of, I just think a lack of education and a lack of experience in how do we relate with each other? How do we solve problems in relationships which are probably always around values. You value this, I value that.
Matt:
And I really believe that what talking about is concept of value is that’s where the key is in terms of understanding people and therefore why they behave a certain way and why we sometimes get disappointed or perplexed by people’s behavior in business and in life. You know, why do people do that? Why do they behave that way? It makes no sense to me at all as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. Right. How often do we think that, and especially in business and in, you know, when there’s a high stake, when you’re in business together with people, is that you’re thinking, oh, why are they doing what they’re doing? And it’s really getting down to that, oh, they’re doing it because they value this. And oftentimes that’s been threatened and it’s been, when it’s been threatened, that’s when people will start to behave in a very I suppose accelerator way sort of, in a bigger way that enhanced that. That might become very destructive or it might become difficult to manage. And it goes against what you think is the purpose of the organization and the values in which we said we behave in as part of it.
Sarah:
And I can see myself doing that sometimes. I can see sometimes, you know, somebody else’s way of doing things feels like it threatens my way of doing things. And in that moment I lose, in a way, I kind of lose touch with the higher values, which would actually resolve that threat. But in that moment where it feels threatened, I can feel that that’s, to me the ugly side of myself. And I think we all have that ugly side of ourself where we know we don’t behave in the way that we would like to because something that we really value feels threatened. In fact, it’s usually not threatened if we can really tap into our values. They also provide the key to the solution. But that’s something that also takes experience. Like if, let’s say you value freedom, freedom can be the key because then you need to give freedom to another person to value what they value. Freedom becomes the key to resolving issues between you and somebody else. But what happens is when you value freedom and somebody else seems to threaten it, you turn into a control freak and you start wanting to control the other person. You throw your core value out of the window in the moment where applying it would actually give you the solution. So this is a beautiful thing about human life. I just was like, I love that contradiction in it.
Matt:
And the other part of that is that if you want to give somebody else freedom, it might be expensive, your freedom. So therefore that’s why you think, well I’m not going to give that person freedom because it’s at my expense. People think, that feeling of limitation that you actually, there’s only so much that can go around. So therefore you need to have a piece of it. And if you give it away, it means you might lose an element of that freedom because you’re giving it to somebody else as a concept.
Sarah:
I see that a lot with money as well. Like if that person has more, I’ll have less. People often find it very hard to see that often more can mean more for everybody, that there are ways of thinking like that. You know, one of the things that I’m reflecting on as we speak is the fact, I think this is a very powerful thing about human beings is that values also are a really good way of aligning people. Because generally speaking, like I said before, what we value something that’s good. And values are very uniting, like valuing family, somebody else might, family might not be so important for them, but they’re probably not gonna say, oh, you know, I just wanna hate my family. People don’t want to hate their family. They might actually really not get on with their family. But generally speaking, we understand as human beings, if we could have really good family relationships, that’s a nice thing. And we value freedom, some people don’t value freedom that much. It’s not so important for them. But they probably don’t value the opposite. People don’t want to be in jail, even emotional, mental jail or physical jail, things like joy let’s say rather than money, maybe a sense of abundance or prosperity, they’re more positive words. Most people can connect with those even if they don’t experience it. If you say money, people will say, oh no money, they’re afraid of money, but abundance or prosperity, that feels pretty nice. So the things that we really value in our hearts are very uniting. I think we can agree around those. Integrity, for example, it’s like most people, it’s very rare that you’d find somebody who’s says like, I really value people being dishonest with me.
Matt:
And that’s why I don’t get any disagreement when we’re starting to go through the values of how we want to behave. Because we all, and this is a thing and I know that you’ll challenge this statement because we kind of all want the same thing, right? Kind of. Because there’s elements as you just demonstrated a minute ago of things. Some people want more of one thing compared to another thing. But ultimately there’s probably a collective of things that generally people want to have, you know, health, happiness prosperity, abundance, you know, those sort of put them into that particular category and then we’ll probably select a subset of those that we, we gravitate towards. But what we spoke about before kind of hit me with regards to this, especially in business, is that there’s a conflict that around this concept of poverty compared to abundance and the poverty is that if you’ve got it, I might have less of it and so therefore I’m going to protect it. And that’s when it starts to get a bit haywire, I think.
Sarah:
Yes, we have all been educated into a scarcity mindset. So whether it’s about money or whether it’s about anything else, we tend to go into this, there’s a certain amount available and if you have more, someone else is going to have less. And there are situations, you know, and I know of families where when they grew up there wasn’t enough food and parents sacrificed themselves or children went hungry or whatever. So it’s real. And at a certain practical level, if you look at money, it appears to be like that, if I pay you money, I’ve got less and you’ve got more. But that’s not a helpful way to look at money because money’s always part of a flow. And the way we spend money also influences the money that comes in and the money that comes in influences how we spend it. And there’s so much more to it than just a single transaction. So I’ve never found it helpful to look at it that way. But we have grown up in a society where we’ve been taught to look at the world also as having a set number of resources which are going to run out rather than looking at, we have a need for energy and maybe certain reserves will run out, but there are many other ways of producing energy. But we still look at, oh, the reserves are running out rather than what are the needs for energy? How can we fulfill those needs? So we’re beginning to look in that kind of way more. And people are very scared of abundance now because they think that we’ll go beyond the capacity of earth you know, we’ve got this thing that we are going to destroy. We are the destroyers of our planet. And I think that’s a very unhelpful mindset actually. We need to get beyond that. What I notice is when people are more connected with a sense of abundance and generosity, they don’t actually become greedy and accumulate everything they possibly can because they don’t have the fear anymore that they’re going to run out. And so it actually calms everything down. Rather than making everyone into greedy bastards kind of thing, like who are going to rape and pillage the whole planet. It actually makes people much gentler, members of the ecosystem who can find their place. But I think this scarcity mindset is so strong in us also from school. Like one person could come top in any exam or any test or class or whatever, one person can come top. The whole thing was built on this kind of squeezing of people into rank and order, crazy.
Matt:
Which is really interesting where we’ve got to in this conversation, around starting with purpose and alignment. But the connection that I kind of got then is that if I like the word generosity and abundance, okay. And I’ve learned that concept of poverty to abundance in terms of thinking about money and those sorts of things, but, and the scarcity element of it. And that can be sometimes a strong element as to why some of those relationships do break up in businesses like we’ve spoken about before. But maybe one of the keys to the alignment piece and keeping people on track and honoring the relationships and not sort of breaking things up is a word. Generosity. And having this sort of concept of thinking about how we actually ensure that we maintain alignment, but building the, the value of generosity in that, because that becomes true north as far as I’m concerned, that every time you actually go through a process and you start to maybe have a differencing of opinion about certain things. But if we start to talk about, well, okay, but how does this link in with the value of generosity? I think that could be a connecting point.
Sarah:
It’s very expansive generosity. And it’s also it’s actually, I think generosity is beautiful. It’s not selfish generosity, that kind of generosity like where I give, give, give and don’t receive anything that’s not generous, there’s a kind of poverty of spirit in that. But if I’m willing to receive generously and give generously or share generously, and if I’m willing to have a generous spirit towards other people, I create space for people to be themselves and then I can find out, I can learn about their values and learn to appreciate their values and the difference between them and me because where there’s generosity, there’s spaciousness.
Matt:
Yes, that feels really good. And I think that that could be a piece that underpins alignment of purpose when we’re trying to come together and ensure that we’ve got something of commonality that we’re going to always point to, to say that this is what we’re trying to ultimately achieve too with a lens of generosity.
Sarah:
Yes. That’s a very beautiful place to end up.
Matt:
Well it’s been really interesting, because I’ve got a lot out of this conversation just thinking about why do people behave a certain way and it really does come down to what they do value. And then if you understand that and you understand your own, then you can, then it comes back to that relationship piece. And then how do we sort of underpin that with something bigger that then binds us together? And I love how we sort of ended up in that term of generosity.
Sarah:
Yes. And then I can literally feel that moment where I want to be mean or I won’t be limited or you know, I feel threatened. And it’s like what happens when I say, okay, let’s be generous in this situation. I don’t have to give everything up. I don’t have to kind of like, oh, well whatever I care about doesn’t count. It’s the opposite. It kind of creates room for me and for you, for the other person, for us both. And that’s what feels so expansive about it.
Matt:
Well, it’s been another lovely chat Sarah, so thank you so much.
Sarah:
Thank you Matt.
You’ve been listening to the Spirit of Business with Matt Murphy and Sarah McCrumb. If you’d like some insight into the spirit in which you do business, a great place to start is by looking at your relationship with money. Find out more by taking the Money scorecard@moneyscorecards.app and we’ll be back next week.
