Leading With Authenticity

Good morning everyone. Happy Monday. Hope you're having a great week so far. Start of your week, it's Monday. We're here. I'm going to give everybody a few minutes as we dial in to jump in today. I'll simply invite you, if you're on replay, to type replay. It's bright so I'm adjusting the sun a little bit. Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing today? As everybody jumps in today, I'm going to invite people to type in one or two words about how you feel this morning. On this Monday, it's 9:00am Central Time.

So wherever you're located, it should still be morning. Unless you're in an international country, then it might be different. So my name is Gina. Jules. If you're new to me, I'll just give you a little context and background. I am a life coach. I am a so I work with executives, leaders, teams. Good morning, Jules. I am a consultant. I take teams through transformation, designing out their change and communication plans, building out their business strategies, helping them to think differently. I have a human centered design thinking approach so I use a lot of personality inventories but also meet people and leaders where they're at so that we can hit the key things that are important to each individual to make sure teams are set up for success.

I'm also a Reiki master and do sound baths and I teach a lot of spin classes and co own a small business so I am a doer. So today on Monday, I'm going to invite you to type into the chat one or two words about how you feel today. And if I did this on a Tuesday or Wednesday or any other day of the week, I'd ask you to do the same thing because it's really important for us to check in in the moment because how we feel right now could impact how we interact with people an hour from now, how we interacted with people as we started our day.

So my word for right now is present. I am intentionally finding calm today on this Monday, trying to take whatever, whatever energy I have in each moment and use that energy that's available and accessible to me. If you dialed in yesterday, I just flew back from Japan so the time change can be a little wonky. So I am allowing myself to have some grace as I move through Monday today. So our topic for today is passion and purpose. Now when I think about passion and purpose in the workplace, I would love to know your reaction to those words and if you think that there is an association to your work with those two words.

So the first word, passion, I'll invite you to type into the chat. How do you see passion play into your work? Why do you think it's important for you as an individual if you do and if you don't, type that and how you see it plays out for you as a leader? And lastly, you know, the conversation can be, how do we allow that to play into our leading teams? Passion. Jules says today her word is balance. Your emotions are on a roller coaster today, so it's great that you can take a time and a pause to acknowledge that it's really important.

So thank you for sharing. So, passion in the workplace. So I get a lot of flack from people when I bring up that word at work. I have gotten flack from family members bringing up that word in the workplace. And the questions that I often get are, why do I feel like we get to have passion in the workplace? How does that impact your work? And why do I, Jean, feel like I need to have that for my work? All great questions, all very valid questions. So for you, if you have questions like that, type them in the chat.

But I'd love to hear if you believe that passion has a place in your. In your job, and if you're a leader, why you may or may not think passion is important in the work. So for me as a coach, why I believe that passion is really important is I believe, based on not just what my experience is, but there's a science called appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology. Jules says it gives a sense of purpose and drive to me. I love that. Thank you for sharing. So in the two sciences, Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology, passion is kind of at a core.

It's at a foundational level within those two sciences. Now, here's why. If I'm applying myself in a way that allows me to feel energized, excited about the work that I'm doing, I will be exponentially more successful. That means that I might get more promotions. It means that I might get more raises or even more opportunities to do special work, special projects. If people can see us shining, excited every day when we come into work, they can see us leaning into the work and having, for lack of better words, joy in our jobs.

People want that or they want to be surrounded by that. It's contagious. So the more that I can find passion in my work, the more that I can lean into that passion, that excitement, that joy, the more successful I can be when I make that statement. How do you feel for some people when I say that they feel a little bit of conflict. Why do we need to have passion in our job? My job is to show up at work, check the box, and then go home. My passion is at home. I garden or I have these other hobbies.

I might do woodworking or sports. I don't have passion in my job. I get that a lot. And all of that is valid. My point here is, is that when we're showing up to work, taking an inventory of how we feel when we show up to work is extremely important so that we can honor how other people might be feeling in that day. If somebody's coming into work super excited, they had a great weekend, but we're coming in tired and drained. How we show up to support them could cause conflict, or it might not allow us to support them in the way they need to be supported to do their best work, especially if you're a manager or a team member.

So it's really important that we can understand that sometimes. We often find that if somebody is really passionate about their work, they're going to talk about it a lot. They're going to talk about their successes, they're going to talk about their highs with their job, where what they're working on, they're going to want to share it with everybody. And if you aren't passionate about your work, if you are coming in and checking the box and all of that is okay, right? Because it takes time to figure out what is it that really brings us joy in our job.

And then it takes us time, plant the seeds to be able to get there. But once we can find it and feel it, see it and recognize it in others and take that pause, we can make choices now. A lot of times I'll hear from surveys, like engagement surveys, where people believe that the manager has the control for their job, for their work. To some extent they do. That's not wrong. But I as an employee have an equal responsibility for my own happiness at work. So if I say that for some of you, that might ruffle some feathers.

For some of you, you might go, oh, yeah, I get that. There's no wrong answer. There's no wrong reaction. There's your reaction to that. So if you do manage people, it doesn't get you off the hook. What it does is it encourages you. It invites you to ask better questions. Tell me what brings you joy in your job. Tell me about last week. Where did you feel successful? Where did you feel deflated? If I'm asking my team those questions, I can help understand where Are they stuck? And where do they need to grow?

Sometimes people don't have passion in their job because they don't have all their questions met. So maybe it's a simple act of investing in some training or allowing opportunities to have a mentor or ask questions. So passion, for me, it's a foundation of at least checking in to see where people are at, because depending on the answer that question and the questions that come after, I know how to navigate the course. Purpose. Purpose was the second word that I brought in this morning. Now, Jules already used it in her answer today.

Passion gives her a sense of purpose and drive for her. So when you think about purpose in your work, what does that mean? What does purpose have to do with your day job? The job that you wake up to every day you go to, you clock in, clock out, you do some work, you go home at night. Where does purpose fit in your work? And if you don't understand how I'm using the word purpose, it's what gives your job meaning to you, what gives your role as a leader or as an employee meaning to you share that.

So purpose. When I think about purpose, it's the things that I just explained. So if I can understand my team's purpose for wanting to be in the job that they're in. So if I think about our team at our indoor cycling studio, I know that most of the people that join my team have a lot of passion for helping people to meet their fitness goals, passion to find community. As an instructor, my purpose is to inspire people to move beyond what they think is possible. But I can use that same purpose for being on Cadre to inspire people to move beyond what's possible.

I can use that same statement for my consulting work, because I mentioned I work with a lot of people going through transformation, and maybe that's with the technology, maybe that's with an organizational change. Maybe that's, as a coach, inspiring people to put beyond where they believe is possible. It's not where I believe is possible. It doesn't do us any good. If I believe something different than you believe, I might fall short for you, or it might push you too far. So for me, purpose and passion go hand in hand.

If I can wake up in the day and I can find passion in my job, or maybe I don't feel passionate about it right now, but I do feel grounded in a sense of purpose. My work has meaning. So if you can do an assessment for you as an individual, does your work have meaning? Maybe it doesn't tie into your Passions. Maybe you find that at home. Maybe it's really rare to bring passion and purpose together in your job. But if you can have one or the other, which would you choose? And if you can only have one, how might we lean into it?

How might we take the pause to really decide, do we have purpose? Do we have a sense of purpose with our work? And if not today, what might we change to give our work a little more purpose? Or what might we change to be a little more passionate about what we do? We spend a minimum, unless you're part time or a volunteer, a minimum of 40 hours a week in our jobs. So if we are at those jobs and we feel drained, we feel discouraged, we feel disconnected from who we are, then how are we showing up in the rest of our job?

In the rest of our days, we might come home at night a little more cranky, snapping at our spouses, because we simply feel deflated at work. Maybe for years we felt excited, and then maybe something happened. Maybe your company got acquired, maybe your manager changed, maybe the strategy of the company changed and you just don't align with it anymore. When you find that that rug has gotten pulled out from under you and your passion just is no longer there, your fire just is no longer there, or the purpose of why you're doing what you do is in conflict with how the organization is working right now, maybe that's time to take a pause and make a change either internally.

Maybe a change of mindset, maybe a change to a different job, a different role. There's no right or wrong answer to your process. But if you are leading people, it's really super important that we understand we have an innate responsibility to draw this out of our teams. Passion and purpose, understand what that is for them, help them navigate that. If this is a topic that resonates with you, it might not. And if it doesn't, that's a good time to do an inventory for you and say, why? Because how we show up as a leader will directly impact our teams.

We can all think back on the best bosses that we've ever had. We can also think back and feel a visceral reaction to the worst boss that we ever had. So if you are managing people, which side of the coin do you want to be on? Choice is always yours. So today on this amazing Monday, we did a check in to see how we feel in this moment. We had a conversation around passion and purpose in the workplace. And we had a check in with if you're a leader, what that impact of passion and purpose might be if you're lacking that in yourself and how that might impact your teams or how you might draw that out of your teams to elicit a higher engaged team, a high performing team.

If you ever have questions, type them in the chat if you're listening on replay. I always go in throughout the day and I watch the alerts to see who's typed what and I'll come back in and I'll respond. So always make sure that you have the ability to do that later today. There's some really, really great people that are going to jump in with different topics around professional development today. If you're looking for me again, I'm here on Sundays with me time where we talk about ourselves and how we might find more intention with discovering ourselves.

And on Mondays, I'm here for professional development. I hope you have the best day. Take a breath, know you're loved. Know that we're proud of you for how you're showing up every single day. We see you and we'll talk to you soon.