Yesterday I met with Melissa, a female CEO of a large California health plan. Business is good. It turns out people really do want health insurance if it’s well-designed, fairly priced and enables you to get high quality medical care when you need it.

Melissa is a force of nature. I have known her for over 15 years. Before she became CEO she had been a Chief Marketing Officer and startup founder. She’s had impressive successes and daunting challenges. Yet, no matter what, I have always found her to be radically consistent. She is creative, caring, enthusiastic and downright brilliant. When I say brilliant it’s not just that she’s smart. She’s actually BRIGHT. She literally lights up a room with her positive–constructive personality. This is all highly valued when things are going well but her brightness makes the most difference when she is a lighthouse in a storm.

As I was thinking about the impact of Melissa’s powerful persona I recalled a marketing campaign that Gap brand launched while I was consulting with them. It was called Bright, Bold and Real. Gap hadn’t done much advertising and it’s clothes we’re pretty boring. The new leader of the brand was committed to brighten up and freshen up Gap’s products. Their marketing people spent a lot of time getting to the core of qualities that attract human beings. Their campaign worked as long as they stayed with the Bright, Bold and Real mantra. In time they left that behind and now they are struggling for relevance again.

But I don’t want to talk about jeans and t-shirts. I want to talk about Melissa’s SMART leadership power. What Melissa does is consistently inspire people to give the best parts of themselves to achieve their common goals. Of course she holds people accountable. But she has built a culture of self-accountability.  People really want to do their best all the time. The reason they do is because she is a hyper-potent combination of competence and authenticity that is motivational Redbull.

Here’s what I mean:

BRIGHT: Leaders must be competent at articulating an inspiring vision that will make life better for both customers and employees if they are going to be followed. Someone who is BRIGHT has a natural enthusiasm for doing something much better than others are doing. Lots of entrepreneurs are dim rather than bright. That’s because they’re always thinking of how much money they’re going to make or their exit plan. BRIGHT leaders are inspiring because they want to make things better, not just themselves, richer. You don’t have to be a formal leader to be BRIGHT. If your prime motive is to help others live better lives; be happier, healthier and truly enriched by your attention and your strengths…then you are BRIGHT.  You are a faucet in a world of drains.

BOLD: Great leaders are bold. They promote original ideas and aren’t limited by the expectations or demands of small-thinking critics. All the people we most admire are bold. Not just the great inventors like Edison, or the great dreamers like Disney or the great entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. We also admire our friends when they are bold.  We admire our children when they are bold. We admire anybody who wants to make a positive difference and won’t take “No” for an answer. We admire people who proclaim their commitment and persist through setbacks. We certainly don’t admire the critics or the people standing on the sidelines shouting “I told you so.” We love to follow bold and courageous leaders who have great ideas to make the future better.  Maybe it’s time for each of us to look at our lives and ask ourselves “What should we be boldly standing for right now?” What is the difficulty or opportunity that is before you that is whispering for your sustained commitment? Sometimes the boldest thing you can do is to keep on keeping on. Other times it is to stand up and announce the change that’s necessary and thrust yourself forward in a new direction… in spite of your doubts.

REAL: The leaders we trust are REAL. It’s what got Abraham Lincoln elected President when we were facing Civil War. His primary qualification was his bone-deep integrity. He was first and always, Honest Abe. Today, more than ever we are longing for leaders that are real and relationships that are real. Authenticity maybe an overused word but it’s what we long for. No one expects you to be flawless. So you don’t have to be fake to be valued or approved of. What makes our imperfections irrelevant is not trying to hide them but to own them. Not in a proud way. Not in a “deal with it” way. But rather with humility and a desire to improve. As long as we remain humble about our flaws they actually become the force that binds us together in the intimacy of mutual vulnerability.

Even as I write this, my thoughts go back to my CEO friend Melissa. I stand by my description of her. She is Bright, Bold and Real. I believe that these are the qualities of personal emotional liberation. It’s when you are finally free to be who you are and to turn up your volume.  I believe that’s what you have been born for.

 

This morning I’m teaching a large class of corporate employees my course entitled Supercharge Your Career and Work Like a Genius.  It’s a spiritual experience for me to teach the class. By that I mean that I am fortunate enough to help people identify their personal bull’s-eye that’s at the intersection of their design and their desires. Then I help them turn that knowledge into a unique value proposition that transforms a job into a career and finally into a calling.

I find it spiritual because, although it may sound corny, there is a real light in each of us that gets ignited when we come in contact with our deepest self.  My experience in working with thousands of people is that each of us are designed to succeed.  I feel privileged to help people become something that I can only describe as being “soul-aware.”  It’s a kind of super-conscious awareness significantly deeper than self-awareness.

As many of you might know from my barrage of e-mails I am going to be doing a series of women’s Leadership SPA events this year. We are getting a steady stream of enrollments so I am not writing this as a sales letter.  What I wanted to share was a brief stream of testimonials that my team recently put together as a kind of surprise for me.  They want to use it for marketing which is cool. But the impact it had on me was simply a flood of gratitude not only for these people but for the opportunity I have to be fulfilling my life’s work.

One thing that struck me is that what most people talk about is the one thing they heard that was exactly what they needed to hear to get clear, make changes and accelerate in their chosen direction. Very often I have no idea whether my training has any impact at the time I deliver it. It’s usually much later that I get an e-mail from someone who got inspired and invented the public health product to prevent the spread of disease, or reinvented the way their company does recruiting to promote diversity, or lost 50 pounds, or convinced their company to institute flex-time and scores of other small and large accomplishments that are as different as each individual’s need and interest.

What produces that change seems very serendipitous.  When someone hears the right words at the right time they spring into action.  Fortunately this is true for all of us. You have affected the lives of many for good. Any time you encourage people to learn what they need to learn, or do what they need to do, to produce the life their deeper self is longing for you release a flood of creativity and energy. You have no idea how many lives you have changed for the better.

Beneath the surface life is spiritual…we are all fortunate to have each other.

If you want to watch the video the team put together it’s on The Leadership SPA homepage just below the fold on the right.  What I’m sure of is that you could make a video just like this about the impact you’ve had.  When you are at your best I’m pretty sure you’re awesome.

Secular economists and so-called business experts have commandeered the purpose of business like blood-thirsty pirates taking over a merchant ship. The ship is our moral minds. We have been taken prisoner.

Since the 1970’s when the popular economist Milton Friedman insisted that the only purpose of business was to make money, greed and shortcuts have been legitimized as smart business strategy. Jack Welch enthroned creating investor wealth as the primary goal of every competent CEO.

What has this mindset brought us? Recently, the corrupt culture of the major international car company, VW, used their engineering talent to make highly polluting diesel cars appear to be clean. Public health officials believe that VW has sold enough of these cars in the LA basin to cause new asthma cases in the children that live there.

The thinking of moral buccaneers has brought us Turing Pharmaceuticals, a drug company that acquired Daraprim and raised its price from $13.50 to $750 a pill. That’s not a misprint. This drug is a vital life-saving drug used by cancer and AIDS patients. The only words that describe Turing CEO Martin Shkreli is that he is an immoral pig. Neither he nor his scientists have created anything.  The drug is 62 years old.  But few in the pharmaceutical industry condemn him. Drug prices have risen over 13% in the last year not because of the cost of R&D but because of the popularity of the new drug pricing strategy called “What are people willing to pay to save their lives?”

Gilead Sciences is one of Wall Street’s most admired companies. The business press admires them because they charge $84,000 for a 12-week treatment for hepatitis C. They don’t try to justify their price on the cost of R&D.  They simply say we charge that much “because it works.” The entire pharmaceutical industry is out of control.

We live at a time when business greed is so taken for granted that even those who were directly responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 were not only left unaccountable; many of them received multimillion dollar bonuses made possible from the taxpayer bailout.  Now I am a big proponent of the wisdom of the government bailout of the economy.  It saved us.  But virtually all the heads of those financial institutions should’ve, at minimum, been fined and fired and some should’ve gone to jail. They should all be banned from working in the financial industry for life. But most of them are back doing reckless stuff.

And of course nearly all industries that are major contributors to greenhouse gases that are driving the looming disaster caused by climate change argue that they have a greater responsibility to make money in the short-term for their investors then they do to the children of our world that will be be growing up in a time of man-made environmental catastrophe.

I could go on about how businesses knowingly use unhealthy   additives in food, toxic chemicals in products, and would rather pay fines when they’re caught polluting than stopping the pollution, but let me stop here.

As someone who has been in scores and scores of meetings with the most senior executives of very large publicly owned companies I can assure you that leaders making these decisions are not inherently evil.  Most of them are good people corrupted by in immoral system in which short-term financial self-interest is the only standard that is consistently applied to important decisions.  It sickens me.

What we need is a moral revolution. We need leaders who empathize with their employees, customers, communities and the future generation of unborn children. We need leaders with courage to change the mindset of business. We need leaders who understand that the true purpose of business is to improve the quality of life of all their stakeholders, including the wider community and future generations.
Those of you who know me know that I don’t believe that most men will take up the torch of moral change.  Men in general are simply too competitive and too self-interested to sustain their moral courage.  Without a doubt some men are but most a not.

We know from research that women are the primary civilizing force. Recently, social sciences have confirmed the influences of respected women are a major cause of men becoming empathetic.  Bill Gates became a philanthropist after he married Melinda.  Mark Zuckerberg pledged to give his fortune away through a vision given to him by his wife.

So as you know, I am tirelessly beating the drum to elevate more women into leadership.  Women’s brains are affected both by hormones and their neuro-networks to think long-term. Their brains are designed for empathy and social inclusion. Women are more interested in community benefit, stopping injustice, and creating a future that is better for everyone’s children.

I assure you this is not psychological mythology.  These are the conclusions of hundreds of research studies using brain scans and behavioral psychology experiments.  This does not mean that all men are stupid and immoral and all women are smart and values-driven.  But what I think it does mean is that if we want a future that is good for all our children we need more women in leadership of businesses and institutions large and small.

You might be thinking that it’s as hard to name more morally-inspiring women CEOs as it is to name their few male counterpart CEOs like Howard Schultz of Starbucks or Mark Parker of Nike.  And you would be right. Susan Cameron leads America’s biggest tobacco company. Marissa Mayer turned Yahoo into a rudderless salt mine.  But my point is that Schultz and Parker are highly exceptional men.  And Cameron and Mayor are negatively exceptional women. They got to their positions of power by mimicking male toughness which too many senior women do. What’s needed is a whole new mindset which enables women to lead with their gender-based brain strengths. That’s when the revolution will take place.

As I have wondered how to accelerate getting more women on Boards of Directors and in corporate C-suites it struck me that I must use the logic of our current business norms to force the issue.  So I commissioned research project to examine the evidence of the impact of women on the financial, strategic, innovative and operational performance of business organizations.

What I found in the research is that women are generally superior to men in 20 key competencies that directly affect the financial performance of a large enterprise.  This means that corporate boards have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to elevate more women into senior leadership positions.

What I’m saying here is that if corporate boards feel their job is to ensure their company creates as much short-term shareholder wealth as possible they are obligated to recruit and elevate women who excel at most of the 20 competencies listed below.  Right now, women who get to the top usually have to mimic men.  But we don’t need highly competitive, short-term focused, self-interested women in leadership.  Instead we need business cultures that promote women who possess high social intelligence, thinking versatility, and creative empathy.

Companies that do not systematically promote these kinds of women need to be sued by activist shareholders who want their companies to prosper both now and in the future.  I think that’s a hell of a big idea!

The list of 20 ways that most women outperform most men is down below.

The world is not going to change on its own…at least not for the better.  What you do matters. What you stand for matters. This is not the best we can do…we need to do better.

20 Reasons Why Advancing Women into Leadership Is a Fiduciary Duty of Corporate Boards

1. Women Get Results. Companies with diverse boards perform better than those run purely by men: Francesca Lagerberg, “Woman in business: the value of diversity.” Grant Thornton International, (2015): 1.    https://tinyurl.com/lb7kk8d
2. Women are more effective collaborators. Women are naturally wired for career success in today’s workplace with attributes such as cooperation, collaboration, and communication: Catherine Kaputa, “The female advantage: 9 ways to use it.”  The Women’s Conference Archive Site.     https://tinyurl.com/ougpx5d
3. Women are more versatile. Character traits of women leaders include “masculine” traits such as straightforward communication style, action-oriented, risk-takers, skilled at solving complex problems but additionally resilience, energy, and empathy: “Women leaders research paper.”  Caliper Research and Development Department, (2014).    https://tinyurl.com/lb7kk8d
4. Women “read” people better. Women have higher social intelligence and are more intuitive and empathetic: Catherine Kaputa, “The female advantage: 9 ways to use it.”  The Women’s Conference Archive Site.     https://tinyurl.com/ougpx5d
5. Women are more mentally agile. Women use both right and left hemispheres of brain making them outscore men on oral and written tests; better communicators: Catherine Kaputa, “The female advantage: 9 ways to use it.”  The Women’s Conference Archive Site.     https://tinyurl.com/ougpx5d
6. Women express themselves better. Women have higher emotional intelligence, can express emotions more accurately which unites others: Catherine Kaputa, “The female advantage: 9 ways to use it.”  The Women’s Conference Archive Site.     https://tinyurl.com/ougpx5d
7. Women are better transformational leaders. Women are more “transformation” leaders; they are skilled at getting subordinates to transform their own self-interest into the interest of the larger group.  Women transcribe their power not to their position within the organization but to their own personal characteristics: Barbara B. Moran, “Gender differences in leadership.”    https://tinyurl.com/p7uomgl
8. Women are better at creating win-win solutions. Women leaders are more democratic; better at win-win situations:  Barbara B. Moran, “Gender differences in leadership.”    https://tinyurl.com/p7uomgl
9. Women are better at leading teams. Women think more holistically, have higher levels of compassion and team-building skills, more persuasive and assertive, and are better at influencing without using authority.  Drew Gannon, “How men and women differ in the workplace.”  The Fiscal Times, (2012, May 25).    https://tinyurl.com/oeeoyu6
10. Women are better at uniting teams.Women are better at building team cohesion: Kenya McCullum, “The feminine advantage: 4 unique qualities women bring to the workplace.”  Worldwide Learn (2014, Sept. 9).     https://tinyurl.com/p835d4n
11. Women are more confident in their ability to deal with risk.Women leaders are more persuasive, assertive and willing to take more risks than male leaders: “The qualities that distinguish women leaders.”  Caliper Research and Development Center, (2005).    https://www.calipermedia.calipercorp.com/whitepapers/us/Qualities-in-Women-Leaders.pdf
12. Women are better at facing challenges. Women managers may be better prepared to cope with the challenges of the future: Barbara B. Moran, “Gender differences in leadership.”    https://tinyurl.com/p7uomgl
13. Women are better at getting results through teamwork. Women create more committed, collaborative, inclusive, and more effective teams: “Women leaders: the hard truth about soft skills.”  Bloomberg Business, (2010, Feb. 16).      https://tinyurl.com/pgjm5o2
14. Women are better at creating loyalty and commitment. Women are better at building relationships that inspire and engage others: Mitch McCrimmon, Are women better leaders than men?  Management Issues, (2014, May 6).    https://tinyurl.com/nh2rhrw
15. Women in the E-suite create better business results. Women generate better teams and better teams generate better corporate results: Solange Charas, “A mathematical argument for more women in leadership.”  Fast Company.     https://tinyurl.com/o8vxk43
16. Women are better at leading change. Women are better at promoting change: “Women leading change.”  Oxfam, (2011).    https://tinyurl.com/o6e6aba
17. Women are more flexible under changing circumstances. Women are more flexible: Christine Avery and Diane Zabel, The Flexible Workplace: A Sourcebook of Information and Research.  Quorum Books (2001).    https://tinyurl.com/qfehe8j
18. Women are more adaptable to new circumstances. Women are more adaptable to change: Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor, Kim Logio, Sociology: the essentials, eight edition.  Cengage learning, (2015).    https://tinyurl.com/oj4mhj8
19. Women are better at avoiding reckless risk. Women are better at avoiding reckless risk: Asha Kaul Manjari Singh, Gender inclusivity: theory and best practices. PHI Learning Private Limited, (2012).    https://tinyurl.com/nrayc35
20. Women are better at resolving risk. Women are better at resolving conflict: Colleen E. Kelley and Ann L. Ebien, Women who speak for peace.  Roman and Littlefield Publishers, (2002).

Quit your job and embrace your calling. I don’t mean you have to stop your current employment. Rather, quit looking at your work as a job. Here’s why.

Human beings have a distinct need that separates us from other life forms.  It is the need for meaning.  There are two primary ways we can fill this need…work and love.

Understanding how we experience deep meaning from loving our loved ones or even more profoundly, loving everyone is easy to understand.  But turning our work into something sacred seems much more challenging. (It is especially challenging to women for some very distinct reasons. This topic is so hot that I’ve had several clients ask me to present a women-focused webinar on the subject which I will be presenting on December 15.  There’s no cost, and you can register here.)

It is easy to make a logical error by thinking our primary choices about work and life come down to either ‘living to work’ as in becoming a work-aholic or ‘working to live’ as in becoming a European.  I must admit for most of my adult life I have been such a champion of work-life harmony that I strongly favored the relaxed approach to work I found in Italy as a young student.  Yet, ultimately I found that making life- enjoyment one’s primary aim is too empty.

After spending the better part of eight years surveying and interviewing nearly 30,000 people about what made life worthwhile I came to some simple truths.

1. There are 7 billion people on earth and no two people are exactly the same. Each of us is different for a reason. That reason is to make our difference.
2. When we change our world for the better, the world   changes for the better.
3. Our choices of what we do for work and how we do it

These three ideas deeply influenced me in my career and in the career training I do for corporations and universities.

Consistently doing really satisfying, meaningful work really comes down to one big choice. Do you want a job? Do you want a career?  Do you want to calling?

A job is simply a way to make money so you can live the rest of your life. The primary demand of a job is to be responsible.  Show up and do your work faithfully. At times we all must do jobs.  The financial stresses and practical demands of life simply require it. There are bad consequences to not having enough money to take care of your own needs and fulfill your genuine responsibilities. However if you work in a job too long it is likely to become a prison.

You may think you have no choice. But it’s a trap to think that you ever reach an age where you cannot learn what you need to learn to escape the grind of the job and find the joy of your calling…a calling that will make you all the money you need to live a life you love.

Many successful people choose a career over a job.  The primary demand of a career is mastery.  People who are exceptionally competent in a high demand field can make a lot of money and acquire the trappings of modern-day success.  However this is no guarantee that you will be doing meaningful work.  That is, work that is meaningful to you.  It is widely known that professionals who have the deepest regret about their career choice are lawyers. By age 40 surveys show that 52% of lawyers wish they had made another career choice.

Lawyers are not alone however in the simmering stew of regret.  Careers that demand expensive education can also be traps. It is easy to make a logical error thinking that you have invested so much time and money in a career that you would be crazy to change. That’s simply not true. Some of the most successful and happy people I interviewed in my research are people that made massive and surprising career changes. I met a lawyer who became high school teacher, and a fashion executive who became a spiritual life coach. I met many others with similar stories. What they have in common was that they are great at their work and are happy to do it. What they found is nothing that they had learned was wasted. They are satisfied because they had found their calling.

Finding your calling requires two primary things. Courage to face your truth and deeper than average self-awareness. The primary demand for calling is to do work that reflects your purpose, personality and values.

You’ll notice that it does not require you do work that is directly aimed at saving the world.  Once you become intentional about transforming your work into your calling you will see your work in a new light and pursue your work in a new way. As I said, the world needs all of us in our many varieties and interests.

Surveys of all job categories find that about 30% of working people find their job both purposeful and a way to express their values through their personality. In this way work gives them energy rather than drains it.

So how about you?  What are you doing for work right now? Is it a job? A career? Or a calling?

Let me encourage you. Don’t settle for a job.  Don’t degrade your life for a career.  What you do matters. You are designed perfectly to succeed at your true calling. And please believe me, with all the research I’ve conducted and all the coaching that I’ve done I can assure you what I am saying is not goofy, pie-in-the-sky.  Many, many, many people have it all and so can you.

If you want to know more about my approach to transforming work into a calling then register here for my webinar on December 15.  It’s designed especially for women and the stressful, conflicting commitments that are so common on their life path.

 

I am grateful to be grateful.  I wasn’t always this way. In fact I went through major periods of my life when the repeating song on my inner soundtrack was “Why me?” My life logic was self-defeating…guaranteed to make me unhappy.
 
Life logic is a simple concept. It is how we consistently explain to ourselves why life is the way it is. It’s our inner story of cause and effect. We use it constantly. It is the super-structure of life logic that is constantly giving us strategic instructions about how we might make our life better or at least less worse.
 
My life logic for nearly 50 years is a framework called “bargaining with universe.”  It is based on the belief that if you are a good person you can prevent bad things from happening to you. Now I know… that’s a very foolish belief. Yet it is very common. A famous book was written by a Rabbi titled “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  The up shot of the book is… bad things happen… don’t take it personally.
 
Unfortunately that’s not a very satisfying answer. Human beings are very uncomfortable with randomness. So we naturally seek control strategies. The things that really scare us in life are the things we don’t control. Major religions have caught onto this human longing and reinforced our misbelief that if we are good enough God will protect us from bad things. So this becomes the desperate bargain we make. Yet we can’t help but notice that too often the good die young and for some reason Mick Jagger seems both happy and healthy. What’s up with that?
 
That was my question when I was soaking in a bath of frustration surrounded by candles of self-pity after spending nearly a decade with daily bouts of emotional agony over the condition of my life. And no matter how good I tried to be, nothing got better. Then my coach said to me. “Man, you are so lucky. Everything that you have feared the most has already happened to you. And look at you, you’re still standing, still fighting. It’s awesome, you have nothing to fear now.”  For some reason those were the right words at the right time. I even wrote them down.
 
For months he’d been trying to explain to me that it is futile to try to protect yourself from all the things you cannot control. He also explained that the only viable life logic is to develop the bone-deep belief that you are stronger than all of life’s tragic disappointments. If you choose to believe that no matter what happens you can be stronger, wiser and even happier because of what your difficulties have taught you… you will be. He asked me to think of people who live by that life logic. I thought of Nelson Mandela and my Mom.
 
Since that epiphany I have become a student of the power of gratitude. With the explosion of research in positive psychology and the effects of gratitude meditation we now know that science clearly confirms that gratitude is health food for our mind, emotions and even our bodies. (Controlled studies show people who do daily gratitude meditation can lower their blood pressure!)
 
Perhaps the most powerful research on the effects of gratitude is from Richard Wiseman, who has performed numerous studies linking gratitude meditation to behavior change. This is what he found.
 
Most people who simply write down one thing they are genuinely grateful for each day and focus on their positive feelings for 60 seconds get three beneficial effects over time.

1. They become more open minded and willing to try new experiences.
2. They become more optimistic and opportunity oriented.
3. They project a positive–constructive personality which expands their circle of supportive friends.

It’s simple. The grand effect on the lives of people who live life through the lens of gratitude is they become happier. Wiseman also discovered that gratitude sets up an eco-system of behavior that makes you luckier… that is, you will have more positive opportunities than average.
 
That’s why I love Thanksgiving. It’s a national holiday with a much deeper practical message than just turkey and football. It’s time to take stock of both the good things that we take for granted as well as what we have learned from the tough things that we’ve experienced.
 
Just think about this. Many experts believe that about 70 billion people have lived their lives on planet Earth. Until about a century ago most parents buried two to three of their children before they reached adulthood. A winter cold routinely turned into lethal pneumonia. Starvation and violence were everyday fears.  These and countless other hardships were accepted unchangeable conditions.
 
How most of us live today would be a fairy tale for nearly everyone who has lived before us. Truly, of all the people that have ever lived, we have the most to be grateful for.
 
And even if you have gone through a very tough time just remember what my coach said. “You’re still standing, still fighting. You’re awesome. You have nothing to fear now.”
 
Happy Thanksgiving!