Purpose-Driven Business and Working Backward
February 27, 2022 | On The Business Power Hour
Katie Burkhart was excited to appear on The Business Power Hour where she talked about purpose-driven business and why working backward is the best way to make your time matter.
Listen to the episode below.
read the transcript
excuse any typos as we tried to capture the conversation as it happened.
Deb: Good morning. Good morning. I am Deb Krier, and I am passionate about giving professionals the tools that they need to make themselves and their businesses as successful as possible.
Today, we're going to have a great discussion because we're going to be talking about truly making your business successful, and that definition of success is what you want it to be. We're going to have a great discussion today about how to really make sure your business is doing what you want your business to do or that you're doing what you want to do.
So, please join me in welcoming Katie Burkhart to our program today. Hi, Katie, how are you doing?
Katie: I'm good. How are you, Deb?
Deb: I'm doing fantabulous, fantabulous.
Let me tell people just a little bit about you and then we will dive into this. Katie Burkhart is the mastermind behind MatterLogic, the simple system for running a purpose-driven business and has quickly become one of the go-to experts in this space. She's a serial entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, a minimalist designer, a jargon slayer, and sharp communicator. She synthesizes connections that enable humans to make the most of the time that they invest in their work. Again, Katie, welcome.
Katie: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Deb. I'm excited for this conversation.
Deb: I know, I know. Most people listen to our program, but for those who are watching, you talked about being a minimalist. You are truly a minimalist—plain background, plain black shirt. I love it. I love it.
Of course, what that means is we focus on you, and I think that's what so many people get caught up in. Especially in this day of Zoom, right? Where we want everything behind us, but no, we want to focus on you. I love this.
Well, speaking of focusing on you, what I really want to know when I talk to my guests is how they got to where they are today. So, tell us how it is that you discovered that this is your passion in life.
Katie: Well, when I was a kid, I had a first job before I actually graduated high school. It was something that my family did. Everybody had to have one. It was part of my parents’ teaching us what work was about, a number of lessons contingent to that.
But we determined for me, lifeguarding was probably going to be the best summer job. You could make a decent rate. It was right in town. I was a swimmer; it worked around practice. It was all good, but I ended up lifeguarding at the pool that I attended as a kid. I had been going for years as a swimmer and watching the lifeguards. They're the cool kids. They have sunglasses and car keys.
It's this, I'm now cool getting to do this job. I was excited to start it because it was new. But what I found really quickly, and rather unfortunately, was that between when I was a kid and when I became a lifeguard, the pool had become markedly less popular for a vast variety of reasons. People play on sports teams, people's time is being spent differently, but there were just less people there. So, the job, in a lot of cases, was you sitting on a stand staring at a largely empty pool, which is not magnanimously interesting.
What I found was that, what you did was you sat there and you counted 15 minutes down, and then you moved to the next chair and you counted 15 minutes down, and then you went in and you had your lunch break for 15 minutes, and then you started it all over again. What I learned from that, among other lessons, was that I never wanted to work a job where that's how it worked, that it was really ...
Deb: Right. You were really watching that clock.
Katie: Yes, and that you were watching time tick by and know that I'm not going to get it back. That was it, the day is spent, and I'm not sure that I really did anything particularly meaningful, or productive, or exciting. I'm not even sure that I was all that useful here because there's nobody in the pool. What is this really all about?
Flash forward a number of years, I had gotten out of college. I was starting to work my first "real jobs." I was working with a particularly difficult manager who wasn't...loved to micromanage but was not very good at telling you why she wanted you to be doing whatever it was that you were doing.
Deb: It was “my way and that was the way to do it.”
Katie: That was it, and the fact that I asked was good enough. Well, I was a very independent worker—very thorough, known for making sure that the project was run well—so I had a really clear plan for what I was working on in the order I was doing tasks to make sure that we hit everything we needed to do. It was very close to the end of the project that she just walked in, absolutely lost her thing because I wasn't focusing on this minute detail because she asked—even though it made no logical sense as part of the project—and decided to ream me out publicly in front of all the other people working on the project.
I was like, "This is so unprofessional." I totally lost my patience, and I told her to go to hell. Needless to say, I was promptly fired because you can't do that.
Deb: You don't do that.
Katie: But it was a recognition, a development that it wasn't enough to do a job that I thought was meaningful. The organization needed to be run in a way that made sense. And I needed to be part of the sense-making, or it wasn't going to be a really good fit for me.
I ended up working with a lot of organizations that wanted to do that. I was working with a lot of nonprofits. At that time, they had a mission. They were trying to set out an intentional track, but I found they had a hard time really sticking to it. How do we really shift this from this statement we worked hard to put together to how we're running our business day to day. That's how I ended up backing into the purpose-driven model.
Deb: Right. I love that you mentioned backing into because what you talk about is how we need to work backward. What the heck does that mean?
Katie: Great question. I'm going to start this with a story because I happened to be on a call with a client last week who was venting some frustration about the fact that she'd had a meeting with her team. And she said, "Okay, well, we're shooting video at this upcoming conference. Are there other people that we should be shooting? Are there other things we should be doing? How are we taking advantage of this opportunity?" Her team looked at her blankly and didn't have an immediate response. She said, "I was frustrated by that. Why aren't they generating more ideas?"
I said, "You're working in the wrong order. What you're doing is you're giving them tactics of which there are infinite and saying, 'Should we do something with this?' What would be better is to say, 'Here's what I'd like to get out of this. Can we use this tactic to achieve it?' Why are you shooting additional people with this video footage? What is it that you want to do with it? What is it going to help you achieve?"
That concept of working backward—of actually starting at the end and then determining deliberately what actions you're going to take to get to that end—has a great deal to do with cutting through the just absolute noise that we face today as leaders and businesses and actually focusing on the things that really matter, and that are going to get us to that destination.
Deb: So many times, whether we're the employee, or the business owner, or all of those, we do something just because—or worse, because that's the way we've always done it.
Katie: My favorite phrase.
Deb: Right. Even if we own our own business, we're not thinking outside the box. We're not... It really is, well, this is what worked before, so we're going to continue doing that. Most of the time that doesn't work because things change. Hello, there's a pandemic. Even if there wasn't a pandemic, technology changes; people change. All of these various things. I love that what you are telling people is that you need to figure out your why. I think that confuses people. If you say, "What's your why?" They're like, "I need the money." Okay, that why does have to be in there, but walk us through how you—whether it's personal or from a business—determine what someone's why is.
Katie: I think the first place to start is to talk a little bit about Forrest Gump. For anybody who's watched that movie, it's one of my favorites. There's a moment where he's gotten shot, he's watching TV aimlessly, and people are like, “I can't deal with this.” I love the contradiction of the contrast between the aimless TV
watching and “I'm going to teach you how to play ping pong” because the advice that he's given is to never take your eye off the ball.
That's really what you're doing as a purpose-driven business. The difference is the ball is your purpose, which is why you exist, why it is that you're doing what you're doing, and why it matters.
To matter, you need to provide lasting value, and the cool thing about value is it comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. I think people hear purpose and they say, "Well, if I'm not saving the whales, it's just not valid." The reality is that's not true. There is a lot of ways to deliver value—whether it's producing the highest quality product, whether it's serving a particular group of people in the way that's going to be most productive to them. There's a lot of way to deliver that value, but that's what you're focused on, and you're getting everything in your business to drive toward that.
Again, following the same working backward capacity, we start there. Then, we start to work backwards, starting with our company strategy all the way down to why the heck am I getting on the phone for this meeting today. The best way to do that, and I think it's the big...
I'm going to talk about two shifts. One, it's not about you. When you start thinking about value, you're delivering that value to someone else. One of the best ways to actually get clear on the value you provide is to talk to the people you serve, whether they're your customers—if you're a nonprofit, they're your beneficiaries. What is it that they are coming to you for? How do you improve their life? Really get clear on that concept.
As much as possible, use the language they use. Make it clear that you understand them. The second part is, once you've done that, it becomes very clear that money is the resource, not the goal. You need to be able to deliver that value effectively, and one of the best ways to know you're doing it effectively is that you get repeat business. Not only was I willing to believe you were going to deliver value, you did it. You did it so well, I'm going to keep giving you money so that you can do it again, and again, and again. That's how you start to actually scale your reach, is because the profit becomes the outcome of pursuing your purpose, not why you all came together in the first place.
Deb: Right. You said something that I just wrote down to make sure I mentioned it, you said, "We want to improve someone's life," and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking. It can just be, "Hey, they had a better dinner tonight than they were planning on." But as a marketing person, we're taught to solve someone's pain. I was just thinking about it. It's basically the same thing, but solving someone's pain is a negative aspect. Improving their life is a much more positive thought process.
Katie: Yes, and that's where you start to get into you need to understand the obstacles and the challenges in their road. Or how do you start to move them out of their way so that they can be successful? But what you ultimately want to understand is, okay, I solved that problem for you. What does life look like now? What do you look like when you're successful? What am I helping you do, achieve, or become? Which starts to your point, put it in a much more positive light, and I think that’s where people really want to be. Yes, telling me in that ad that you're going to solve this really niggling problem I have is probably going to get me to click, but I also want to know that you understand what I want my life to look like on the other side of said problem.
Deb: Right. I love that it doesn't have to be something huge and grandiose. I started my career in public relations by working for one of the biggest nonprofits in the world. I worked for the American Cancer Society.
That's a pretty big, grandiose type of thing, but we also had much smaller goals that fit into that. Yes, you want to cure cancer. We've spent a lot of money in funding research and things like that, but sometimes it was, "Hey, we wanted... "
I remember one time, one of our campaigns—this was we were in Denver—we were reaching the Russian population because there was, for some reason, a large Russian contingency in Denver, talking to the women about the importance of mammograms.
That's a pretty small little thing, but we had to be very specific. Clearly, I could not go in there and do that. I don't look like them. I certainly don't speak Russian. We had to really think about how we were going to be able to change their lives with our message. It was a much smaller type of thing, but for those people, it made a huge difference.
Katie: Yes, and I think what you're starting to look at is, I think, a lot of organization's purpose, and they're like, "I worked really hard. We brought in a consultant and the C-suite sat in a closed-door room. We poofed up some magic."
Deb: We made a notebook.
Katie: Which originally makes me go, she didn't talk to any of the right people, and I hope that 10 of you can be your sole customer base if you didn't take the time to talk to them, but, okay, let's assume we have a good purpose statement. What's missing after that is you also need the rest of your Core strategy—your vision, your mission, your values, and your story. You then need to start looking at what are those top-level outcomes as an organization that we're striving toward all together. Then, how do we translate that into a plan with objective key results and tactics that actually break that all the way down to the day to day? Because you're right, we're not all going to be doing the huge thing at one time. We're going to be breaking it into chunks that we can actually make that forward progress and, hopefully, also be learning as we go.
Because one of the big shifts that I think people also need to make is that when you're really dealing with a purpose-driven business and looking at what you want to achieve, for most people, it's really about the long game, not the short game. Most things that you want to achieve—whether it is saving the whales or really helping to deliver value to the particular group that you're serving—it's going to take some time for you to see that come about, and you're going to be working at it for a long time.
Even if you are just looking at saying, "I'm here to fulfill this purpose." You want to be picking a purpose that's going to last a hundred years, so I hope you're starting to shift your thinking to, we're going to have to break this into bite-sized chunks and move ourself along this track and be excited about the fact that it's going to take some sustained effort.
Deb: Right. I talk with businesses who use the word just. "Oh, we just sell insurance. We're just a plumber." It's like the people that... "I'm just a wife." We should never use that word just because the first thing you did was you devalued yourself. The plumber might have solved a really, really big problem for somebody. The landscaper, their purpose might be to bring beauty into people's backyards, all of those things. The insurance, that's an important thing for people. I think that's one of the important things for people to remember is, your purpose is important, and you shouldn't devalue it. And maybe if you are devaluing it, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
Katie: Yes. One of the people that I like to talk about, because it happened in my life, was the pest control guy. For the life of me, I cannot remember his name, and that is my fault, not his.
Deb: Bug dude.
Katie: Yes, but he was fantastic. I was upset because I thought I might have tracked bed bugs home from a hotel. I'm very happy to know it did not happen.
Deb: Oh, good.
Katie: There weren't bed bugs at the hotel; it didn't happen. But I had been upset the whole night because, for days, because I was like, “I don't know what's going on. I have no peace of mind. I have so much anxiety over the fact that there could be bugs here, and what a mess that's going to cause for my life.”
What was really cool about this professional was that he was there. He was there positively. He was like, "I will be as thorough as you need me to be because I want to make sure that you have the peace of mind you need that your home is clear." This was someone that understood the value he was delivering. I think we don't think about that value until we need it, or we can very easily say, "Well, geez, that's not a very glamorous job. I think the startup with the shoes made of plastic is way cooler."
But I would've cut off my right arm if it meant he could tell me for sure that there were no bugs in my home. So, I think we need to be really careful to think about that. What I thought was really cool was that this company understood that value in the way they delivered their service. They had somebody there that day. They had somebody there. And they had all the paperwork done in advance so that if I needed treatment, it could be delivered immediately. They understood the value they were delivering and were able to be specific in the actions they took to make sure that that value was delivered.
Deb: Right. You mentioned the Core values, and those are your purpose, your... I'm reading from your website, purpose, vision, mission, values, and story. I think too often what happens is we create one of those, and it gets put on the wall, right? We put it into pretty letters, we fight for hours over what it's supposed to say, and things like that, and we might create a plan. I laughingly earlier said, we create a notebook, but we do. We create the book, the plan, the whatever, business plan, marketing plan, whatever. And it sits on that shelf and it gathers dust. So, how do we make these something that is so important that we live and breathe it every single day?
Katie: Some of that's a shift... There is no sexy answer. Step one, you have to believe that this is the way you want to run your business and—
Deb: Mm-hmm. It's not just a thing on the wall.
Katie: —instill the discipline that that's what you're going to do. Some people really embrace that, and some people don't. We have clients who have looked at it and said, "We've tried a lot of other ways to do it, but we are not cutting through that noise. I have disengaged team members. I got people working on stuff I don't understand why they're working on it. We're not delivering on the value we need to deliver, and that's going to start to disrupt our ability to do what we're here to do. You know what? I'm pretty excited about what we're here to do, and I'd like to bring everybody along with me." So, you have to have that open space to say, I'm really going to do this for real.
After that, a couple of pieces become really obvious. One, we talked about...and you just did a great job of reading all the pieces of the Core strategy. One of the things that people fall down on is they get their purpose, or their mission, or their values. They pick one, not all five.
I will be the first to tell you in our work with clients, you need all five, and you need people to understand how they work together. So, purpose really sets that focus and tells you why you're here and why you're here perpetually. Why do we keep existing over time? Then, what you need is your vision to say, “This is what the world's going to look like if we're successful in fulfilling that purpose.”
Our mission is the specific actions we're actually taking to move along that road. Your values are actually how you take those actions so that you can be more specific to your company and hopefully deliver that value better. The story is what brings it all together. And it's why I actually have a team dedicated to doing nothing except helping leaders refine that story and getting their team onboard with what it is because that's what's going to allow people to grab ahold and come with you versus the statements in a book or on the wall.
The next piece is, once you've defined your outcomes and you've put your plan together, that's the plan. I think what ends up happening is people see what is traditionally called “strategic planning” as something different from how they run their business every day. This is an age-old problem, not necessarily a purpose-driven problem, but the problem remains. If we're going to sit and put this plan together, then this is what we need to be doing for the next three years and actually working to develop a cycle by which you review, you listen, review, learn, and realign so that your business stays focused on these things. You've also given yourself room to adjust to changes, to try and experiment—determine if it failed or worked and learn from it either way—so that you really stay on track.
That's one of the things we spend the most amount of time with our clients who usually get to the end of the process and they're tired. They worked really hard to put all these pieces together and hopefully involved all of the stakeholders in the process versus again making that closed door CEO magic session and say, "Okay, we're tired," and us to say, "But you really need to do this part." We call that cycle calibration, making sure that you know—every week, every month, every quarter, every year, every three years—how are we making sure that we are connecting the dots and working backwards so that we're putting our time and resources into the things that matter.
Deb: Yeah. It's obviously so important to work backwards. I think it's also important—and you've alluded to this—to work from the bottom up, including every person. I've mentioned this a couple times on the program before. When I worked for a very large company, our CEO routinely—no, I shouldn't say routinely, once a month at least—would go down to the mail room and have coffee with the guys. It just happened to be all guys. His philosophy was, they knew everything that was going on because they made the rounds, they talked to everybody, and he was up on the top floor of the building, right? CEOs are always, if you've got a multi-level building, they're on the top floor.
So, he loved talking to the guys in the mail room to find out what was really going on. The nice thing was, he had a good enough relationship with them that they were honest with him. They didn't just say, "Oh, it's great." They would say, "You know what? People are really complaining about this." Or, "Have you thought about that?" I think that's, as leader, that's where we get lost in it because we're running the business and we forget to ask everybody who works there. Maybe you can't go individually and talk to them, but they need to have that ability. Maybe it's that they have team meetings and then those leaders report up, things like that. But you really do need to know what's going on at the...I don't want to say it's the lower levels, but certainly not any less important.
Katie: Yes. I have two responses to that. One, never ever devalue work. I think in part of the conversations or what I often hear about focusing on what matters, people are very quick to say, "Well, we outsource all that other stuff." I'm like, "Okay, you've just obfuscated the fact or hidden the fact that there is a human being that is going to pick up all that stuff, that if they didn't do it, you wouldn't be able to do what you are doing. So, there is no work that doesn't have value if it's moving you toward that goal. You have to have everyone involved. I think there's been a lot of talk about, “We're going to create a chief purpose officer and they're just going to figure it out.”
Deb: What a fluffy title.
Katie: It's terrible. That's not the goal. You as the CEO, it is your responsibility to set the pace and to keep us focused, but that means not just telling me that this is what it's going to be. It means involving me. So, when you think about the old way of doing business, we were accustomed to treating people as things. I can tell them what to do. I can hit the button and just like a machine, they'll come on and off.
Deb: And they're replaceable.
Katie: Correct, and they're replaceable. That's not what's really going to allow you to have a high-impact team moving forward. Your people are someone, which means they need a reason for what they're doing every day. That's why you're telling them not just what they're doing but why they're doing it. But to really make smart decisions about what we talked about—we know what our objectives are, we know what our key results are—then we get down to tactics. When we work with clients, we like to say to leaders, not only do you need to listen to your team before you develop the strategy—get comments on what the strategy you put in place is—but because you have set guidelines, because you are working backwards, give them the flexibility to pick the tactics they know are going to work because, "You don't know anything about Twitter, CEO. I can tell."
Let your communications people determine what the best tactics are going to be and then, as a team, understand what measurements you've put in place to determine if you're effectively delivering value. That's what will help you to assess. “Well, we tried this tactic. It didn't work. Here's what we learned. Let's try a new tactic.” But you're putting it into the hands of the people to do what they do best.
I think that makes a huge difference, completely to your point, how you get that feedback you so need to really develop the plan and know what's going on. We like to talk about those as feedback loops. In a lot of cases, people will solicit things from their employees or from their team. And they'll read the information, but that's where the conversation stops. It's a thing—
Deb: Right. They get the thing out of the suggestion box. They read it, they say okay, and they throw it away.
Katie: That's it. Sometimes they even think about it, but it's not a dialogue. It should be a loop. You've asked for feedback on specific things. You've gotten their input. Then, you need to be able to go back to them and say, "I heard you. Here's what I'm doing with your input." It doesn't mean you're going to act on all of it because sometimes you can't or there's not a good reason to do that. Or Pete has this real hang up about X, Y, Z, and unfortunately, we disagree with Pete. We're going to have to work in and do what we can, but you've gotten back to them.
Then, the last piece of that is to say, "Here's what we're doing." Don't just get back and say, "I read your stuff." Say, "I got back. Here's what we learned. Here's what we're planning to do, or here's what we're already doing." Then, the last piece of that is to say, “Thank you so much for contributing” because that's what helps them to know that you valued the contribution, that it wasn't just a box to check, or, “Man, you guys complained about a lot of stuff.” But it was something that you really valued.
Deb: Right. It is that discussion that goes on where, like you said, it might be something that you choose not to do, but tell me why. Is it a budgetary thing? Is it, we tried it and it didn't work. I've worked in financial companies and so some of those are, that's not legally possible. It might be a great idea but... The people, whoever's giving you that feedback—whether it's your employees, your clients, people like that—they have to know that if they give negative feedback, that's just as valuable, if not more valuable.
Katie: Yes, and we talk about one of the pieces of our system is decisions, which we've called out completely on its own. I've had people ask me, “Well, why?” The answer is exactly what you just said. Why? We want to make sure that there is a strong culture around decision-making, that you understand that that the Core strategy is really a lens by which you can make decisions. Does this help us fulfill our purpose?
I guarantee you, you just knocked half the options right off the table because it probably doesn't. Then, you can say, is this going to help us get the world to our vision; is it going to help us achieve our outcomes? Yes, no, maybe.
Does it fit within the unique capabilities of our mission and the way things we do things here under our values? Yes and no. Can I make a good case for that? Where, at the very least, a good case to tell you that I think it's worth testing and how I'm going to know if it was successful. That starts to change how that's going through.
But the important piece of that— which is something we're working with clients to do, and it's a big shift—is you're going to need to write that down so that when you're sitting to make the decision, you have to actually go through, “Here's how I think this works in practice. Let me walk you through my reasoning, which makes for stronger, more careful decision-making.”
Two, it also means that there's a record. So, if you are with a larger team, they can see, "Oh, here. I see the information they considered. I see that they tabled these things because they tried them in the past and they didn't work. And we already knew that." So, we're trying to improve, not go backwards. Here's why they went with the decision that they made, and I can understand that—which is a huge shift, I think, for a lot of organizations that feel that their team doesn't trust them or that the decision is really challenging for a couple of reasons.
One, they're having meetings to make decisions, and decisions did not actually get made. They've discussed something, but no decision was made. Or two, we had a meeting, we made a decision and then we did not communicate what the decision was and why it was made.
Deb: Right. Right. You know what? I think so many times people also forget that communicating that message is not just for that one person. It's also for everybody else.
Katie: Yes.
Deb: We manage Facebook accounts for clients and reputation management, and so we, on occasion, get negative reviews. There's a reason. Some of them, you can tell somebody had a little bit too much to drink, and they were just annoyed. And they were... Some of them are just, they're wanting to be mean. They're just, "I don't like you, so I'm going to write a bad review." But we always respond.
I tell my clients, I say, "The response is not for the person who wrote it because most of the time they never go back and read it. They don't care. They vented; they were done. The response is for everybody else who reads it to know that we care, we listened, and if possible, here was the outcome."
Whether it's just to say, "Please call us, we want to discuss this." Sometimes it depends on what it is as to how you can respond, but we always respond. Of course, people want to put the bad stuff away; they want to hide it. I tell them, "No, we cannot do that. We have to respond so that people know that we are paying attention to those things."
Katie: What's more is that, one of the shifts that we also ask organizations to make is to say that if you're not learning, you stop. I think with bad things, we're hardwired as humans to avoid them. We jus—
Deb: Right, that hurts.
Katie: We don't want to look; it hurts. It's going to be difficult.
Deb: You said our baby was ugly.
Katie: Yes, and we just do not want to touch that, so I'm just going to not look at it. But the reality is, if you're really a purpose-driven organization, this is an opportunity for you to learn and improve. So, if something's not working—now this may not be the person venting on Facebook because that may be their issue, not yours because sometimes that's the case—but when you start looking at your team, I think we have a tendency in feedback loops to be looking for the places where somebody had really...something really positive to say.
But making space for people to say, "This isn't working." Or, "I'm really trying to hit this objective you want me to hit, but these barriers are really in my way." Taking time to say, "Okay, thank you so much for raising that to my attention. Let's go in and see what we can do to make it better." Sometimes the answer is, there is legalese in the way that means we just have to follow this process because that's the law, and I'm sorry the paperwork stinks. But sometimes it's like, "Oh, I had no idea that this process was such a pain in the butt. Let's see if we can figure out how to streamline it so that this isn't where you're spending your time. You're spending your time doing the work we really need you to do."
Deb: Right. Yeah. Somebody might just be pointing out, "Hey, our software is outdated. Our tech is outdated." So, your response might be, "Okay, we can afford to upgrade half right now." Again, people just want to know that they're heard.
Katie: Yes. I think that that piece, that learning how to have a conversation versus this kind of one-way piece is part of starting to treat people as someone versus something. No one likes to be talked at.
I went to the seashore in August, down in Jersey, which is where I went as a kid, and my family was like, "Wouldn't that be fun?" I was like, "Sure. I think we're a little old, but sure." They had installed—since I had been there a number of years ago—big megaphones, which they used to only get on the megaphone once in a blue moon because there was like a genuinely unique announcement.
Deb: Shark. Shark.
Katie: Yeah. Usually, "Can so and so please come?" It means somebody lost a kid, which is not a good thing, but that's what it means.
Deb: Mm-hmm. Yup.
Katie: What they had changed to was an automated messaging system. So, every so many minutes you would get, "There is no smoking on the boardwalk." Then, you'd get like a pause. "There are no dogs on the..." Whatever it was. But it was like, by the time we left, we were predicting the message with them because there was no dialogue there. It was a one-way blasting, but frankly it was—
Deb: And you ignored it.
Katie: Absolutely. It was frustrating at first, and then I just tuned it out with the rest of the noise.
Deb: So, then if they'd come on and said, "Danger. Danger." You wouldn't have paid any attention.
Katie: Probably not because we would've been like, "Oh, new message. Cool." Then, going back to—
Deb: Your brain just reached the point where it just didn't even listen because it was so repetitive.
Katie: Yeah, and I think that's a big piece in that learning to focus on what matters is that conversation, that dialogue, helps to keep everybody's efforts in the right place and to keep them listening versus tuning you out.
Deb: Right. I was thinking about when you've got your purpose and when you've communicated it with everybody, how important is it to communicate it with the people who are going to buy things from you? First of all, you better be able to make it, but is it important?
I looked real quick here at Walmart. People love Walmart, people hate Walmart for a variety of reasons, but their purpose is to save people money so they can live better. And they communicate that to people.
So, if you went in and things were really, really expensive, you're like, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense." Or, if things were of such low quality, and that's a debatable thing, but how important is it that your constituents, that the public,
knows what your purpose is?
Katie: We would say that it is something you probably should put on your website, most likely on the About page, so that people understand what that is. The reason it's important is that it should be there to benefit them, and I think that's where people get caught up in. Well, this purpose... People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And I would put a big asterisk after that and say maybe. Because if why you do it is because it makes you happy, I could give two poops. Frankly, it's just not going to motivate me as a customer. If why you're doing it is about how you're delivering value to me and/or the world, that's much more interesting to me. And I can determine if you're actually holding up to that or not.
I think really getting out there and saying, This is the purpose, this is the vision we're trying to get to do, and here's the mission that we're currently on, you're giving people points to engage—whether you're encouraging a customer to make a purchase, you're encouraging them to talk about what you're doing and share that with new people, you're encouraging someone who's investing in you to understand why they're there, or you’re engaging a potential partner who wants to work with you. One of the best ways to do that is ultimately through the story because it's the most human of the pieces. It's what they're going to understand most rapidly and see where they're supposed to be.
But putting those things out there publicly, first of all says, "I'm taking this seriously enough that I'm going to put it out there," which means I know somebody is going to hold me accountable to it. Two, it's then an opportunity to say like, “Hey, join me on this, versus not.” It does, which surprises people when I say this on the third prong, is it will turn away those people who aren't with you. People immediately get upset and they say, "Well, that's not good." I said, "Why? You weren't here to serve them in the first place." So, in some ways, telling people who you're here to serve and how you're going to serve them will also help them to self-select. Like, "Yeah, this is the group I want to work with; this isn't."
For example, my company, my storytelling firm, lists its values right on its website, and I have people who will call and say, "I absolutely love the value X, Y, Z." It's their self-selecting that not just what you do but how you're going to do it is where that this is a good fit for them, and that's a good thing.
Deb: I think more and more people really are doing that. They're either saying, "Hey, this is where I want to spend my money" or "This is where I want to work." We were talking before the program about millennials. I think one of the things that we have seen so much with that generation is that they want to work with companies that have a good solid purpose that they can believe in.
Long gone are the day—well, I shouldn't say this, but there are still people who go to work to get the paycheck, and that's fine—but when we believe in it, for one thing, we're going to work harder to make them successful. But again, we have to know what that is.
Katie: Yes, and I think it's where one of the shifts that we think is so small, but it's so critical, is understanding that it's about value. As much as there are a lot of purpose pundits out there being like, “People want meaning in their life, people...” which we do not disagree with, I do not disagree with. The first thing they want in all of the reports coming back is pay. They want to be paid well—and like it or not paying someone for the time they don't get back, that they are spending with you out of their life—is the first way you tell them you value them, period.
After that, then you can say, "Okay, I'm going to invest in helping you to learn and develop, make sure that I'm connecting your personal purpose to our corporate purpose, that I'm helping you to be fulfilled here at work." That's number two.
But we actually would say that after value in capital, it's value in time. And the best way after looking at how do I help you learn, how do I help you grow, is can you can value their time without wasting it. So, if you don't have a good reason for what you're asking them to do, don't ask. Have them spend their time on something else, have them take a break and come back so that they're really delivering on their best self.
Deb: Right. I think we saw that happened a lot with the whole work from home thing. If you were in the office, you were there for eight, nine hours and how much of that time was spent going and getting coffee and puttering around and doing this and doing that. When people worked from home and...
Or more importantly, how much of that time was spent going to useless meetings? Then, all of a sudden, when people were home, I think a lot of companies figured out, "Okay, they can do this job in six hours."
Or, we don't even care how many hours it takes as long as they get it done, and we're not going to have these stupid Monday morning meetings where everybody's sitting because what happens is, of course, they get on Zoom.
Then, they turn their camera off because they've wandered off, gone to sleep, whatever. That's been one of the fascinating things with people working from home is companies’ priorities have shifted. They really have said, you get done what you need to get done in the time you can... And even when--if you're a night owl, fine, do your work at midnight. Yeah. If we have a meeting at 9:00 o'clock in the morning, that's a required meeting, you need to be there, but otherwise, as long as you get the job done, that's all we care about.
Katie: That's a huge shift from forward thinking to working backwards and sayin—
Deb: You got the job and then backward, or the task and then backwards.
Katie: Correct. So, what used to happen very traditionally is—which came about when Ford built the assembly line—is this nine-to-five, this concept that we have working hours, not working hours, and then it's going to be this many hours that we're going to be here.
Deb: Right, because that machine runs for this many hours.
Katie: And we need you to be part of this machine to keep the machine running, and that's how we looked at it. I think still today, even in discussions about the four-day work week versus the five-day work week, you're still missing the point. You're looking at it and saying, "I have these many hours, and we're going to fill it with stuff because that's how I know that the job got done" versus saying, "We want to achieve this. What's it going to take to achieve that? Let them figure out how and when they're going to go about doing it because as long as it fits within the guidelines I've provided through my values, my mission, and our plan, do it." If you can figure out how to do it in four hours, kudos to you.
Deb: Or, from the beach.
Katie: Or, from the beach or on your... It does not matter as long as that's...we're all working together towards the same things. And that's why working backwards is so critical with the distributed workforce because we're not going to have the ability to be standing and say, "Well, you're all stuck here for eight hours, so we'll figure it out." You don't have that ability. You’ve got to know what you're trying to achieve so that people are putting their time into the right things and actually getting there. But that's absolutely what they're looking for. Flexible, having enough paid time off, time away from work is huge.
So, they are already motivated to make the most of the time they do spend at work because if they can do it more effectively or more efficiently, they're probably going to, which is good for you and good for them. So, why would we not encourage that?
Deb: Right. So, these poor micro-managers, their heads just exploded because they could not be... They didn't have their employees under their thumbs. They put software on people's computers so that they could figure out what they were doing, but the good managers, actually I should... But now what this is forcing the managers to do is to truly work backward. It's not just, "We have eight hours a day; we're going to fill it with stuff." It's what is our end, and then we're going to go backwards from there. Maybe it is a six-hour workday. Maybe it's a 10-hour workday. Whatever it is, but those managers and leaders have to know what that end is and then go backwards. The pandemic has forced this.
Katie: Absolutely. I think it’s part of treating people as someone, not something. Once you've done this and made it really clear that I'm not going to waste your time. I'm going to use the time that you're giving, that you're investing in your work really well, which I think is a baseline commitment as a purpose-driven business.
The next piece you're going to say is, part of that is me helping you to do your best work—and to your point—maybe you are a night owl, maybe you are an early bird and after a certain hour you're just going to fall asleep. How do I make sure you can do that?
One of those pieces, as far as cutting out extra noise, because—I think we've both cringed at the unnecessary meetings—is really figuring out and setting clear communications, expectations, which I was just reading a report that the majority of companies don't have.
What channels are used for what? When is it appropriate to communicate with people? When is it not appropriate to communicate with people? Because they might be doing something else. How do we really set that up?
Then, spending time teaching people how to be better communicators virtually, to be better writers—things that we have, I don't want to say lost, but we have deprioritized because we have just leaned on that crux of the meeting and said, "Well, I'll just schedule another meeting. We'll circle back with another meeting." It's like, “No, you can't.” So, how are we going to start helping people to do other things?
Deb: Right. One of the things you mentioned was really valuing people. I think one of the problems has come in, and I've heard several people who... Now, I've worked from home for over 20 years, but I'm also my own boss. But for the people who were in an office environment and now are home—either in hybrid, permanently, whatever—one of the first growing pain type of things that many people had to deal with was that their bosses thought they could work 24/7. Why can't we be sending them an email at 9:00 o'clock at night and expecting them to respond? No. But that's one of the things I learned when I brought my office home was to tell my clients, “I work from 8:00 until 5:00, whatever time zone I'm in.”
I work 8:00 till 5:00, but I had clients in different time zones so we had to adjust in those things. But the way I got it through to them—because they said, "But you work from home. Why can't you respond at 10:00 o'clock at night?—I said, "Here's the deal. I'm more than happy to work evenings, weekends, holidays, but it will cost you double." That got their attention because there are times where emergencies happen but... So, that's where it's important for the employees and everybody to lay down those boundaries and to say, "Okay, I'm... "
Or, especially when we had people who had kids that they were having to homeschool. They had to be able to tell them, "You know what? My children are taking my time from 8:00 until 10:00, from 2:00 until 4:00, whatever it is. I'll still get my work done, but those are the hours that I'm with my kids." I think it's definitely caused us to be a lot more flexible.
Katie: Yes, and I think that flexibility is going to need to continue, where you can understand not just the individual purpose of the team members on your team, but also when do they work better? When do they not work as well? Do they have a better channel of communication than others? So that you can try as much as possible to reach them in the way that's going to work for them best, and they can try to reach you in the way that works for them best.
Now, there will need to be some common ground where we do have to all come to these certain meetings every week or we all need to do whatever.
That's where you start to say to the group, "Hey, is Wednesday going to be our team meeting day? We know we're going to schedule most of our meetings at this time, and there are some meetings you all have to attend. You may even have to come into an office. Is that the day?" Because that helps people to start to plan their other priorities. Since it's really about understanding that, we talk about work/life balance, and the reality is you have one life and everything has to fit.
Deb: Yeah, there's no balance, because work/life balance means 50-50, right? That's the only way it balances and that's not what's going to happen.
Katie: No. No. Your life is always going to weave in and out, and I think what a lot of people have found, although not all, is that allowing it to be more shades of gray and having the ability to flexibly weave it in and out is allowing them to get more out of their work and more out of their things that they do outside of work—like their family, or their kids, or their hobby, or their ability to travel. If that's what they're really invested in, right?
Did you find with the clients that you're working with that the pandemic made them change their purpose and vision and all of those things, especially to reflect not only their employees but the world and how things were going? And not just the pivot word, but they really thought, "Maybe this isn't what we should be doing."
Katie: What we found was more an opportunity where change was required, so we were more open to making bigger changes. We didn't have people who called and out of the left field were like, "I guess we should do something about that purpose thing” because as a general trend, most of what I've seen is people taping it onto the outside of their wall because they didn't really invest. They just want you to think that they did. It was trendy. I typically talk about the fact that I love to wear men's jeans because they have real pockets, pockets I can put my hands in.
Deb: Yeah, they're big pockets.
Katie: They come all the way down to my knees. It's useful versus women's jeans, which often don't even have pockets. They just stitched a line—
Deb: I think you're just supposed to carry your lipstick.
Katie: Yeah, and I'm like, guys, if you just tacked it on because you wanted to look cool like the other jeans, you didn't get purpose-driven right. Let's start with adding value and being really useful.
Our clients typically reached out to us because they said, "We now need to dive into a new strategic plan. We merged with a couple of organizations, and we're going to have to look at doing things differently." We have an opportunity because some of the things we thought we were going to do we're not doing right now, to start looking at doing things differently.
So, we took an undercurrent and started to make it a top current because they realized that they wanted to make this shift, and now we... Or, they wanted to do things differently, even if they didn't know this was a shift they were going to make and said, "You know what? This makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. I'd like to really refine what we have if we have it, or let's really start from the beginning and make sure that we know what our value is. We can clearly articulate it and get everybody on the same page, and we have a system in place to help us run our business this way, every day."
Deb: Right. Unfortunately, I think what we saw was the companies who refused to change, pandemic or not, they're the ones that don't survive.
Katie: Yes.
Deb: It comes back to what we were saying at the very start with, this is the way we've always done it. Things change, folks! You're no longer unique or all these various things, and so we have to change. Which means our purpose, our vision, those things can change also. Just because they're on the wall doesn't mean that they can't be rewritten.
Katie: Absolutely. We would always encourage that hopefully your purpose, you did the work to get something that's pretty lasting. But those other pieces, please review and make sure that you're talking to you...the people you serve, you're talking to your team, and you're talking to your partners. Because that's what's going to tell you what's shifting for them so that you can adapt and continue to deliver the value they need.
Deb: Right. I love it. I love it.
Well, oh my gosh, Katie, this has been such a fascinating discussion. I would love to continue it at some other time. So, we'll have you back. But in the meantime, tell people about exactly what the services are that you provide and how they can reach out to you.
Katie: Absolutely. I run MatterPulse, which is an organizational transformation company. We work with leaders who want to develop high-impact teams and really be able to deliver that value they set out to deliver. We help them cut through the noise of business and their work by helping them to work backwards.
We do that through our simple system, which we call MatterLogic. Start with what matters and then start to train your thinking to focus on that. We help them to put that into place in a way that's going to move their business forward. I also have, as part of that, a subset team called Matter 7 that helps to evolve their story.
It's so important to be able to communicate who you are, what you do, and why it matters. I have a team dedicated to delivering on that work, which we do through a seven-step process. So that's what we're working on, and we're happy to help anybody who's listening to this. Or, even if you're just curious to be like, "I want to know more about that working backward thing and how that has to do with purpose-driven business," I'm more than happy to talk to you and see if I can answer your questions and be of help.
Deb: Cool. So, how do they find you?
Katie: Easiest way to find me is through LinkedIn. You can find me. I am in a black shirt on a white background, so it'll be very easy to match it up. And you are welcome to follow me. You're welcome to connect with me. You're welcome to drop me a message. I will take time to meet with you and try to answer your questions.
The other great way to find me or to get involved with our community, and hopefully get some actionable advice as to how to make this shift in business, is to subscribe to the weekly, which gets into your inbox every week with one actionable tip at a time, which you can get to by going to matterlogic.co/weekly.
Deb: Perfect. I love it. I love it.
Well, we really have been having a great discussion, and I think this is so important for people. Even if you're the little one-person business just doing your little thing or the big gigantic firms, this is so important for people to think, what is my why? What is our purpose? Because you're going to be more fulfilled.
It's not just, "Hey, I want to make money." It's nice, but it's why am I here? Let's feed our souls and our heart as well as everything else. I can't wait to talk with you about this again, but do you have any final thoughts that you want to leave everyone with?
Katie: Final thought I would have is, whether you're an individual or a company, always be asking yourself, am I doing something valuable or am I adding to the noise? Did I need to have this meeting? Is this helping my team or am I adding to noise? Did I need to put out this extra blog post today? Is it really saying something valuable? Is it helping my audience learn something, or is it adding to noise?
I think that if we all started to ask ourselves if what we're doing is adding value to ourselves and to the world or just adding noise, I think we would be in a much better place to start to reduce the noise volume and put out things that really matter.
Deb: I love it. There's an awful lot of noise in this world, right?
Katie: Yes.
Deb: Well, I have been having such a fascinating discussion with Katie Burkhart. I'm Deb Krier. Until next time, everyone, have a great day.