389: Finding An Organization (And Cause) That Fits You

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:04

The question is, how do you get something exceptional? Here's an idea. What if your work not only paid your bills, not only you worked for a company that you wanted to, but actually allowed you to make a meaningful impact on the world? Can your work change the world? Well, if you listen to Episode 388, you already know the answer is, yes. But the real question is, how the heck do you find that type of work?

Introduction 0:38

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast, with Scott Anthony Barlow. We help you stop doing work that doesn't fit you, figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that's unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:02

In the last episode, we showed you how it was possible for anyone to change the world. If you've already listened to Episode 388, then you know, the three criteria that must be in place to help you make a real significant impact and do purposeful work that might otherwise be known as world changing. Those three criteria are finding the cause you care about, number one. Contributing in a significant way, number two. Number three is, as you've done that growing and evolving yourself as a person to become more adept at furthering that cause over time. Of course, this means that making an impact on the world starts with figuring out what really matters to you personally, and how you can uniquely contribute. Sounds simple enough, right? Simple. Yes. Easy? No. I know, this raises so many questions. How do you find causes you care about? How do you know how you can contribute? Don't worry, we're going to give you examples along the way, in this episode of how this all works in reality. By the way, behind the scenes, this is the very same place we have our clients start when they're making a career change. Here's an example of what we do very first, with our clients, we help them understand their strengths. Why? Because your strengths give you clues as to how you can best contribute, which is number two that I mentioned earlier, right? Here's Allison Thompson, describing a career transition, she recently made.

Allison Thompson 02:40

Was that client interaction, like that's one of my favorite things.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:43

When Allison says client interaction is one of my favorite things. It's because that type of interaction is using her strengths.

Allison Thompson 02:50

I love building relationships with my clients. And you know, when you work on, you know, a large program, or like a huge wedding or something like when you work with someone over the span of nine months on this huge thing, you feel like you've been in the trenches, and like you've accomplished something with your client. And I love that feeling. And I was like, well, you know, I know I don't want to be in hotels, but if I can find something, or I can still support and kind of coach and consult with clients like that would be amazing.

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:18

These were all clues to how Allison contributes, it allowed her to say, here's how I can help. She also needed a cost to contribute to.

Allison Thompson 03:29

So in my current role, that's pretty much what I do. Like it's a health and wellness company. And they were able to really pivot with the pandemic. So a lot of the work that I'm doing right now is with administrators and directors of nursing for nursing home facilities for COVID testing. So we're basically providing a like a COVID testing program in these facilities. So my direct clients that I'm dealing with are the administrators and the directors of nursing their day to day COVID testing processes.

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:56

Okay, back up for a second, let's review. Allison first identified how she wanted to contribute. And then second, she found a cause that she wanted to support. This means that you can start with your strengths and get those clues as to how you contribute. First, here's Allison again.

Allison Thompson 04:14

But you know, over the span of just the month and a half, I've been working with them, it's like we have a relationship and we have a rapport now. And we're we've kind of gotten into the groove of them kind of understanding like what my style is as their designated clients, as a specialist, but me also understanding what their style of communication is and how they work and operate from a day to day basis.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:33

But what if you want to start with that cause first? What if you want to focus your efforts initially, on finding an organization that lines up with a cause that you want to support? That also works, as it turns out, the important part, you must have both. So the question becomes, what do you really care about? We use a variety of questions with our clients behind the scenes to get clues as to what they really care about. These are questions like, what has heard in the past for you that you don't want others to go through? Or what challenges, difficulties and hardships have you overcome? Even the simple question, what causes do you strongly believe in? Interestingly enough, a lot of times, we already know what we care about. But we don't really see a way that we can make a career out of it. So we just ignore what we care about, or we discount what we can actually do about it. It's a really funny human tendency. Let's take a look at what happens when you don't ignore it. Daniela, the CHRO, at Philips, who we had with us, in the last episode, realized what was meaningful to her. Also, in the last episode, we mentioned that as a 10 year old girl, it started out just as a desire to help animals as a veterinarian. And by the time she got to university, she realized that she actually wanted to work with people instead of animals.

Daniela Seabroook 06:05

I just really asked myself, do I want to be with animals around me more in my leisure time and continue to have animals? Or do I really want to work with them and also work with the people who own these animals? And I come to you, and that was a bit the decision when I decided for myself, I think I want to work with humans. So I actually registered for a medicine, human medicine at the time, because instead of work, being a doctor for animals, I said, okay, I'm going to be a doctor for humans. But early into my studies, in the first few months, I realized, I'm more interested in the psychology of human beings. And so I shifted to clinical psychology. And that's what I studied. While I was graduating, I worked in a chemical industry organization. And so in this combination, we do my internships in hospitals. And this work I did, I realized that I'm more tuned towards corporations, organizations, and in particular to companies which have real products that was something which attracted me at the time. So hence, I shifted to human resources.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:09

An interesting thing that we see with Daniela is that, she was also experimenting every chance she could along the way, she was diving into her interests, and causes that she did care about to determine both what she actually wanted, as well as what would actually work for her. Now, as you saw with her experience, she started with a love of animals, she got into university, she realized she wanted to focus on helping people that started out into the medical field. This was an experiment, she didn't even fully know if this was the path she really wanted to take. And as it turned out, she enjoyed the psychology aspects, even more. So she shifted again, this led her down the path into contributing in HR. In her roles in HR, she was able to connect what she did to the impact she was making. In fact, one of the things we've seen again and again, is that you need to be able to connect what you do to what you care about. This helps tremendously for feeling purpose. Here's Rachel Gatlin, the lead for supply chain direct business, e commerce at Philips organization. She describes how she sees her connection to the cause and how it evolved over time.

Rachel Gatlin 08:23

First interaction helps me tremendously interacting with our customers to hearing what they want, what they need, you know, from us as a company. I love the fact that I am able to have a functional role that puts me in contact with processes and products that save people's lives. I'm also glad that as part of my role, I'm able to expand and do other things. And so not just going into different roles, which is, you know, a need for me, it's great. I love the fact to expand myself, but also, you know, I'm making sure products get to people, I'm making sure that I'm making our systems better and processes better. I make sure also that I get to make people better.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:07

In the last episode, we mentioned that Rachel found another cause within her organization that she could impact as well.

Rachel Gatlin 09:12

I am encouraged to mentor and as one that is an advocate for diversity and inclusion, like it was talking about the Women's Network and black professional network, then I am also called upon to be part of the solution for problems that are existing in our industry, today. I'm able to be called upon to be someone that is valuable and valued for her presence and for her contributions. I remember seeing a study somewhere saying, "how are men more successful than women in achieving raises?" And the study said, "because men will actually ask." So I saw this behavior in our Stanford office, and I went to HR and I said it was peak season again. It was so funny. I said, I'm going to outline a plan for you to be more structured. But I would like the consideration of forming a women's networking group here at Philips. Because I want to show women that first we can empower each other. And we also can share knowledge. But we also need to know, we need to inspire, empower and lift each other up and motivate each other to go after opportunities. When we feel shy, or whatever reason, we are not worthy, we don't want to be seen as too aggressive, just different reasons. And my HR group said, "you know what, Rachel, don't worry, don't reinvent the wheel. There is something out there in our corporate office that you could utilize as a guide, open up as a chapter." And I actually did the next year, because I we had to get through our peak season. But I was able to do that. Because I asked my company for an opportunity.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:28

We see that Rachel not only found a way to make an impact for women professionally, Philips had resources available to help her multiply her results instead of starting from scratch. Rachel and Harriet Tubman and countless others, we can see that partnering with an organization multiplies the impact you can make. But what about you? How can you find the right organization that matches your values and supports the cause that you're passionate about? Not too long ago, I sat down with Sherry, one of our clients, showing her how to search for organizations that fit, based on what she knew about that she cared about. And specifically, that tool that I mentioned, ideal career profile. Here's me going through and showing her how to start her search using Google. This is very much a CSI style approach.

Sherry 11:51

So I have been in a business analyst type role for the last probably 13 years. And when I started, Happen To Your Career, it was because I was unhappy in my current role. And I wasn't sure if it was the role I was unhappy in, like, I didn't want to be a business analyst anymore, or if it was what I'm doing and the company I'm in. So through working with Jennifer and figuring out my strengths, I figured out that like I really do like being a business analyst. And I want to be a product owner, which is just the next step. And it's just what I'm doing in my particular role, that I'm not happy in. In the past, I have worked in software development, which I loved. And I would like to go back there. I've also learned that I have a passion for mental health for one reason or another. I was briefly a psychology major in college.

Scott Anthony Barlow 12:36

Were you really?

Sherry 12:38

In briefly. Yeah, I ended up having a management of Information Systems degree. But yeah, so it's always been an interest of mine. And I would love to work doing software development in the mental health space.

Scott Anthony Barlow 12:50

Sherry knew what she wanted, and what her strengths were, she lived in a rural location that was almost two hours away from a major city. So she was very interested in remote work, she wanted to understand how she could find organizations that really fit what she was looking for that cause. So I went into a few different approaches for how she could actually conduct her search. One really important note here, she's specifically looking for organizations that really combined with her interest in mental health and health and fitness. So she's looking for those that create software or create apps. However, you know, that's her cause. The process that I'm talking about, works the same for whatever type of organizations or cause that you're looking for. One of the things I found is super helpful for searching for organizations is, taking variations of different types of words, almost CSI style, and searching for those combinations. Because you might not get it right in Google the first time and maybe not at the second time and probably not third time, either. But, you know, four or five, six times down the road, when you tweak some variations, then you can probably get it right. So let's take a variation of that and see what comes up here. So oh, by the way, one of the things that we can do too, is look for suggested searches too. So I like Google Chrome browser on so that it pops up suggested searchers as well. But let's say mental health, how about apps instead of software, that's a more current term that more progressive companies have a tendency to use anyways. So that's going to fit that more progressive type organization is probably going to have more progressive culture, which, you know, that's a far set of assumptions here. But even starting out with words that are more likely to fit are going to be a better way to go. So mental health apps, let's just see what pops up here. Okay, so we've got scholarly articles for mental health apps, top 10 mental health apps. Oh, you know what, hold on, that might lead us to a different thing. What if we, oh, here we go. Seven best mental health apps of 2020. What if we took that and just took that as a search potentially, again, and said best mental health apps, because that's probably going to get us to a list. Or we can click on one of these looks like, you know, Google's prioritized this 23 mental health apps for stress, anxiety, and more. So, here's what's gonna happen. We're gonna get a list of apps. Oh, look, headspace pops right up. Okay, fantastic. We already know about that one. Some of these, I guarantee just if we're looking at apps, some of these are going to be things that are invented by or you know, coded by somebody and their brother. And they may not be a full organization, that is going to be a great fit for you. But there are probably other ones in here too. So we've got inscape. Have you heard of some of these here?

Sherry 15:49

Some days, yep.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:50

Okay, calm... the calm app. Ooh, yeah, that was a really big a couple of years ago, or that's another one. PTSD coach. Okay, so we've got a whole bunch of them here. One of the things that we can do, we got the mindfulness app, 10% happier, we can actually go and look for the organizations that fit those. So let's take the happify app. So let's see if we can find that happify app. And then we might have to do a little bit more CSI style work, and say, okay, happify. Or we can go find the app itself, happify apps on Google Play, we can go look at any one of these. So this comes from Happify, Inc. Okay, so Happify, Inc. we can now take that information and go to the next step. Well, it takes us to happify.com. So that's probably the company isn't same name as the app, apparently. All right, let's go down here. And let's see if we can find what either a list of their team, or list of careers or jobs. First of all, looks like we have a jobs list right here. But let's go into the team section, it'll give us an idea of how big they are. We've got co founder and CEO, pretty much all of these are going to have something like that. Head of happify, head of healthcare, medical director, head of content strategy, head of enterprise marketing. So part of what I'm looking at right here, and now that we're on this website, is trying to get an understanding of the size of this organization, is it possible that they're going to have the set of resources to be able to hire someone like you. And regardless of whether or not they, as a standard, have remote opportunities, or whether they're just like everybody else, when we're working through COVID in a remote fashion, then this is going to give us some clues as to what they might have available. Okay. So it looks like they've got quite a few people on their leadership team. That's what I'm seeing up here. So I don't know if this is their entire team, necessarily, but they've got a fair number of people on their leadership team. Let's go over to that job section here, really quick, just to get a glance at that. Okay, happify health, director of talent in New York City. So let's see, SVP pair sales. So they do have some remote for sure. Potential for some remote work. So they list a few different things. So this is an organization that already is doing some remote, for sure, likely is doing remote right now. And there may be an opportunity for them to make an exception, if you found, you know, down the road that this is the right organization for you. You're right for it, so on and so forth. That's, you know, thinking 17 steps ahead, but that still is, you know, where we need to be at, let's not rule out that possibility. We don't see anything saying we do not do remote work at all costs, we pride ourselves on having everyone under one roof at all times. Because it's, yeah, we don't say... Okay, so instead, we've got a few encouraging signs. And that's all we need, at this point to add them to our target list, assuming that we're seeing other things that line up with your ideal career profile, and some of the pieces that you must have or that you're interested in. This is a pretty simple process, but you do have to put effort into it. From these simple searches, you can create a shortlist of organizations that you can follow up with and see if they line up with your values and the cause that you care about. Okay, so here's the place where people get stuck. A lot of times they're like, well, how do I know if it fully fits on here? How do I know if it's exactly the cause that I care about? Don't worry about that right now. You should just need to build a small list of those types of organizations and then that allows you to continue taking action you can try to figure out do the stay on the list, do they come off the list. But if you don't have a place to start, then you stay stuck. Okay. So then that's where you can use this information to figure out which organizations you want to work with, to advance that cause. Now, as we've seen with Daniela Seabrook, from Philips, remember we mentioned earlier, she, I would say, is a purpose driven woman, and she has used purpose as a driving force, as she looked into which organizations to work with.

Daniela Seabroook 20:30

Ross, for me, at the time, really linked the work I was doing to a greater good, and also being able with the work, you know, I did and the company did to impact a broader or serve a greater good broader society, and the health and well being of people. And that was something which really attracted me, I really, over my time, in that company, I started to realize this is important for me. And from then on, every company I chose to work for, was very much linked to what purpose the company had, and was it the purpose, which aligned with my values and my own purpose, or not. So that is how I actually chose from then on the organization's I work for, and, of course, also, ultimately, Philips, which has a great purpose, and it was really one of the key decision criteria for me to join the company.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:33

Okay, when you partner with an organization that's aligned with your values and purpose, that's where you get to make a meaningful impact as long as it's aligned with also the ways that you can contribute, right? Okay, I get that this is a very different approach for the way to look at making career changes, way to look at work, I get all that, absolutely. However, but what we consistently see is that those people that are working with organizations and causes that they care about and doing so in a way that allows them to uniquely contribute. Those are people that are looking at it from this backwards approach, this unconventional approach first, here's what you can take from this, if you really want to make an impact on the world, if you really want work that matters to you, and matters to other people. And you can see how you're making a contribution, how you're making an impact, how what you're doing is actually creating some kind of real purpose in the world, then you have to start with that in mind. It doesn't happen easily, it happens through a series of small steps, trying to decide, hey, is this a cause that I really want to support, trying to be able to dive in, do a small experiment, talk to people in an organization and around an organization, but if you don't do something, if you don't start, it's not going to happen. And if it doesn't happen, not only are you losing out on opportunities, but the world is losing out on you being able to make a real impact that matters.