My guest on today’s podcast, Lisa Earle McLeod, is a good friend and the author of five books including Selling with Noble Purpose and Leading with Noble Purpose. Her consulting company created the concept of Noble Purpose which is a declarative statement about the impact an organization has on its customers. It incorporates telling the market what your company stands for and why your organization exists.

Lisa is an expert in sales and leadership. She writes for Forbes.com and she has been featured on NBC Nightly News, the Today show and Good Morning America. She has delivered keynote speeches all over the world for Apple, Pfizer, Hootsuite and many other well-known organizations.   

 

What does Bring Your Whole Self to Work Mean to Lisa?

The phrase bring your whole self to work makes Lisa feel relaxed. She relates it to her job as sales manager for a college newspaper when she was authentically herself without being conscious of it. In contrast to her first “real job” after college (in sales in the 1980s) where she felt she had to become a different person to fit in. An exercise she found exhausting.

Lisa finds it fascinating that mindset, words and behavior can completely change the outcome of a situation. When she realized the culture of a company resides in the language and interactions it had a profound effect on her. Even with this understanding, she found it hard to be authentic within her own business because she thought her clients expected her to be a certain way. Back in the mid-1990’s, people weren’t having the ‘how to be authentic’ conversation at work. They may have been having it outside of work but not at work she says. 

 

Bringing Her Whole Self Together

Becoming a writer had never occurred to Lisa. She admits that somewhere along the line she missed the concept of great writing was made up of great ideas. When personal events inspired her to investigate meaning and purpose, she took a class on how to get a book published. She solicited advice from friends and shortly after doing so, her first book, Forget Perfect, just poured out of her. In her recent writing, she has connected her assertive business side with her purposeful side to create books that help leaders drive revenue by focusing on their noble purpose. 

People want to hear the compelling story about what a company is doing to change people’s lives. Lisa wanted to show sales leaders how to create a company which is competitively differentiated so they could be unique in their space and all of their people would be on fire.

Her advice for companies who wish to implement this ideology into their culture, she says to start with these three things 1. Name and claim your noble purposes 2. Tell your backstory and 3. Bring customers to life in your organization.

 

Resources:

Mike Robbins Website

Mike Robbins Podcast

Mike Robbins on Facebook

Mike Robbins on Twitter

Mike Robbins Speaker Page

McLeod and more Website

Noble Purpose Institute

Lisa McLeod on Twitter