039: Solve Community Problems Without Leaving Your Job
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I remember that feeling when I first got out of college and got my first job. All I did was watch numbers go in a bank account, bills come in, and numbers go out of a bank account. I remember saying to my mom, “Is this really what life is all about? Just transactions in and out of a bank account? Getting up every day and working?” I was hungry for my life to mean something more. I think we can all resonate with that wish that we could do more to help to make a difference in the world as a part of our daily life.
You’ve had that feeling, everyone's had that feeling. I think we've all felt that way at some point in our life. And here's why: we are all created to be in relationship with one another – actually choosing someone else's best interest over our self interest, the community good over your individual good. That's a part of the unique trait of what makes us human.
Last week, I spoke with a man named Tim who'd recently finished The Social Leader Essentials ECourse. He told me that during the course he began to realize why he was struggling to find purpose in his life and work. He said he realized that there were three Tim's: there was the CEO Tim, the Sunday church elder Tim, and the charity volunteer Tim. Rarely, if ever, did these three parts of himself ever coexist in his daily life.
The problem was that no one had ever told him that they could coexist. And nobody had ever actually equipped him to do that. We don't learn that in business school. We don't even learn that as entrepreneurs. We have to be given permission and be taught to do that, even though it's innately a part of us.
CEO Tim focused on profits and creating value through work in his company. Sunday church Tim was a lay leader of a small group, and he taught about the importance of compassion and mercy. And charity volunteer Tim tried to do good once a quarter when he'd go and serve at the local homeless shelter on the weekend.
But what Tim needed was to close the gaps between those various parts of himself and find ways to integrate all of himself into each situation of his life. It had never occurred to him that it was possible for all of those parts of himself to show up in his daily life and work all the time. And once he started to ask himself what that would look like, a whole world of opportunity opened up to him. Tim could lead people, not only to achieve profits and create value, but he can help inspire his team to build a culture of empathy and compassion in the workplace. He could dream of ways that his work would even help solve problems of homelessness through creating jobs or other second chance initiatives. And because he was such a great CEO, when he blended all those things together, he could actually create scalable solutions.
But many people, even those people who work in helping professions, in nonprofits, or in some sort of compassionate work – those people are often like Tim, too. They're uncertain about integrating the various parts of themselves in their daily life, especially at work. So as a result, people retreat into this position that we might just call inactivity. They become paralyzed, and they don't act, even though they know that they want to make a difference. They can't connect that purpose to their daily life, or they relegate it to some sort of social action on the margin of their life. And this is where the problem begins. This is how our heart begins to stagnate.
When this happens someone's wealth – their time, talent, and treasure – starts to pile up. And so naturally, when something is piling up that's that valuable, we try to keep it. We try to preserve it, and in effect, we end up burying it. Paradoxically, however, St. Basil the Great, one of the founders of what would later become hospitals in the second century said this, “As you bury your wealth, you entomb with it your own heart.”
In the Scripture, Jesus taught: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. A lot of people think about it the other way: where my heart is, that's where I'm going to put my treasure. But, the eternal truth is where your treasure is, there your heart’s going to be. So if we're burying our time, our talent, our treasure, our passion, our desire for social action... if we bury those, our heart gets buried, too.
But, when we give away our treasure, when we place our heart as if it were on the fulcrum of a scale that inclines daily towards compassion, mercy, meaning, and purpose, then we find really deep enjoyment, even in menial daily tasks in our life and in our work. Slowly by slowly, we began to take social action, and to connect our passion in our life with our daily work, and that leads to your heart coming alive, and to being able to lead with greater impact every day of your life.
A LEADER’S MOST IMPORTANT JOB
Think about a great river. Great rivers always begin as tiny little streams. But eventually, they acquire an irresistible magnitude by means of small additions. Little creek, added to a little creek, added to a little creek becomes a great river, such that eventually the waters are so powerful that they can sweep away even huge obstacles and boulders that are in its path.
A leader’s most important job is to connect people to their purpose. And people respond really well when their work becomes framed as a meaningful contribution to the greater good. But, that is still a top down model. That whole idea of Corporate Social Responsibility is still being pushed from the top down. What's even more powerful is when the leader sets the stage for that transformation of the heart where every person in the organization begins to connect to their purpose, not just an organizational or a company purpose. That's when the real transformation can take place.
When leaders and team members connect their social passion to their daily life, and infuse their work with that passion whenever possible, this is what helps us to avoid the trap of cynicism and inauthenticity that can emerge when purpose is artificially imposed from the top down through corporate mandates or some kind of planning endeavor that doesn't actually tap in to the creativity and to the heart of the individuals in the organization.
When more and more people in an organization begin to see themselves as Social Leaders, an authentic ecosystem of social passion begins to permeate a business or an organization –the decision making, the culture, the personal good, and the common good. The shareholders welfare and the stakeholders welfare merge and become one. Collaboration and creativity increases, and achievement accelerates.
When leaders are empowered to connect to their social passion, and to integrate that into their working life holistically... when they're given permission to communicate that passion to those around them... those leaders model a contagious passionate leadership that really is set apart. You can tell leaders who have tapped into that inner purpose, that deeper why. Others on the team then want their life and their work to be filled with that same sense of deep passion and purpose. This is when all of the untapped talent, productivity, and creativity of an organization comes gushing forth.
Getting to that point takes some work. And awakening that passion within your heart really only happens once we make time in our life to do the reflection, to do the visioneering that it takes to figure out what our passions are, and what we're going to do in our daily life to bring those passions forward. That's why I created the Integrated Priorities Framework.
THE INTEGRATED PRIORITIES FRAMEWORK
The Integrated Priorities Framework is a way that we can learn to move beyond just being inclined towards charity and we can get to integrated priorities in our leadership. But it really does take thoughtfulness and time.
The integrated priorities framework is a four-step, simple guide that gives you an outline to help you write an Integrated Priority Statement. This statement helps you to figure out how to integrate your desire for social good into every aspect of your daily life and work. Here's mine, for example:
Daily, I will harness my passion for social venturing, my natural fluency and public speaking, and my professional network, to make racial and economic reconciliation more possible today than it was yesterday.
It's essentially like a vision statement, a mission statement, that gets you thinking about how to creatively integrate problem solving and the common good down into the minutiae of your daily work in life whenever it's possible.
I want to teach you this framework, I want to unpack each of the steps for you, so that you can do the writing and reflecting yourself, begin to connect to your social passion, and come up with ways where you can take greater social action.
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STEP ONE: INVENTORY YOUR SOCIAL PASSION/S
Here’s the first step: you've got to inventory your social passion and your situation. So this begins with asking yourself first: what are the issues that really pierce my heart? What moves me? What do I want to see change? Then you begin to list those out.
For me, I cannot go to sleep at night without figuring out a way to make racial and economic reconciliation happen. I am surrounded by people in my life and in the news who I know are struggling to survive and succeed. That pierces my heart. I know that I can make a difference, I can make a dent in the universe, even if it's just a small one. And that moves me. That's why I've chosen my work at Reconciliation Services and always worked in the nonprofit world. But that would move me whether I was at a car dealership or an insurance company, or working in the nonprofit world. And I want to figure out a way, no matter what I'm doing in my life, to move the needle on that. Because that, like a magnet drawn to something, that is what my heart is drawn towards.
Literally write down your social passion/s, list them out and begin to understand which one or two of those really bubbles to the top.
STEP TWO: LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE AFFECTED BY THE PROBLEM YOU WANT TO SOLVE
The second step is to make time and to be willing to listen closely to the people that are affected by the problem that you want to solve. The second step is all about getting educated. In this step, what I recommend is that you commit weekly to at least 30 minutes of scheduled time on your calendar where you're going to intentionally go deeper and learn more about the issue that you wrote down for step one.
For me, I spend time every week reading, following the news, but also listening to people’s lived experience wherever I can find it – podcasts, in the news, in my volunteer work, in my life, in my neighborhood – I spend time listening to the people who have the lived experience of poverty, the lived experience of struggling to find a job and make it economically, the lived experience of racism, and learn how that impacts their life.
In this step, the most important and hardest thing to do is actually to lay aside your first instinct on how you would solve the problem and keep on listening. For example, you might want to help people find adequate housing, you might think there needs to be more affordable housing. And so you would think about ways that you could give money to an affordable housing nonprofit, or you might be a developer and think about ways that you can build more affordable housing. But if you just rushed to the solution, you might not actually come up with the right one – a good solution to the wrong problem is still the wrong solution.
You have to really listen, even listening to voices that make you uncomfortable. People that are from different ways of life, walks of life, political persuasions, voices that are outside of your social circle. In that education, you're going to find the answer. You don't have to bring the answer like you're an inventor who's got the solution that nobody else can come up with. Actually, when we're talking about social issues, most often the solution is in the community. The people who are living with the problem know the answer to the problem, but they may not have the agency or the means to be able to bring that solution to bear.
In this second step, it's not to act, it's not to rush to what you think the solution is – it's being willing to make time to listen closely to the people affected and to get educated.
STEP THREE: DISCOVER YOUR UNIQUE SOCIAL FLUENCY
That leads us to the third step (which, by the way, is still not to take an action). The third step in writing your Integrated Priorities Statement is to discover your unique social fluency. Your social fluency is both the masterful integration of your knowledge, skills, abilities, and talents, and the utilization of these in the areas of your life where you are uniquely positioned to make an impact. In other words, said more simply: when you're fluent in a language, you know it in and out, you can dream in the language, that's when you know that you're fluent. Your social fluency are those skills, that knowledge, that talent or ability, where you know it in and out and you can use it.
For me, public speaking is easy, I don't get stage fright. It's something I can use. It's a tool that I've got, it's a skill that I can use, and I can use it really well. I also have professional networks and people around me. And I can organize people, bring those things together in order to make a difference.
In this third step, start by asking yourself: what are your natural strengths? What unique professional skills, access, influence, or privilege can you bring to a solution?
STEP FOUR: WRITE YOUR INTEGRATED PRIORITIES STATEMENT
That leads us to the fourth step. Now it’s time to actually start to write our integrated priority statement, that statement that's going to guide you in your social leadership journey. Generally, your integrated priority statement can be thought of as that mission statement, a vision statement that I mentioned earlier. But it needs to be something that you feel passionately, that you feel in your gut. It's something that people are going to come to know that you stand for. So in that way, it's a roadmap.
It's a roadmap for deploying your unique skills and social fluency. That statement enumerates the social impact that you want to make from your position of leadership, whatever your leadership lane is, from whatever your ability is, and whatever your context is. Then once you've written your statement, it'll sound something like this:
Daily, I will harness my passion for social venturing, my natural fluency in public speaking, and my professional network to make racial and economic reconciliation more possible today than it was yesterday.
Let's unpack the parts. First, I start off with how often am I going to do it – I try to make it specific and measurable, I try to make it time bound. So I start with “Daily I will harness…” and then, what's your passion? What's your social fluency? I say “Daily I will harness my passion for social venturing, my natural fluency in public speaking, and my professional network…” That's: what moves me, what I'm good at, and what I have access to. That's what I'm going to harness.
Now the question is, what am I going to do with it? I'm going to try to make racial and economic reconciliation more possible today than it was yesterday.
Your statement might be very different than mine, your skills might be very different than mine, your area of passion might be very different than mine. But by using that four-step framework, you can then create this Integrated Priorities Statement. My encouragement to you is to put it where you're going to see it every day. A social leader takes that statement and then works to develop habits, systems, processes, and routines around their integrated priorities. The Integrated Priorities Statement becomes a lens through which every new opportunity, every new project is viewed and evaluated.
When you do that, you begin to discover (like Tim from the earlier story) that there is much more possible in your daily life than you imagined that there could be. Now not every new project or opportunity is going to reveal the way to make an impact or to change the world. But when you practice the Integrated Priorities Framework, and you use it, and when that alignment does happen, the results are unbelievably powerful.
I want you to be able to experience that in your daily life. I want you to be able to have your heart come alive, for you to find that passion, that purpose in your work that only you can bring forward. And the Integrated Priorities Framework is where you can begin.
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Fr. Justin Mathews is the Executive Director of Reconciliation Services. He holds a BBA in Business from Belmont University (TN), a Masters in Divinity from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. In 2020, Fr. Mathews was awarded the “Ace Award” from the KC Chamber of Commerce as a champion of diversity and inclusion and Reconciliation Services received the “Excellence In Impact” Award from Nonprofit Connect.