The Purpose Factor with Brian Bosché – Part 1

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. We are super excited today to have another guest with us. I say guest because he’s a guest to you. He happens to be one of our newest team members. And so we’ll talk about that in just a minute. But before we get started, one of the things that we love to hear is leaders and teams taking these short podcasts and then using them for leadership development in their teams. And so I just want to thank you for that.

Chris Goede:
Thank you for the comments that we hear about that and just continue to do it. That’s why we do this. What is this, Perry?

Perry Holley:
386.

Chris Goede:
386 of Perry creating content. Me just along for the ride. Brian, joined us today.

Perry Holley:
He thought it was episode 1.

Brian Bosché:
He’s like, it’s the first time.

Chris Goede:
The first one. So continue to do that. This is what this is for. It’s for you to use this as a development tool. In addition, I want to encourage you to go to MaxwelllLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast, and there you can download the learner guide that goes along with today’s content, which will be very helpful. Or there’ll be a button there that you can click and you can just— if you have a question or a content piece, content idea would be amazing. He loves it. We would love to hear from you.

Chris Goede:
Here’s what we’re going to talk about today, finding your purpose. And you’re going to go, man, that sounds like it’s a personal development side of things. Well, we’re joined today by Brian Boschee, who’s our newest member, one of our newest members, president of Maxwell Leadership. And this is his project, him and his amazing wife. We call her Gab, Gabrielle. Their company and what they’re passionate about is helping you and helping teams and organizations find that purpose. And so we’re going to dive into that today. And you’re on here going, well, maybe I just want to check out.

Chris Goede:
Don’t do that, because my team dug into it and we’ve had some amazing conversations about aligning their purpose with what they do. We’re going to dig into all of that because it’s not job agnostic, right? It’s not like, oh, this is my purpose, I’m out. Like, I lost team members. No, it’s about the alignment and understanding and how to lead them more effectively. Before we do that, and I’m super excited, talk to us a little bit about how did this come to be, your passion for it, and just give us a high-level overview of the assessment and then we’ll dig in a little bit.

Brian Bosché:
This is one of my favorite first questions that I get, which is, hey, Brian, how’d you get into purpose discovery? And they’re always shocked by the answer. And I always tell them it started with depression. And they’re like, what? Maybe I’m going to end this conversation. I’m not sure where this is going to go, but it’s true. I got passionate about discovering my purpose and then helping others do the same. It started in depression. You know, if I go back now, what are we, 12, 13 years ago, I got laid off from my dream job and divorced at the same time. From 20— when I was 16 years old, I wanted to be a national journalist.

Brian Bosché:
I wanted to be like the Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, you know, read the teleprompter at 6:30 PM Eastern time, 22 minutes of content, and the rest is commercials. That’s what I wanted to do. And I pursued that since I was 16 years old. I got out of law school and I went right into being a national journalist. And a year later, I got both laid off and divorced in the same month. Never had experienced depression in my entire life.

Chris Goede:
Wow.

Brian Bosché:
Ever. Bottom out. No money, no relationship, no job. Everything I thought I was was completely destroyed. And so it had me reaching out to really close friends and mentors. And it was always so fun. They were always well-intended. They were like, Brian, listen, listen, Brian, you need to find your purpose.

Brian Bosché:
You need to find your purpose. It sounded like those seagulls in Finding Nemo chirping away. And I’m like, and I would say thank you so much. And I would go home not satisfied with that advice. I was very frustrated with it because they were telling me what to do. They weren’t showing me how to do it. And then I realized they didn’t know how to do it. But also too, as I started to unpack this, this wasn’t about like creating— I had no intent to become an entrepreneur back then.

Chris Goede:
Zero.

Brian Bosché:
No intent. I just want to be a broadcaster. I wanted to get back to television. If you ask me, where are you going to end up next? I’ve been like, I don’t know, CNN, Fox News, whatever. And I sat down, I said, what is this purpose thing? What is— I was frustrated. I didn’t start with this journey of joy going on. I would really love to find my purpose. This is going to be really exciting.

Brian Bosché:
I was so depressed I couldn’t read words on a page. And so I sat down researching it almost like angry, and I started writing down reasons why I was dissatisfied with what I found. One, I felt that purpose discovery was too emotional. I thought it was too subjective. I thought it was too much of a journey-driven experience that most people don’t complete. I felt like that probably less than 1% of people in the world ever discover their purpose. So that’s where I started. And for me, I realized I really wasn’t searching for my purpose.

Brian Bosché:
I was searching for a decision-making That’s what I was looking for.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, filter to help me.

Brian Bosché:
I was like, okay, ’cause it’s really, when you study motivation yet like you guys do, everything comes down to 2 questions. What’s next? What’s worth it? What’s next? What’s worth it? At the time I was asking, what’s next? Where am I going? And that’s when I realized I didn’t just need to find my purpose, I needed to use my purpose as a decision-making tool. And so now 12, 13 years later, it wasn’t even in the personal vision, if you will, to create an assessment. I was just trying to figure it out for me. And then it probably wasn’t until 5 or 6 years ago that we thought about doing an assessment. And I got really excited because I’m like, oh, that’s never been done. That’s never been done. Nobody’s tried to do that well.

Brian Bosché:
Right? How could we do like the equivalent of what more like a StrengthsFinders would be or Myers-Briggs would be and turn purpose into something that could be discoverable at scale?

Chris Goede:
That’s good.

Perry Holley:
Well, I know many leaders, I don’t think I’ve ever met one that didn’t think purpose was important. I just don’t think they know how to— operationalize it. And it seems like in your story there, you’re figuring out how you can help them. But what would be your recommendation for someone that wants to inject more purpose into not only their own life but into their team’s life? How do we help them with this?

Brian Bosché:
What’s interesting is you hear people talk about purpose as if it’s definitely not a hard skill, and they’re like, oh, it’s a soft skill. And I’m like, is it really just a skill? The way I like to say it is purpose is a non-negotiable. It’s a non-negotiable. And you can’t talk about purpose without talking about fulfillment. Purpose is the best of what you have to help others. That’s a definition that’s a lot more helpful than reason for being, or right, sometimes if you say— Say that again one more time. It’s the best of what you have to help others.

Chris Goede:
That’s good.

Brian Bosché:
Because if you look at the dictionary, it just says it’s reason for being. I’m like, wow, that’s profound.

Chris Goede:
That’s gonna help you make your next decision. That’s gonna help me make, oh cool.

Brian Bosché:
So if I could just solve the existential part, I could get around to making decisions. And then you hear people talk about why and they kind of conflate why and purpose. Why is a very important— what’s your why? Very important question to ask and answer. But purpose is not just why. It’s not just passion. It’s not just reason for being. If you look at the top 1% performers in the world, they’re living lives of contribution and they’re loving it. They’re loving it.

Brian Bosché:
And so you have to talk about purpose, but you can’t talk about purpose without talking about fulfillment. Purpose is the best of what you have to help others. This best of what I have to lead others or love others or whatever. Contribution. Fulfillment is the result of helping others with the best of what I have. It is the emotional feedback loop that shows me I’m making a difference. You have to talk about fulfillment because if it’s not purpose that people are seeking primarily, they’re actually seeking the result of living a life.

Chris Goede:
That’s a good point, right? Yeah. The fulfillment of that, right?

Brian Bosché:
They are. And because if you’re not fulfilled, you’re not going to sacrifice. If you’re not going to sacrifice, you can’t be successful. So when you think about leaders, I always tell them, this is one of the most important things you personally could ever do. And then secondarily, your team, because if they’re not fulfilled, they’re not going to sacrifice, not at the level you want them to. And if they don’t sacrifice, can’t be successful.

Perry Holley:
That’s why when we took it, so we invested in this heavily for our team. But you, I love what you did afterwards. We got the paper, we talked about it, we shared what we learned, but then you started going person to person. How does what you do fulfill your purpose.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
And with that, so that kind of makes that connection there.

Chris Goede:
And the big thing there was, as I started off, it was not for me to then say, well, let me go find another opportunity for you that you can fulfill it on. I wasn’t trying to offload my team, Perry. Maybe, maybe it was you, but I— the rest of them, I wasn’t, right? But we talk about this in leadership, right? When you want, uh, and we’re going to move into this about When do you see your team begin to lack engagement? What are some of the behaviors early on that all of a sudden your leadership bench is withering away? Or even to the fact of you’re not seeing people make decisions. And we talk about quiet quitting. All these corporate words and buzzwords are because they’re not engaged. But going back to what Perry and I were just kind of joking about, It is taking their purpose while we had this conversation and we took our entire team through it. And by the way, the entire Maxwell Leadership organization is about to go through it because Brian and I are working on something for our culture. It’s super important for them to be able to know that so that we can tie your purpose to what you’re doing.

Chris Goede:
And I think leaders, you need to hear us say this, is that a way for you to to connect with your team at level 2, as we talk about the 5 levels, to get more level 3 production together and develop them. You got to understand this. It’s another tool, like Myers-Briggs, DiSC, like you talked about. So all that to be said, we’re super passionate about the experience that we had. What are the signals? Why have you seen in the research when they’re not linked to that purpose? And I love what you said. It’s ultimately about the fulfillment. Do you see that quiet quitting? Do you see that lack of engagement? Do you see the reserved? Of the employee or the team member or your peer come out?

Brian Bosché:
One of the leading indicators for me of disengagement is— it’s not, it’s not what a lot of people say, but it’s how I’d like to describe it to myself, which is, are they talking about their work more emotionally, or are they talking about it more logically? Because if they’re talking about it with emotion, they’re showing that they have like this Psychology research calls it identity fusion. Tom Cruise was accepting an award on some award stage. I don’t— one of them.

Chris Goede:
One of them. One of them, right?

Brian Bosché:
And he had this statement. He said, making movies is not what I do. It’s who I am. It’s who I am. It’s a statement of identity fusion. He’s speaking about it with emotion. So when I have team members that have gotten like a lot more logical, and a lot more, yeah, that’s a pretty good idea. I think we could do that.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I think that’s good. I’m already getting a leading indicator that there’s an issue there, that there’s not an emotional connection with the work.

Chris Goede:
It goes back to discretionary effort, right, at level 2. Yeah.

Perry Holley:
I’ll just give that somewhere else, not to you.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I’m going to hold back that energy.

Brian Bosché:
And so when they have fulfillment in what they’re doing, there’s a couple of things that you have to look at. Fulfillment is received by human beings in 3 primary ways. The top one is gratitude. Gratitude is a fulfillment delivery vehicle. So if I’m a leader and I’m not giving away specific gratitude to my team members, calling out the best of what they have to help others, attaching it to how it produced the outcome, saying I’m going to come alongside them like a coach to help them do more of that. That’s my greatest engagement mechanism is the specific gratitude targeted at the best of what they have to call it out and bring it about. So I look for people that are talking about things logically, almost too logically, almost too sterilely to see if I can get more emotionally connected.

Chris Goede:
That’s good. That’s good.

Perry Holley:
So I’m looking at mine and I thought we agreed before the podcast started that we’re going to make fun of Chris’s.

Chris Goede:
We’re going to yours first.

Perry Holley:
I love it.

Brian Bosché:
Yours is in color. His is in black and white.

Chris Goede:
We can’t see mine.

Perry Holley:
So And I love the red and black. Go Dawgs.

Chris Goede:
Go Dawgs. That’s it.

Perry Holley:
So it says your purpose factor elements. And so I was wondering about just interesting, the 4 elements of natural advantage, acquired skills, pull passion, and origin strength. The relationship, because you just made a comment a minute ago about it’s not a hard skill, soft skill. What is it? It’s bigger than that. What is the relationship between these? And as you read the report, What’s it telling me right away when it just on the, on the 4L? It gets into core values and beliefs, and it really, it’s got a ton of information, a ton of information. Um, but help me with the factor elements.

Brian Bosché:
So over a decade ago when I started researching purpose, I just consumed everything I could get my hands on. I had books, movies, documentaries, anything that was tangentially related to purpose, I was watching it or reading it. And I kept seeing these 4 themes come up: something natural, something related to skills, something related to passion, although passion alone can become kind of problematic. And then also something related to this coming of age, childhood origin story, how that— how those developmental years shape your.

Chris Goede:
Perspective and your decision-making.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I kept seeing these 4 buckets. I was like, okay, wait a second. So purpose, it’s definitely not just why. It’s often confused with passion. But why do these 4 things keep coming up? And then the question became, wait a second, what if this could be turned into a process or an equation and started playing around with that? And so, where I landed on in the research years later was natural advantage, the role you tend to play in life and work. When you’re watching kids play in the backyard and you’re watching how this one leads this way and this one kind of steps back a little bit, this one kind of speaks like a teacher, you see these natural nature giftings come up. Then there’s acquired skills. You have to consider the sum total of all the skills that you’ve gotten over your life and your career.

Brian Bosché:
Life, work, and education gave you a set of skills that you wired. That’s what was nurtured. Pull passion. The reason the word pull is there is because I want to solve problems that pull me out of bed in the morning. I don’t want to have to push myself all this time. Whether it’s an injustice in the world or a problem in the world, whatever it is, I want it to pull me. It’s a passion that pulls me. Origin strength.

Brian Bosché:
This is how you overcome hard things. So when you look at this, this is generally how you approach the overcoming of hard things. So I see yours is the discernment. Discerning strength. When you get into an environment that’s tough, you’re thinking, okay, you got to think about this thoroughly. I want to think about this from multiple angles. On your worst day, you’re probably having a hard time trusting people. On your best day though, you have a gift of discernment, and we’re going to get through this hard thing with discernment.

Brian Bosché:
So that’s how they’re all related when you look at it in the red and black. This, this assessment also, uh, underneath these layers speaks to nature and nurture. What’s your nature? Like the kids playing in the backyard, right? And what was nurtured over the course of your life?

Chris Goede:
That’s awesome. That helped me even. We had Brian and Gab do a 2-hour debrief with our team, which we’ll talk about that at the end of the session today and the power of that and how you and your team can experience something like that. But when you— I don’t remember hearing that because I didn’t hear it pull me out of bed in the morning. I’m a simple guy, right? I tell people all the time, John keeps things on the bottom shelf. That’s why I’ve been around here for 30 years, because if it was anywhere above that, I wouldn’t be here. But as I’m looking at this, that pull me out of bed makes a lot of sense. Now, what I want to do is I want to transition into my leadership style.

Chris Goede:
So Perry and I, ironically enough, are the same in the first 3, okay? Except for the second one, or the first one. Natural advantage. Is natural, right? Advantage is where this is a recruiter and I’m a builder. So what I want you to do is kind of walk me through this thing and say, okay, if I’m leading meetings, if I’m making decisions, if my leadership energy, like I see it even just coming out of you talking about this, right? Where we do well under pressure. What’s the difference there between— just go ahead and let’s talk about the two and let’s talk about the builder and the recruiter as our natural advantage. Just to give you a little bit of glimpse of how it’s going to show up in our leadership.

Perry Holley:
Feel free to say which one’s the best.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I know, I know.

Brian Bosché:
Well, it depends on how much you pay me. Either side. Who’s got more cash on them? Just kidding. So when I look at yours, you’re the, is it you’re the builder?

Chris Goede:
I’m the builder.

Brian Bosché:
You’re the builder and then you’re the recruiter. When we’re talking about natural advantage, the role you tend to play in life and work, the easiest way I like to explain this is this is going to very much inform your leadership style. So how you’re going to show up as a leader. If you’re the builder, you like going after those big macro, seemingly unachievable goals. Get after it. Take the hill. That’s going to inform your leadership style. If you’re a recruiter, the way you’re going to lead is a little bit more, we’ve got this thing, we’ve got this service, we’ve got this product, we’ve got this cause, and I’ve got to get people around it.

Brian Bosché:
Those are two different and distinct leadership styles. And what I love about this is that oftentimes when we say the word leader, we all kind of think of, oh yeah, well, there’s these obvious ways to lead and all of that. What I love about this is I’ve seen this really liberate some leadership teams to think that this person had to be this way, but they could actually— like, one of the other archetypes is the teacher, the teacher archetype. That they felt empowered, they could show up in their leadership style as a teacher, somebody who likes to take in information and make it more simple, easier to understand. So they’ll come sit next to their team members and kind of work a little bit more like a coach, as opposed to a builder might be a little bit more like, let’s take the.

Chris Goede:
Hill, we’re going for it. It reminds me, you were joking about this one’s the best. People will ask us when we’re doing team sessions, off-sites, they’ll be like, okay, this is great, but tell me, What’s the best leadership style or what’s the best this in whatever assessment that you’re using? And we say it’s yours. It’s yours. And what you’re leading to is that if I come into a meeting and while I’d like to teach periodically, but if I’ve just become— I’m going to be pulling energy out of my body in a hurry. I’m going to be leading on the left hand. My team’s not going to get the best. I’m not going to get the best of me.

Chris Goede:
And it’s the same thing with you. And so that’s the power of being able to dig in and to look at this. So, yeah, we’ll continue on if you don’t mind.

Perry Holley:
The next piece I thought was probably where most eyes go is your core values and your beliefs. And there are a set of words. I’ll just say mine and you say yours. I said mine say champion, vigilance, inspire, and responsibility. And what are yours?

Chris Goede:
Mine are innovation, vigilance, inspire, and responsibility.

Perry Holley:
Okay, so we’re again 3 out of 4.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, this is about— in addition to help you know your elements, like know the 4 core pieces to your purpose, is to also give you a set of words that can operate as like a subset of that decision-making tool. So for example, the black means nature, the red means what was nurtured, right? Black means this is how you were made. And then when it comes to nurture, this is what you got through life.

Chris Goede:
Got it.

Brian Bosché:
So champion, for example, maps to Recruiter.

Perry Holley:
Okay.

Brian Bosché:
Inspire maps to his Messenger acquired skill set. Vigilance maps to his Discerning strength. Responsibility maps to his Need Satisfier. So those words were selected through our research process to be associated with your element, but to give you a singular word to associate with it as a, as a set of core values that you can take into decision making. What I love about this What I personally love about this, this came later in our research process. We were really thinking about adding core values to the research because leaders kept asking us about, well, we’ve got our core values as a team, we got a vision, we got a purpose. How do we get this all related? I said, the goal is this: purpose, mission relevance. Individual purpose, macro mission relevance.

Brian Bosché:
How can we connect these two things? So sometimes we’re working with teams, we’ll say, hey, John, out of these 4 core values and beliefs, which one of these would you say most describes you? And which one of these words could you draw a connection between your word and one of the corporate values? So he, he or she could use a word to make the macro mission organizational values personally relevant to them. I’m just going for personal relevance. Because where people get purpose wrong in an organization, if I could say that, is that they have a come join us mindset. Leaders have a come join us mindset. What we’re doing is so cool. You need to join what we’re doing without saying, why don’t we have a go join them mindset? How can we? Okay, we’ve got our mission, we’ve got our vision, we’ve got our purpose as an organization. Great. Check.

Brian Bosché:
We’ve got all that. Now, how do we go join them in their individual purpose and make it relevant so that they show up with fulfillment?

Chris Goede:
This is exactly what we talk about. And it’s what does it look like to be on the other side of your leadership? Well, if you don’t know these type of things, it’s going to be very stoic, very cold, right? And listen, it’s tough to increase your influence and to increase your leadership because you have to lead people the way they need to be led. This is a blueprint for Chris Goede, right? It’s a tool for you. One of the last questions I have for you is when you think about— because we talk a lot about here, Level 4, increasing your Level 4 influence, where we are developing people as leaders, right?

Brian Bosché:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
So that we can help them achieve what they want to. How do you use a tool like this? I know you’ve coached a lot of executives, a lot of teams, both you and Gabriel have. How do you encourage leaders and how do you use this tool to develop other leaders, to develop people?

Brian Bosché:
To develop— the best thing I can do for anybody I lead next to, lead with, lead, is help them first identify the best of what they’ve got, the best of who they are, and then equip them with a couple of focusing questions. But when we’re talking about organizations, it’s really one primary question for me, which is, Most people are looking for a reason to stay at an organization, not a reason to leave. McKinsey did research on purpose in 2021, and in the, in the study on purpose, it said 87% of those surveyed said if they felt that their purpose was connected to the mission of the organization, they planned to stay for the long term. 87%. It was either 93 or 94% said they would suggest that their friend also work at the organization.

Chris Goede:
That’s a key indicator.

Brian Bosché:
Or would also talk positively, net promoter score, about the company or the product or the service to their friends, their family, their network. And so they’re looking for a reason to stay, not a reason to leave. Now, when I’m working with leaders, the first thing I’ve got to do— it’s law of the lid, right? You’ve got to get clear first before you go and try to get your people clear on their individual purpose, because you’ve got to have what you talk about all the time. You’ve got to have a common language.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Brian Bosché:
What I see this is it’s not just a decision-making tool, but I can personally use this as a leader, as an encouragement tool. This is for me, this is like, this is a diagram that if I wanted to articulate gratitude to you, feed your fulfillment, feed your willingness to sacrifice, I’m coming to this page to learn how I want to give you gratitude and give you feedback and constantly connect you to the overall mission of the organization with this.

Chris Goede:
That’s so good.

Perry Holley:
To finish the first page, at the bottom it has your fulfillment factor. And it says, for me, I’m most fulfilled thinking critically about how to effectively communicate and inspire. And you feed that fulfillment for me by you ask me, how should we do this? What do you think? Even this morning we were delivering the session. You kind of gave that and said, what do you think we should do for this group? And you let me think critically about it, how I’m going to communicate that. And I don’t even feel the hours and hours you put into it. It was so fulfilling. It just flew by me thinking, But I think you’re kind of connecting the dots for me about how I operate here in this organization, but how you help me fulfill my purpose in what I do. I never thought about it other than I just enjoy being here.

Perry Holley:
I’m not looking for a reason to leave.

Chris Goede:
Yet. So I’m going to wrap this session up. But let me say this. Brian’s coming back for another session. We’ve got to dig in and talk about this a little bit further. Couple of things I wrote down that I just want to share with you as we kind of wrap up, and then I’ll let you close this out. We do a lot about— Perry and I were just talking before we started recording about resilience, and we had Valerie Burton on a couple of weeks ago, and we roll that out to an organization or organizations and their teams. Man, this aligns with that, right? I’m thinking about the conversation we’re having, and you want teams and you want people that are more— you want to be more resilient.

Chris Goede:
Then do we get aligned with what our purpose is? And so listen, just because you know your purpose and you’re aligned with it doesn’t mean that we’re removing hard work. We all have challenging times. But what we do remove is the wasted work that is pulling energy out of us. Right. And so how do you do that for yourself? How do you do that for your team? How do you have a conversation with your team around that? And so the other thing I was thinking about is when we have the opportunity to delegate, came off of your comment just a minute ago. I absolutely could have went and facilitated some content and had a conversation with the group this morning. I knew we were going to be together, and I know that’s your sweet spot, that’s your jam, and you’ll do 10 times better than I would. And so when I can get into that mode as a leader and go, man, I’m going to empower or give ownership to him, even if it was to the short term, he’s still going to kill it.

Chris Goede:
And he killed it this morning with the organization. But you were built to solve problems like that.

Perry Holley:
I discerned it. And I mean, everything you were just saying.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So I’m telling you, if this dialogue just— if you’re thinking about a team member right now, you’re thinking about another leader or peer, maybe it’s your CEO, I don’t know who it is, but to begin to have conversations like this, it changes the engagement level and the environment around your team and your culture. As Perry wraps up, he’s going to give you that URL again. And here’s what I want to do. I want to encourage you to go to that Explore Solutions tab that you’re going to see. And in there we have a form and just say, Purpose Factor, right? And our team’s going to follow back up with you, and we would love to take you on a journey with Brian and with Gab and with our team on how to implement this into your organization.

Perry Holley:
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you, Brian. As Chris said, if you want more information on Purpose Factor or any of our offerings or like to see our other in our podcast family, you can do all of that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you and very grateful. That you spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

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