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In this episode I speak with Arthur Woods, co-founder of Imperative. With a mission to enable everyone to uncover and apply their purpose drivers, Imperative sets out to help everyone realize their potential as employees and members of society. Currently two-thirds of the workforce is disengaged at work. This leads to high turnover and low job satisfaction. However, this can be upended, if people understand what their purpose drivers are, they can proactively change their situation. We discuss Arthur and Imperative’s approach to this challenge.
Arthur Wood’s story includes leaving a job at Google to answer his higher purpose, creating community and helping people realize their potential. While at Google he was unsatisfied with his position, so he worked nights and weekends, to create a philanthropic educational department at YouTube. He succeeded and that side job became full time. YouTube invested in his vision, but yet he still wasn’t satisfied. During this process of creating his job at YouTube, he realized so many other smart and talented people were in the exact same position he was in, unfulfilled, and wanted to find a solution to that problem.
He was introduced to Aaron Hurst, founder of Taproot Foundation. Aaron introduced skill based volunteering to the market to take advantage of people’s talents at scale at Taproot. Both Aaron and Arthur felt like this volunteer work was important, but more important, was introducing this great sense of meaning people had volunteering and infusing that into their actual day jobs where they spent the majority of their time.
The interview traverses all aspects of purpose, including, how to define it, myths arounds it, and how you can realize what drives your purpose. Arthur relays how Imperative works with company from starting with a boot camp, purpose leadership development, to piloting programs in corporations with management training and hiring practices.
Highlights:
- Free Purpose Profile for Purpose Up Listeners
- Arthur’s first business connecting a farmer’s market and college students while at Georgetown
- Explanation of what a B Corp is
- Imperative’s leadership certification and learning lab
- Three purpose drivers dimensions, and how an individual can uncover them:
- Scale of impact
- Collective vs. Individual Focus
- Problem solving
- Human
- Community
- Structure
- Knowledge Oriented
- Framework for experience purpose at work: R.I.G.
- Relationships
- Impact
- Growth
- Purpose key performance indicators
- What does an engagement with imperative look like?
Arthur Woods Bio
Arthur came from Google where he led operations for YouTube’s Education division and oversaw YouTube for Schools. Arthur co-founded Social Impact 360, the leading collegiate social enterprise education program and co-founded Out in Tech, the largest global LGBTQ technology community. Arthur studied Operations and information Management at Georgetown University and Project Management at Stanford University. He contributes to Fast Company’s Purposeful CEO series.