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Gregory Offner is one of the most in-demand experts on the topic of professional performance, and navigating disruption. His clients include Fortune 100 companies, and he is often asked to keynote at conferences where industry leaders and executives turn to him for new perspectives on how to elevate performance, eliminate disengagement, and make work suck less.
Podcast Highlights
Who is Gregory Offner?
Gregory’s story starts off after graduating college, not really knowing which direction he was going in. His student loans kept adding up so Greg ended up in a career in sales. Between his natural talent for music and performance, Greg was pretty skilled at it and the connections he built led him to a career in leadership and international work.
By 2015, Greg had cobbled together two separate lives. One as a professional, one as a piano player, but after years of overusing his voice, he discovered that he needed to make a drastic change. He knew he had a limited amount of time to use the gifts he had been given and make the most of them, and after 15 surgeries in 5 years, Greg now helps organizations create a culture of highly fulfilled and engaged team members.
How do you make work suck less?
Most organizations have mission statements, but they’re largely homogenized. Same with people’s todo lists. We don’t start with clarity of purpose, which is crucial to doing work that you care about.
You have to identify your root goals instead of focusing on the superficial ones. Your root goals get to the heart of your purpose and what fulfills you.
Words have shared meaning, but those meanings don’t always align for different people. If your mission statement is misunderstood or people in the organization say one thing and do another, that creates friction and frustration.
Getting to your Root Goals
Ask clarifying questions and go deeper until you get to the root of why you do what you do, whether that’s as an individual or as an organization. Once we achieve that root goal, then we can start to build a culture and ethos, a vision of what it means to work towards that goal within the organization. From there you can look at what it feels like to work at that organization and the impact you’re having there.
Surface goals are easy, and our brains prefer efficiency, so going deeper can often be a frustrating process, but if you get to the root of your purpose it can feel like a weight is being lifted off your shoulders.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, put your thoughts down on paper. This frees your mind and gives you the space to consider whether it’s really a worthy goal.
We often tell ourselves stories about what we need to do to achieve our goals, only to find out that we don’t actually need to do those things, or the goal we had in mind is not something we actually wanted. Having a coach helps you achieve a level of clarity that is difficult to find on your own.
How can a business sort of leverage this idea across their organization?
Organizations need for their messaging to be aligned in all areas of the business, whether that’s public facing or internal meetings and communications. Lack of alignment creates confusion on the priorities of the organization and mistrust within the team working to make those goals a reality
Getting to the root goal is where you can begin aligning the message across all levels of the organization. This starts from the top down and begins to align down to the individual level.
The average employee doesn’t care about the share price. One of the reasons employees quit is when they don’t see the impact they are having each day and why it matters.
Sleepers lack a connection to the impact their work has, but they are also the biggest transformative opportunity for organizations. A leader’s job is to wake up their dormant potential, to unlock their trapped value.
Churn rate is rising, and we need to change our perspective from being the best place to work, to being the best place to be from. Develop the leapers in your team and help them create the career capital they desire. This will attract great people to your organization. Honest conversations about a person’s goals can create a valuable symbiotic relationship between the individual and the company.
The mantra is really transforming the business by transforming the individual.
Links:
https://www.gregoryoffner.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregoffnerjr/