Find your purpose: The methodology behind NYU’s most popular class
Feeling stuck? Suzy Welch shares the simple 3-circle method to find your purpose, at any stage of your career.
Suzy Welch (00:06):
I think that the work of our life is working out the conflicts between our values. This thing, what was I meant to do with my life? Am I doing the right thing in my life is not for college kids, it’s for people of every single age you’d be stunned at who is looking for their purpose. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been sort of at events with very fancy people who are very stellar in their field, and I’ll be standing there with the vice president of a bank and she’ll lean over and say, I need to take your class. Becoming You is a class that I created at NYU because it was a class I wish I had taken. I have seen so many people’s lives change simply by knowing their values and their aptitudes.
Hannah Beaver (00:46):
Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Today is very special because not only is it the first live episode of the How to Make a Leader podcast, it’s also special because I get to talk to the wonderful Suzy Welch. Suzy is an acclaimed researcher, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, as well as the director for the Center for Flourishing at NYU Stern Initiative. She’s also a three times New York Times bestselling author round for floors, and especially including her new book, which you’ll see at the back there Becoming You. So we will dig very deeply into becoming you in as much time as we can in the short time that we have together. But first, this is the How to Make a Leader podcast. I have to ask, what is a leader,
Suzy Welch (01:35):
First of all, by the way, hi, I’m Suzy, so nice to be here. Okay, we’re off to the races immediately. Thank you for having me. When I teach management, this is the big management class which students have to take after leadership and I have to do a lot of unteaching about leadership because they’ve been taught leadership by academics and I’m professor of management practice. I’ve, over the course of my career led about 30,000 people as a business leader. So I have my academic background and my own research and so forth, but I’ve also actually run organizations and the students come in and they have been given this absolute lofty explanation of leadership with all this sort of, you are on the mound mountaintop, you’re a visionary and so forth, and I have to break the news to them that actually a leader has to do that plus that.
(02:17):
There’s a lot more to it than that. That’s all you do. Eventually your team is going to say, but wait, how does this actually get done? We need some help there. Please come down into the trenches with us and truly leaders go back and forth, shuttle back and forth and shuttle back and forth between the two. I do think that there’s this one concept that is a very unfortunately permeated throughout the culture at large and also the culture of organizations. And it starts when kids are very little leader, good manager, bad, okay leaders, the big halo over it. If any of you have ever sort of sat there with your kid’s teachers and the kid is like seven years old and the teacher says to you, little Johnny’s a leader and you feel like, oh, I must be a great parent, right? It’s like you’re waiting to hear that your kid. You don’t want to hear little Johnny’s an individual contributor like, oh God, no. Right? And yet it’s wonderful if you want to be a leader and it’s wonderful if you’re wired to be a leader and if you have the personality traits to be a leader, and I have a construct, which I would be more than happy to talk to you about with what a leader really is, but you have to also be able to execute otherwise you cannot function at the speed of business today just to have lofty thoughts is about half your work.
Hannah Beaver (03:24):
Thank you. Appreciate the context as well on your background. I think it’s great to inform the conversation going forward and what do we do when someone doesn’t want to be a leader? How do we focus on developing them?
Suzy Welch (03:34):
They’re great, thank goodness for them. If everybody wanted to be a leader, get very crowded, wouldn’t it? One of the things I’ve discovered, I teach this class Becoming You, which is about figuring out who you are and what you should do with your life. And I also teach management. I’ve taught thousands of students at this point, and one of the things that I receive when I get these shiny MBAs into my classroom is that they’ve all been told that they should be leaders. Leaders, as I said, leaders, good manager or bad. And then at some point, either one of those classes, they get 360 feedback, they go through the whole process. It takes five weeks to use a company that maybe some of you use, and they go through the big 360 feedback. For many of them, this is the first time they have found out how the world experiences them and they are, it’s a day of reckoning.
(04:14):
I tell you, they sometimes find out that they’re very, very appreciated, seem to be very good team players and sometimes not, but sometimes they are, but that they’re leaders and we have to start this conversation that not everyone is a leader and that some people are really good individual contributors and then you add the layer on top of it that some people just simply don’t want to be leaders. So I realized that when I was helping my students figure out their purpose and their career path and many of them taking management, whether or not they even want to be leaders, I finally created a tool to help them figure out what their personality traits suggested and what they were really feeling about the world. That sort of says it’s a continuum about individual contributor to leader. And so some of them get back scores that are very high.
(04:55):
It indicates that they have the potential high potential for leadership. I now use this in organizations all the time. I started with my students and others get scores that are sort of below 40 on this particular scale. And what I say is this is not a value judgment. This is just about what you want to do with your life and what your sort of bundle of personality traits would suggest your dominant hand kind of thing. And I cannot tell you how often there’s relief like this is such a relief. I don’t want to be a leader. There’s plenty of organizations that will take me as an individual contributor and woe to the organization that does not have a way to develop individual contributors. So I mean that you’ve got to have that path for developing them as well. They’re essential to organizations. Everybody cannot be a leader and it’s very freeing for the people who are specialists or not set up to be leaders that there’s a way for them also to grow in every organization.
Hannah Beaver (05:41):
As we think about the becoming new methodology, one of the first steps in that methodology is to find your own personal values and your value system. So can you talk to me about why we sometimes find it so hard to find our values and define what those values mean to
Suzy Welch (05:57):
Yeah, but can I first talk about what becoming you methodology is of? Because I’m sure you’re not sitting there all saying, oh, we know what that methodology is becoming you is a class that I created at NYU because it was a class I wish I had taken all the way through my career that from the outside my career looked kind of spectacular. I went to Harvard Business School, then I went and I worked at Bain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had what looked to be a very linear career that from the outside you would say, that looks great, but I never really, it was kind of accidental and not entirely intentional. And I was sort of dodging and weaving between what I used to call all the shareholders in Suzy Incorporated, which included my children and my husband and my bosses and my sisters and my parents.
(06:33):
And I just sort of did the best. I kind of cobbled it together and life went on and a series of events happened and I had at a certain point morphed into being a academic and a writer who really focused on careers and I had developed this methodology. Finally, I said to the dean at NYU, I really want to teach this methodology that helps young people figure out what to do with their lives. And he said, well, we can try it as an experiment. And so I created this class called Becoming You, crafting the authentic life you want and need. And I will just tell you, if you create a class named that and you put it into a course catalog for 20 and 30 somethings, they come for you. So it started off as an experiment and now is a widely taught class at NYU and I now teach it in workshops and so forth.
(07:13):
But here’s the premise, it’s very, very simple. The premise is is that your purpose, what you should do with your life lies at the intersection of three data sets, your personal values, which no one really knows. I mean, my research would suggest that only 7% of your values, okay, so your personal values of which there are 15, and you all have different levels of those 15, your aptitudes slightly more people know their aptitudes, but there’s eight big cognitive aptitudes and then there’s your emotional aptitudes, which is your personality, how the world experiences you, and then there your economically viable interests. And a lot of people, there’s apertures get smaller and smaller and smaller as they go along in life when there’s beautiful research, best research very well done that shows that when we come out of high school, five to seven jobs exist for us.
(07:58):
Then you go to college, you think that the aperture would get bigger, it goes up to 11, and then after that it starts shrinking down and down and down as you get onto a conveyor belt. Next thing you know, you’re on that conveyor belt your whole career. I mean with my podcast, number one kind of communication I get is people saying, I’ve been in hospitality for 25 years and finally have to admit to myself, I never liked a day of it. And I’m like, okay, let’s get going here. The becoming your methodology is an excavation of your personal values and identification of your aptitudes and opening of the aperture and an identification of your economically viable interest. And at the center of those at the overlap is where your purpose lies. So your question was low those many years ago when you asked it 10 minutes ago or whatever.
(08:39):
What gets in the way of us finding out what our values are is first number one, no one knows generally, I’m speaking very broadly here, but the term values has sort of been hijacked by popular culture, progressive values and family values and conservative values, and nobody really knows what values are. And most of the time they mix them up with virtues. Okay, kindness, integrity, generosity, those are not values, those are virtues and it’s wonderful to have virtues, but values are choices and you don’t ever say this, anybody decide how kind you want to be? No, that’s just generally decided to be virtues. So most people don’t know what values are and they just come down to sort of saying values are, and by the way, values are the deeply held beliefs that drive our decisions and our actions. And there’s two kinds of values everybody has.
(09:26):
As I said, there’s 15 values that are established and everybody has values that they hold and then they have values that they express. So you can have a very, very high value of say, family centrism, organizing your life around family common value that we all are familiar with. Many of the others are sort of less well known, but you could be either not expressing it a lot or expressing it a lot. So let’s take another value scope. Scope is the value of how big or small a life you want. You could want. If you have high scope as a value, you want to have a really big exciting life. One of the people with high scope that I’ve tested one time said, I want to touch everyone’s brain. I want to be, she didn’t say this, but it was like, I want to be Bianca Jagger on the back of that horse in Studio 54.
(10:08):
I want an exciting life. I want a lot of experiences. I’ll take the chaos and then other people, no shade because I don’t, I’m a values agnostic. I don’t care what anybody’s values are. I just want people live their values. Then if you have low scope, I dunno how many people are addicted to TikTok like I am, but there’s a whole vertical in TikTok for low scope. It goes like this, I like this little life. And then people have pictures of their very TWE lives in Brooklyn, and it’s like where there’s a lot of predictability and routine and controllability and you can foresee the future and so forth and scope is a value. Now, you may have extremely high scope, I want travel the world, I want my life to be exciting. And you may have that as your number one or number two value, but you could maybe be expressing it 0% because why?
(10:55):
You’re in relationship with somebody who doesn’t have high scope or your job doesn’t allow it or you have children. Okay, I mean there’s a millionaire, my kids are now grown, but I have grandchildren now. So there’s a variance between how much value of you have of a value and how much you’re expressing it. So the reason why people dunno what values they have, they don’t know what values mean. They don’t take my test, they don’t take a test and they can go take it for free if they want. And then there are things that just get absolutely in the way of values. Here’s some things that get in the way of values, expectations. I really want X, Y, and Z. One of my values is achievement. One of my values is radius. Radius is how much systemic change you want to have. People who work in your organizations or yourself social justice warriors tend to have extremely high radius and you could have family expectations, you could have all sorts of reasons why you don’t live your values.
(11:43):
Then there’s expedience. It’s very hard to live our values. Sometimes it’s just easy or not to, you could say, let’s use scope again, very, very, very high scope. You want to have a big exciting life, but it’s just much easier to get your groceries into the car in the suburbs and you don’t live your values. So there’s expedience, there’s financial security, there’s economics that sometimes we just feel like we don’t have the money to live our values. But to sum up all of behavioral economics, I’m so glad that my finance colleagues are not here to hear me do this. But to sum up all behavioral economics, sometimes we make decisions based on money, even though money is not one of our values, happens all the time because we’re wired for it and because of cultural norms. And then finally events. Events just get in the way of our values.
(12:30):
Somebody gets sick or a kid goes off the rails. Gee, I keep on mentioning that, but I just think that there’s just sometimes things get in the way of us living our values and actually it’s much easier not to live our values a lot of the times than actually live them. That’s an act of courage. So that’s why, and it shows up all the time. And just speaking organizationally, organizations also have values. One of the very important pieces of work that goes on in organizations is trying to make sure that you are hiring and nurturing and developing the individuals who share the organization’s values. So it’s not just about you as individuals, which is fantastic, and I want everyone here to be living their purpose, but also in your role as organizational leaders, making sure that the values of the organization matches the values of the people who are working there.
Hannah Beaver (13:19):
So you just mentioned how values exploration can show up in organizational development. I’d love for you to talk more about your work with Google and how you’ve seen it manifest there.
Suzy Welch (13:28):
Yeah, well, I do a lot of work with organizations around values. Google’s just one of the organizations. And usually what happens is, I mean in this case I was called in to help because there was a highly dysfunctional team and they manager wisely understood it was around values. And so they had at Google, one of the great, I dunno if we have any Googlers here, very, very well-defined values. This team had extremely well-defined values. And I said to her, now we’re now going to take the values bridge, which is the test that identifies individual values. And then they were going to compare them and we were going to do a day long workshop where the managers of this group, there were around 12 managers. It was a very large group, 12 managers were going to walk the employees through the values and then everybody was going to look at the results of their personal values.
(14:09):
And then they were going to be able to identify whether or not there was overlap. And I said, look, I have to warn you going into this. I have a sick feeling in my stomach because you are going to have people on this team who are going to realize that their values and the organization’s values are extremely far apart, do not have overlap. And the research is absolutely, this is some of the best research in my field. The research shows that when organizational values and the values of the individuals who work there overlap that there’s an unheard of correlation, a 0.24 correlation between retention, productivity, and engagement. So you want desperately to have organizational values and personal values overlap. And I said, what happens if we go in there and there’s not overlap? You could lose people. And she said, we don’t want ’em. I said, I don’t want people who don’t have the organization’s values.
(15:03):
I don’t that’s why you’re here and this is why this is a crisis situation. We got too many people like that. I said, but you could lose some high performers. And she said, this is Google, we can get some more high performers. So it was very interesting. I mean I’ve definitely done this work in organizations that don’t have as much access to talent as they do. And I always have the same warning, which is once you do this work, no, going back people see that the organization has, for instance, an incredibly high value of belonging. Okay, belonging is the value about collaboration, connectivity. People know each other. JP Morgan off the charts on belonging. And some individuals do not have high value on belonging. They’re just much more on self-determination, individualism and so forth. And then you’re staring at and the organization and at the same time that this is the problem, and I’ve done this at many, many organizations now, and I believe it’s very positive.
(15:54):
It’s a kind of a reckoning where you realize where’s the dysfunction? The dysfunction is that the organization has this set of values and individuals do not have those same values. Now, a couple of situations in certain kinds of organizations, a large nonprofit I just worked with, it actually led to an incredibly fruitful conversation where they just started talking about values using the names of the values, and they depersonalized it and no heads rolled, so to speak. And they just had now a new conversation talking about, well look, we have this value and you have that value. How can we reconcile it so it doesn’t always cause parting of ways?
Hannah Beaver (16:28):
And how do those conversations start? How would you start to structure those conversations around identifying values, showcasing your organization’s values? And
Suzy Welch (16:36):
Look, the first thing is to learn the language. There’s 15 values. Okay? There’s just 15 of them. And so the first thing to do is to say, let’s all learn this language. I was at a dinner party the other night, nobody will ever invite me to a dinner party after the story I’m about to tell. Okay? So one of the people made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. And so I started talking about the values bridge. I said, I’m so excited. The bridge is out of beta where it’s out there now. And it’s exciting because about 10,000 people a day are taking it, which is really exciting. And I said, bridges out. And I started talking about the values bridge, and they were like, well, what are the values? And by the end of dinner, everybody was comparing their values to each other.
(17:08):
They immediately all took it. And that was the dinner party. And I was like, I kept on saying to the hostess, am I ruining this dinner party? No, I always wants to know my husband’s values. So I haven’t heard from them since though. So the tool actually has this very cool aspect to it, which is that what happened with my students when they took the values bridge was that as soon as they took it, they said, how can my partner take this? How can my boyfriend take it? How can my wife take it or whatever. I said, well, I don’t know, they can just take it. And then finally when we built it out truly into a tool that was going to be used more widely, we developed the functionality that you can take it and if another person takes it, you can check a box and then your values come up next to each other and side by side they compare the level of conflict or harmony.
(17:51):
No, I know it’s the divorce tool. I mean, I didn’t mean it to be that way. I know it’s a dating app by accident. I created a dating app. I know I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t tell NYU. I mean, but I mean, look, we have our values seriously in relationship, in relationship with our family ecosystem or with our organization or with our boss. I mean, it’s very hard when you’re just with a boss or with an employee who you really like and you cannot figure out why you can’t get along or why somebody is not working out in an organization. Our values are not in solitude. We are part of ecosystems, professional ones, family ones. I mean, everybody always says like, oh, what about your family? I said, well, when my family’s together, we take these tools and we sit around talking about our values and we’re a fun lot mean, but they’re all into it. And so two of my children became therapists. So go figure. So
Hannah Beaver (18:41):
Could you talk to me a little bit about how we now have around five generations in the workplace and different values are showing up from the data that you’re collecting with different generations. So how do we handle that in the workplace? How can we kind of come up with structures and have those conversations when values may not align, but we’re all working together still?
Suzy Welch (18:59):
Yeah, that’s a great question. You mentioned the initiative. I run the Center for Purpose and Flourishing at NYU Stern. This is a think tank really, that is a combination of people in HR and l and d and scholars who are all working on purpose and flourishing. And we just had our first convening. We used to call them conferences in the old day, now they’re called convenings. And we had 160 people there. It was very exciting. We were able to present our data. So obviously since we have so many data points from the values bridge, and we can actually see because we collect demographics, what people’s values are ranked from one to 15 and what their variances are on each value, in other words, how much they have and how much they’re expressing on each value, we’re now able with all of the data, we have to split it by generation.
(19:40):
So we are able to compare all five generations. And I would say a couple of things. Number one, the data strongly seems to suggest that every single values difference that we seem to feel in our fingertips is absolutely true. As an example, one of the values of the 15 values is called eudemonia. Okay? So eudemonia is a Greek word because there’s so much negativity around this concept in some workplaces and in some circles. And this is really the value of self-care. Okay? So when I created what’s now called the Welch Bristol Values inventory, which is what my tool is based on, there’s three big values inventory, I won’t nerd out on you to talk about the differences, although I’d very much like to, but I won’t. In the other values inventory, this value is called hedonism, which I think is very judgy, don’t you? I mean it’s called hedonism, but we’re talking about self-care, pleasure, leisure, recreation, renamed this value eudemonia.
(20:40):
And it’s about, I mean really self-care, it’s about personal flourishing, alright, for 20 somethings, okay, people from 20, it’s exactly up to 28 I think, which is when Gen Z. So for Gen Z, does anybody want to venture or guess what percentage have it in the top? 3 0 1, 70 5%, 75% in the top three. So you then look at my generation and I’m 65 and you’ll get my generation. What percentage have it in the top? What’s the matter? I’m 65, you can still take me seriously. I always say to my students, this is what it looks like. I’m not dead yet. Okay, so it’s like for the boomers, right? Top three eudemonia 0%. You know why? Because my generation was taught that you postpone joy and guess what’s up there for us achievement affluence and work centrism. It’s like I can dig it, I got those values, but my students are like, no way.
(21:43):
I’m not giving my life to the man. And so they have a lot. So of course this is what happens all the time. They get their results back and there’s usually that day, there’s kind of a line after class and they’ll come down and they’ll say, student will say, professor Welch, is this a problem? I have eudemonia as my top value, but number two is affluence. And I go, yep, that’s a problem. I mean, it’s like these things I say, let’s just talk about it. There’s a very high conflict score there. Maybe you’re Richard Branson who was managed to have eudemonia and affluence right next to each other, but you got to be damn good to have those values equal and be able to work it out. And then the really heartache one for me, and I hear this all the time, especially from my podcast listeners, because I got a lot of working moms who listen to me where they have a family centrism and work centrism right next to each other, and they love their work and they love their kids, and that’s hard.
Hannah Beaver (22:35):
I have to ask, which value ranks highest for you?
Suzy Welch (22:39):
Yes, for me, the top value is Cosmos, which is the value that measures your faith system as the organizing principle of your life. And what happens with Cosmos, I happen to be a very faithful person, the cosmos. It is either you’re number one or you’re number 15. It’s very rare that you see Cosmos. It’s six. So becoming you but right after is work centrism. Okay,
Hannah Beaver (23:02):
I can tell. Well, we love it becoming you started out in the NYU class. Well, it started out with a self journey of realization and coming up with a methodology. You then moved to the NYU classroom, and now we are fortunate enough to have it in a book so we can all learn the wisdom. What would you say is the biggest thing that you learned both either from the classroom and in writing the book about becoming you?
Suzy Welch (23:26):
Sort of two different things. One is you’d be stunned at who is looking for their purpose. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been sort of at events with very fancy people who are very stellar in their field and also be describing what I’m doing. And then somebody will go get a drink and I’ll be standing there with the vice president of a bank and she’ll lean over and say, I need to take your class. One time I was on set with a very well-known person in broadcasting because I still do my gig on the Today Show. And there was a whole bunch of people on set and all well-known, and then we were going for break, and I was walking towards my dressing room and this person you would never imagine came up to me and said, I need to take your class.
(24:03):
So I think number one, that everybody’s on a journey, that this thing, what was I meant to do with my life? Am I doing the right thing in my life is not for college kids, it’s for people of every single age. You can be 60. When I teach Becoming You in the Wild, NYU is wonderful and they let me have open enrollment. Anyone can take my class. I do it a couple of times a year in a three day workshop. And at first we thought it was going to be all young people and then it ended up being all people over 40 who were there because they were like, this cannot possibly be all that there is, or people who are going into retirement and said, okay, now it’s my life. What am I going to do? So that’s number one. Okay. The other thing is that I encounter people who just want an answer. They don’t want to do the work of it. It is the work of our lives to find out who we are and our values to do the work of figuring out our aptitudes, which you know, can test for those. You can test for those except for personality. There’s an art to closing the gap between how people perceive themselves and how the world perceives them. And so I think that it’s work, but it can be done. I mean, when I do it in the wild, we do it in three days. So yeah,
Hannah Beaver (25:06):
I want to allow some time for q and a. So last question from me. Okay, what is one practice that everyone could take away today from the becoming new methodology and implement tomorrow?
Suzy Welch (25:17):
Can I urge you to figure out your values? Many of you may know them or think you do, but I think it’s one thing. I think it’s very interesting to actually identify them and take a good hard look at them one through 15 and to also see where the variances are. So if you take the test, each value will be listed in order and then you’ll see the variance. So say you have your top value is beholder. This is a value that sends everyone into hysterics. Beholder is one of the oldest most established values ever since people started doing values inventories. The oldest values inventory is this alport strang values inventory. It’s in there, but they used to call it aesthetics. I call it beholder. And it’s the value of caring how stuff looks including yourself. That’s a value. That’s actually a value. And I think it’s very important because you could say, oh God, oh, no wonder we’re constantly fighting because I have very high beholder and he or she does not.
(26:09):
I think beholder is interesting because in that I think it may be a proxy for the desire for harmony in your life. If your house is clean and you’re okay, that that’s harmony, that you can only control one thing and it’s you and your place. But last time I’ll nerd out, there’s sort of two aspects of values, which is what I study the most when I do my research. And one is values formation. And that’s how you came to your values. Was it your parents? Is it partially your identity? Is it personality? Is it trauma? There’s a whole beautiful, mainly in the psychological and neurological spaces, people who think and talk about how we come to our values. And that’s what you talk about with your therapist, right? That’s just not my pay grade. I don’t do that. I’m in the field of values expression, which is the values you have and how much you get to show them to the world and how much you want to show them to the world.
(26:59):
And actually at the end, you can find out if they add up all your variances, where you are and how close you are to your actually living your authentic values driven life. And so I’d say if there’s one thing you could do is kind of get a, you don’t have to take my test. You can sit down and try to think of what my values be. And you can use anybody’s test. I happen to like mine, but there’s others tests out there. But I would say that’s something that can change your life. It can just change your life right away to be able to have a language around what’s driving you and what’s motivating you. And even beyond that, which one of those values are in conflict with each other? If they are. And most people have values in conflict with each other and which values you are holding that you’re not expressing because closing that gap is a pretty good feeling. And you can do that right away. Not close them, not sometimes that’s hard, but you can find it out. You can find out right away. Wond erful.
(27:51):
Thanks.
Audience (34:19):
Such a gift being here. Thank you very much.
Suzy Welch (34:20):
Thank you.
Audience (34:21):
You said that you found your purpose.
Suzy Welch (34:23):
Yeah.
Audience (34:24):
How did you find your purpose and before you found it, did you know what the purpose was about? Were you in the same neighborhood and had you taken this class when you were in college?
Suzy Welch (34:35):
Yeah.
Audience (34:35):
Had your life changed?
Suzy Welch (34:37):
Yes.
Audience (34:37):
Would you have taken a different path?
Suzy Welch (34:39):
Yeah, probably. Although I think that I would’ve made less boneheaded mistakes. There was a long period in my life where I knew what my purpose was, but just to be very personal. But I couldn’t live it because my husband was dying. And so I was just completely removed from, I mean, I had to take a sabbatical from work and so forth. And so when I say events, I’m not kidding around. I mean, sometimes events just remove you from what you want. So I probably for several years had to put my purpose on hold and any person would do it. I would do the exact same thing again and again and again. If only I could have a different outcome, but I couldn’t. So I would say when I finally went back to the world after he died and I went to NYU and I said, I’d like to teach this class, I definitely thought this could be it.
(35:24):
I think that this is it. I had never had the freedom to do it. But as I was walking into the classroom the first day, I thought, what made me think I could do this? I must be out of my mind. But the way people sometimes say to me, how do you know if you your purpose? And I say, it’s like a little being in love. You definitely know, okay, you feel exquisitely alive. And I remember there was a moment where I was teaching and I said something in the class, there was a little gasp, but then I said something and then there was a laugh. And I remember thinking, I might levitate. This is so fun. And I was like, I knew I was living my purpose. And then if you actually do my Becoming You, there’s this workbook. I mean, if I was to fill it out, I would land exactly where I am as a professor.
(36:07):
I would of this material, of this material. And it’s really funny because when I was at business school, I was good at finance, and so head of the dean of HBS came and he spoke to me. One, I thought I was in trouble. He called me to his office and he said, Suzy, you’re going to be an academic someday. Why don’t you stay right here at Harvard and get your PhD with us? And I said, in what? And he said, in finance. And I said, no. He was like, no way. Now first of all, I had an offer from Bain. And so at that point I was like, I’m going to go make money. I was so excited and I was going to go pay off my debt and do all sorts of other things that I really, really wanted to do at that age.
(36:44):
He wasn’t wrong about the academic part. He sort of knew me better than I knew myself at that point. And it’s funny, I wonder if he had said Stay and talk about management and organizations, what I would’ve said, probably still know, I’m going to go make money. I have seen so many people’s lives change simply by knowing their values and their aptitudes. Most people know their interests pretty well. Occasionally I get a student who comes in and does not know their interests, but most times people do. But if I had known my values and aptitudes earlier, I would’ve made fewer mistakes for sure.
Audience (37:12):
Hi, Suzy. I was wondering if there was any connection you saw at all between concepts of a landr and then individuals and finding their own values. As you should know, individuals report to a landr. So I’m wondering if you’ve got any thoughts on just the connection
Suzy Welch (37:27):
Between the two, so many thoughts. So one of the things they, thank you very much for that Great question. So I teach these two classes. I teach Becoming You couple hundred students each semester, and I teach management with purpose couple hundred students. And one thing that my department that all departments ask the professors is do not have redundancy. If you teach two classes or three classes, do not repeat any content from one class to the other so that students can take all of your classes and not have redundancy. And the torture of me trying to keep my classes separate is like I’ll start saying something and I’ll say like, oh, I can’t tell you that because I teach it in becoming you. Now, oftentimes, I have a lot of students in both classes, so I do have to be careful, but look, so much overlap and it’s this way.
(38:07):
Stanford noticed at the medical school, they noticed that there were a lot of doctors, more and more doctors raising their hands in medical school saying, I want to run hospitals, and isn’t there some kind of way to help train us as well? And so Stanford very wisely put together a program for doctors, God bless them, that they want to become hospital leaders. And they called me and said, will you come and be part of this program? And NYU was very gracious, generous, and let me go out and teach in this program. And what they had me do was come in and teach these doctors the Becoming U methodology as a managerial development tool so that they as leaders to develop their teams around them could use the methodology, which is you walk through its 13 steps and it’s done. Because their argument, and I agree with it a hundred percent, is that if your people have purpose, they’re more likely to stay, they’re more likely to fulfill fulfilled.
(39:03):
And I mean, I think it’s very, very progressive and enlightened to say, the more you develop your people and allow your people to identify their values and eventually find their aptitudes and purpose as part of this, the more likely they are to say, I’m signing up with this organization because they care about me as a person. And I think it’s just genius to use it in this way. The only other place they use it in this way is at the humane world for animals where I’m on the board because I’m there and I’m saying, you should do this, and they do it. So I think that it is a good managerial tool. That’s the overlap. I mean, lands want engage productive people who care. And the fastest way to get that is to tell your people that they matter to you. You matter to me so much. I want you to find out who you are, and I want to help you become that person. So the next frontier is for me to figure out how to make it easier, an easier tool for managers to use as well.
Audience (39:51):
Thank you so much. This has been amazing. I really wanted to follow up on two ideas that came out of one. You said that your initial thought is that values don’t change a lot throughout your life, but you also said that lots of people have values that are in conflict.
Suzy Welch (40:06):
Yes, absolutely.
Audience (40:06):
And so are you just set up for a rough life then?
Suzy Welch (40:10):
Okay. No. I mean, yes. Okay. That’s why there’s literature and rock and roll music. Okay. That’s why there’s movies. I think that the work of our life is working out the conflicts between our values. That’s what we do. And so I one time had this woman on my podcast and she said, look, I’ve had a spectacular career. She had daughters who were in sixth grade and ninth grade, she was in the museum administration field, and she said, I’ve loved my career. I’ve loved every day of it. It’s getting too hard. It’s getting too hard. And she said, I think I’m going to quit. I worked my whole life to balance this. And I said to her, okay, we looked at her, she did the values bridge, we looked at her values, and in fact, it was family centrism number one, and work centralism number two and achievement number three.
(40:56):
So she had a massive conflict in her top three values. The reason why I remembered is it, it got 3 million hits when I said it, and the only thing I’ll say is that it must have really resonated. So I said, look, I used a game of Throne who watches Game of Thrones. I used a Game of Thrones reference. I said, look, it’s like Denarius. You suit up every day and you fight the dragon. Okay, you got your dragon and they got their dragon, and you just fight every day to make this balance work. Okay? That’s one option is that you wake up every day and you litigate your conflicting values and that those conflicting values can be and affluence, okay? There’s a lot of values that come into conflict. And you can wake up every day and you could say, I’m going to try to negotiate this and litigate it every day.
(41:42):
And there’s a whole other approach, which is that you deprioritize one value, you repress it. Okay? So I have sisters, they’re exactly like me. We’re bull Irish twins. We are all very, very close in age. They went to very fine schools and were very highly educated, blah, blah, blah. And we all had our kids right around the same time, and I got up and litigated every day for the entirety of my career. They both dropped out of the workforce. They said, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I don’t want to fight this fight every day. Just too hard. And they both stopped working and they focused on their families. And it was kind of noisy in our relationship for a couple of, it’s all worked out now because we’re all grandmothers, but at the time it was kind of noisy because they felt judged by me that they dropped out of the workforce, and I felt judged by them that I stayed in.
(42:31):
And so people are very judgy about values, and that’s just very unfortunate. I’m a values agnostic. I am. If you’re not hurting anybody, let people have their values so you can have yours for God’s sake. Alright, so I think that everybody doesn’t want to be judged for their values, and yet we judge all the time. We do, I do do it myself, and I am teaching this stuff. So I would say that you ask a great question is what do we do when our values in conflict? So the answer is first, know which values are in conflict. Acknowledging it first is very, very freeing. Whoa, look at this. I have eudemonia as number one and affluence is number two. No wonder I feel like I’m going through life wearing a suit that’s two sizes too small. I’m uncomfortable. These values are in conflict. And then just make your decision.
(43:20):
Are you going to do the balancing act for your whole lifelong and kind of every single day, see how close you get to the mark and the balance? Or do you repress and sublimate one until you don’t have to anymore? Because usually something gives kids grow up and go away mean, but sometimes it doesn’t. Okay. Sometimes it doesn’t. And you have to make a decision. I have this value. I’ll never be able to live it. And I just have to make that choice because I can’t have everything all at once. There’s no person who could have it all at the same time. I mean, maybe somebody, but not everybody. I mean, most people can’t do that.
Audience (43:56):
You’ve found correlations between different generations. Is there enough data to number one, look at different values between cultures and if so, or if not, what does that mean on a larger scale than companies, but like societies and globalism, how we live in the world together.
Suzy Welch (44:15):
So we will have that data at the rate that the values which is being taken around the world. We will have that data. We don’t have it analyzed yet. I think it’s going to be a treasure trove to take a look and to be able to cut it in all those different ways. I myself cannot wait. We have a great data scientist who’s working on this right now. We were just looking at the us. It’s going to be fascinating, isn’t it? And actually at a certain point, I know this is crazy, but at a certain point, given the rate that we’re collecting able to collect data, at a certain point, we will be able to even get down to the kind of level of cities. I’m dying to see what the values of New Orleans are, say versus Pittsburgh. I mean, I just think it might be kind of interesting to see if cities have different values and we could get down to, I mean, we were approached by somebody who wanted to know would we eventually have data by colleges?
(45:08):
And we might eventually. I know. Wouldn’t you as a parent want to know that? I mean, I think as I have all sorts of data that’s very painful that we’re still processing. I think I mentioned this to you and I’ve not mentioned this here, is that, did I mention this here already about voice? So we are finding, I mean I have to dig into this data more, but what we’re finding is among young women of color between ages of 20 and 26, that their number one or number two value is voice, which is authenticity, creative self-expression, showing the world who you really are, that they are showing as a number one or two, number two, value voice. And that their variances are from ranging over 50% to a hundred percent. In other words, they have it as a top value and it’s a gigantic variance of not expressing it. And this is very painful. I don’t know if we’re going to check this data again because it’s so stark. And if it’s true, what does it mean and what can we do about it right now? Look, the data is popping off and we’re just trying to wrap our heads around it.
Hannah Beaver (46:14):
Well, with that, we will conclude today’s conversation. Thank you everybody. Suzy, thank you so much.
Suzy Welch has helped thousands find clarity on the question: What am I meant to do with my life?
In this conversation, she shares the 3-circle methodology behind her wildly popular “Becoming You” methodology, which she also teaches at NYU Stern School of Business. She explains why knowing your true values is more powerful than skills training alone, and offers a practical path to purpose, at any stage of your career.
You’ll learn:
- Why most people don’t know their true values—and how to find yours
- How personal values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests intersect to reveal purpose
- How value conflicts show up in leadership and career choices
- Why aligning personal and organizational values can transform teams
- What leaders can do to help others live and work with purpose
This was our first ever live recorded podcast conversation in front of an audience – you’ll hear audience interaction throughout, and Q&A at the end of the episode.
Take The Values Bridge test Suzy references here: https://thevaluesbridge.com/
Read Suzy’s book, Becoming You here: https://www.suzywelch.com/books/becoming-you-the-proven-method-for-crafting-your-authentic-life-and-career/
About Suzy Welch:
Suzy Welch is an award-winning NYU Stern School of Business professor, acclaimed management researcher, and New York Times best-selling author, most recently with “Becoming You: A Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career,” which is also a #1 bestseller on Amazon.
A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Business School, Professor Welch is a frequent guest of the Today Show and an op-ed contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Her podcast, “Becoming You” is one of America’s most listened to career podcasts. She serves on the boards of public and private companies, and is the Director of the NYU | Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing.As the founder and CEO of Becoming You Labs, Professor Welch, who received her PhD in business from the University of Bristol, has developed several digital assessment tools, including The Values Bridge and PIE360. Two more assessment instruments, the Career Traits Compass and the Holland Bridge, are currently in the final stages of beta testing.