Steve Woodruff asks us why our company is in business and names 3 drivers that shape a business, and subsequently, our brand. These drivers are:
Doing Well
Doing Good
Doing Right
Many professionals are becoming entrepreneurs, either part-time or full time, and many more of us are “serial” entrepreneurs, engaging our various talents into business ventures. Technology has enabled the explosion of “microenterprises”, which may sound small, but can generate serious revenue.
Steve called the Doing Good dimension of business “caring”. I call this the “soul” of a business, large or small. I am being unscientific and perhaps heretic to even dare place the word “soul” anywhere close to the word “business”, but I believe in the idea that businesses aren’t simply a legal structure sometimes backed with physical or even virtual bricks and mortars. Rather, businesses are created by people. Businesses are born of people’s ideas and ideals. Therefore, it isn’t too big of a stretch for me to believe that people impart their life energies into what they create.
When our creation is a business, our businesses inherit either soul-enhancing or soul-eroding energies from us as the creators. Once created, our businesses are continually imparted with either soul-enhancing or soul-eroding energies from the people who sustain them – the employees and creators (depending on whether the business has employees or if the founder is also the sole employee).
A colleague I respect who makes a living coaching C-level executives tell me that the ethics of a company’s executives often translate into the health of the entire organization. I believe this to be true, although based on my personal experience (therefore, N=1). Steve called the Doing Right dimension of business “conscience”. I call this the “integrity” of the business. This is a choice to look either at the short term gain at the expense of long term health of the business, or to look at what is best both short term and long term. Most importantly, this is a choice to look at how our business conduct reflects our personal character. I don’t believe in the notion of a “personal identity” versus a “business identity”, as if we can act one way in our personal lives and then behave another way in our professional lives. I know some try, but most often their true directives are revealed over time.
I remember a situation where a hiring manager directly solicited for my help with recruiting scientific professionals for his organization. A candidate submitted his resume to me, we had a productive conversation, and I presented his resume to the hiring manager. Unknown to me, this candidate had also submitted his resume to a recruiter who had used my job posting board. The recruiter had presented this candidate to the hiring manager, but through the company’s HR person. Whether the recruiter presented this candidate before or after I had presented the same person, I don’t know. The recruiter then discovered that I was helping his client, and he called me about it. He was under the impression that I did not do recruiting, and he was correct, because this was a rare incident where I was directly asked to help. However, he perceived there to be a conflict of interest, if he paid to use my website and ended up competing with me on the same project.
At this point I had a decision to make. As the candidate was extremely promising, the finder’s fee would not be insignificant, and certainly many times (at least one hundred times!) more than what I’d make from website job posting from the recruiter. Even if this recruiter had used my website many times, the total revenue I’d generated would be nowhere near what I’d make on the finder’s fee…
… But wait. What did my sense of integrity dictate? It dictated that any perceived conflict of interest – no matter false or real – is problematic, because it creates confusion and erodes trust in my business conduct. Yes, there are consultants who try to make money every which way – if they run a meeting, they’d charge you to attend and they’d charge you to display and they’d even charge you to speak (because they reasoned you can potentially generate new business from speaking at their meeting). There are consultants who will charge job candidates for “mentoring” and then turn around to make a buck from sourcing the candidates to client companies. I find these practices troubling for my conscience, because if I put myself in the shoes of the person who is paying, I would not feel good about the transaction. Maybe it’s completely legal, but it does not feel ethical to me.
I ended up telling the recruiter that I’ll give up this candidate, and if the candidate gets hired, he is welcome to the commission that he believes is rightly his. In fact, if I ended up getting a check from the company for this candidate for any reason, I’d sign the check over to him. It didn’t matter whether or not I presented the person before the recruiter did. The money-making voice in my head said, “Are you nuts? This is potentially tens of thousands of dollars you are giving up!” The sense of integrity within me said, “This is what I expect from you.” I felt GREAT about my decision, but make no mistake – it was a HARD decision for me to make. (yes, I had to make the font that much bigger, because it was that hard for me even when I believe I did the right thing.) I like making money as much as the next entrepreneur, but I want to make money that I can feel really good about, in a way that doesn’t suck the life out of my soul.
Over the past few years I have within my personal and business circles people who want me to succeed, who believe in me, and who offer and volunteer their ideas for me to consider. There are people who come to me for help, and who are very happy to pay me well to help them, because they know they can trust me to tell them the truth and do what is in their best interest. This has resulted in me doing very well in my business despite having pretty “simple” plans about what I wanted to accomplish.
It comes as no surprise, then, that I KNOW for myself that when I “Do Good” as my business objective and “Do Right” as my code of conduct, I always end up “Doing Well”.
