Aaron Hurst
Aaron Hurst
CEO @ Imperative
“When people have human connection, it creates a flywheel with all these positive benefits — from physical and mental health, to productivity, energy, the ability to adapt, have empathy and be inclusive.”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
It’s time to check your echo chamber at work. Us vs. Them mentality is a cultural reality. Reflect on the professional connections you have or have not created with those outside of your direct circle.
Write down the 10-20 people you connect with the most. Consider how much diversity of thought, belief and lifestyle you see represented. (ie. gender, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, socio-economic backgrounds, political beliefs.)
// TEAM EXPLORATION
Gather your core leadership team for a 60 minute exercise on crafting your moonshot.
1. Review the definition of a moonshot Aaron shares in his interview.
2. Review your organization’s vision statement.
3. Dialogue on your vision. Is it bold enough? Compelling enough? Measurable?
4. For 10 minutes, each person creates some moonshot statements.
5. Share and discuss your favorites, and allow the visions to inspire you.
Resources
Read Aaron’s latest LinkedIn article about how to best prepare for supporting teams in what’s to be a very stressful end of 2020.
Register for this October 13th webinar hosted by Aaron on how to empower teams to build and sustain meaningful relationships, ones that help each other do their best thinking, process change and grow personally and professionally.
We loved chatting with Aaron Hurst (he/him), CEO of Imperative, and foremost expert on the science of purpose and fulfillment at work. In 2014, he brought global awareness to the rise of the fourth economic era in history, the Purpose Economy. Previously, as the founder of the Taproot Foundation, Aaron catalyzed the $15 billion pro bono service market.
Aaron emphasized differentiating good tech from bad tech through the ability to build true, meaningful connections between people with both bonds (commonalities) as well as bridges (differences), rather than divide people by preying on their insecurities.
He’s a visionary who’s obsessed with the future, and has an gift for aligning his team who believe in it as much as he does, especially during challenging times. Aaron and the team at Imperative have been galvanized by the waves of change, and believe that centering fulfillment of all people at work through peer coaching is a key shift that could change everything.
We loved his practice of using a moonshot to rally people around a bold, compelling vision. “I really thrive when there's a clear, shared battle to be had together. The sense of urgency aligns well with my sense of purpose, and my impulsiveness,” he reflected.
Imperative’s moonshot: Flip the statistic from ⅔ of people being unfulfilled at work today to becoming ⅔ of people fulfilled at work by 2030.
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The Breakdown of Civil Society
My family has always focused on civil society. The issues are going to always change and evolve — what matters is whether or not we’re able to respond to whatever’s happening. What we've seen is a fundamental breakdown in civil society over the last five, six years, that’s largely driven by technology and how technology, combined with a deeper understanding of psychology, has basically manipulated people into a world in which it's very hard to have a civil society, and it's not quite clear how to put the cat back in the bag.
Human Connection as the Antidote to Divisive Tech
Imperative and Facebook are at opposite ends of a continuum. Facebook has monetized having people consume disinformation, and be able to create community around a sense of purpose, but often in a way in which is an “us vs. them” mindset. It’s also used dopamine hits as a means for economic creations. They’re basically a dopamine dealer and then monitor that through advertising.
What we are as a counter to that, which is still about psychology, but it's fundamentally looking at the science of human connection. How do we build actual, meaningful connections between people? How do we help people see past the superficial, and see each other as human beings? How do we start to sew back together civil society?
We have a peer coaching platform that enables a company to match their people for psychologically designed, ongoing conversations that help them build empathy, connection and trust with their colleagues. It also gives them space to reflect and take ownership of their work, bring their values forward, and bring courage and intentionality to what they’re doing.
Forging Bonds, Fortifying Bridges
There’s two different kinds of social capital: bridging and bonding. Bonding is with people you already have an affinity with, whereas bridging is between. You and I could bond because we care about similar things, but it'd be bridging on gender. What we’ve found is that people really need to meet with true peers for peer coaching, so someone at the same level as them in an organization, but with someone in a different group. So they're bridging into different communities.
We’re most successful when we create bridging capital, but we find the things that create a bond, strengthens the bridge. When you do pure bonding without the bridging piece, that leads to insular thinking. If you just do pure bridging, it generally doesn't stick.
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
When COVID first hit, we just saw everything freeze. Q2 was frozen. People were freaked out and just trying to address very basic changes, like, do people have a place to work? Very bottom of the pyramid needs.
As things started to normalize, and we saw in Q3, it started to shift. People started looking more proactively, recognizing this isn't going away in general, and work from home is something likely here to stay -- and oh my God, let's look at the silver lining here. Suddenly people are concerned about mental health, people are concerned about human connection. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
We started to see that this may be the opportunity for that break, and get the business buy in. There were a lot more CEOs saying, sure, let’s try it. Before it was just like, “send it to committee!” There's much less patience for sending things to committee.
COVID Meets Q2 “Planning” : Catch the Wave
We created this metaphor, catch the wave. Like, this is a moment. I framed it as, we're either gonna ride the wave and make this our moment, or we're going to get completely crushed and obliterated by the wave. We were saying we're all in this together and like a fourth quarter in the game, we need to all show up in a big way.
The Moonshot: A Magnetic Force for Your Vision
Organizations should have a moonshot. I challenge people to think about, 10 or 20 years from now, in whatever the universe is that you care about. Maybe it's just your blog, maybe it's your school, maybe it's the world. Whatever it is, what is the single metric that will be different, that you could measure and say, this actually changed.
Declaring a moonshot is a very motivating, very powerful way to lead. It’s something everyone can play their part in. It draws creativity and it also creates a tolerance for risk. A moonshot, you don't know how to get to right now. Like, we know it's the right thing to do, we know it's needed. It’s gonna take all of us to figure out how to get there. It creates a way to all feel like you can contribute to it at different levels, and it's not a goal that anyone can argue with.
Create a point that the organization can rally behind, which is a vivid description of a future state of the world, or whatever scale. Be able to vividly describe it so people are motivated to get to it, and enables you to create a tribe around that. It becomes a bond, and becomes what over time pulls talent and people into the organization. That's what fuels a lot of the energy around it.
With Imperative’s moonshot, you could see flipping the fulfilment metric as a simple thing, but it's something that you can see the cascading impact of. What is that going to do to people's families? What is that going to do to the economy? What does that do to our health? What is that going to do to civil society? Then you start to see, maybe all the problems come down to this one metric. Maybe we should stop fucking around and just focus on that!
Encoding Peer Coaching Conversations Into Society
Who are the different audiences that we need to build social bridges between? How can our product be used for that and how can the team be identifying opportunities? Like our current project helping returning vets who are in the workforce to support each other. It's really exciting to be able to help folks in a situation, to be able to answer the need in K-12 education, or in higher ed.
How could we use a peer coaching platform so that this becomes a part of how we live and how we operate? Where, it's not a program, it's an encoded behavior in our society that’s now possible.
When people have human connection, that actually helps them have more human connection, and you create this flywheel with all these positive benefits, from physical health and mental health to productivity, energy, ability to change, ability to adapt, and ability to have empathy and be inclusive. We also know that when you don't have that, your actual ability to be empathetic, actually starts to erode.
Building real human connections will have that ripple effect where companies don't need 50 programs, they just need to empower people and connect them.
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Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.