Alaina Love, CEO of Purpose Linked Consulting This is Capitalism: Up Close, Inspired, Explained

 Patricia O’Connell interviews Alaina Love, CEO of Purpose Linked Consulting, about passion and purpose. They discuss how passions express purpose, the ten archetypes of passion, and about learning your top three passion archetypes. They explore how to link an organization to a meaningful purpose.
 
Listen in to learn more about your passions and purpose and how to express them in your life and career.


Key Takeaways: [:22] Patricia O’Connell introduces Alaina Love, CEO of Purpose Linked Consulting, and her message of following passion with purpose, for individuals, companies, and teams.
[1:15] Patricia welcomes Alaina Love to CEO Stories on This is Capitalism.
[1:26] Alaina explores what it means for an individual to have purpose and passion. She begins by sharing her experience of walking away from an executive opportunity at a large organization where she had been climbing the ladder of success.
[3:58] Alaina had to ponder to discover why being successful and being rewarded for the work she was doing was not enough for her. She didn’t want to spend the next 85,000 work hours doing work she didn’t see as deeply purposeful. Alaina began to realize that purpose and passion are connected.
[5:07] Alaina has interviewed people for 20 years about finding purpose in work. Most people spend their lives trying to find out exactly what their purpose is. Most people believe they will be satisfied sometime in the future, after finding their purpose.
[6:26] Alain found that people who have figured out how to weave who they are into their roles, where their passions can “come out to play every day,” are the folks who feel that their roles were aligned to a deeper purpose that they are here to achieve.
[6:50] After many years of wrestling with this issue, Alaina realized the passions people exhibit are the outward expression of the deeper purpose that drives them.
[7:43] With researchers from the University of Michigan, Alaina developed The Passion Profiler, which identifies how a person resonates with each of ten passion archetypes that are present to a degree in each of us. It is useful for us to understand what our top three passions are, and how their strengths and vulnerabilities drive our behavior.
[8:27] The ten passion archetypes arose from Alaina’s structured interviews with high-potential folks from fourteen industry segments across the globe. Alaina observed that certain patterns of behavior showed up consistently, over and over again, across industries. Alaina had been seeing these patterns throughout her corporate career.
[9:33] Alaina found these behaviors organized themselves into ten categories. Through her research, she identified what each of these passions looked like.
[9:59] The ten archetypes are Creator, Conceiver, Discoverer, Processor, Teacher, Connector, Altruist, Healer, Transformer, and Builder. Alaina describes each archetype.
[11:40] Understanding your passions provides you with a roadmap to understand where you can contribute beyond your skill set alone.
[11:57] Alaina suggests designing our organizations to leverage the passions our team members are wired with, giving them opportunities to utilize their passions in their assigned roles, and putting them in a cultural environment where their values are honored. This extends beyond hiring someone for a particular set of skills.
[12:27] Alaina tells how an individual can benefit from the knowledge of their top three passion archetypes. When an individual applies their passions to the role they hold, their level of engagement becomes higher, and their role becomes an expression of who they are more than a responsibility they have to accomplish.
[13:05] The team leader, with a knowledge of the passion archetypes of their team members, understands each of those team members on a much more intimate level. A leader can put the right people on the team to create the correct passion composition.
[14:05] A Gallup poll found that onl