Impact with Love: Building Business for a Better World

By Greg Harmeyer

Develop high-performing organizations that positively impact people’s lives

People want to make a difference in the world; they want their work to matter. The businesses we lead and engage in provide an opportunity to serve others and have a positive impact on their lives. After 20 years of leading an award-winning, high-impact, healthy, high-growth company, author Greg Harmeyer shares his wealth of knowledge in Impact with Love. In the valuable book, he shares insights, experiences, and frameworks that help leaders create organizations that make a difference in people's lives. We can bring love and trust into the workplace through systems, practices, and beliefs that reinforce these ideals; in doing so, we have healthier work cultures and higher performing organizations.

If you’re a business owner, executive, or a leader in some facet who wants to break from conventional business structures and norms and think differently about how you can use your position of leadership to create value, create profit, and make a meaningful impact on all stakeholders, then this book is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639090211

Book preview

PREFACE

A Love Story

Honestly, I never gave thought to the word love when we started our consulting firm, TiER1. I mean, I loved my wife. I loved my daughter and my newborn son. I loved my parents, and I loved God. And in a very trite way, I even loved my work. But love didn’t have anything to do with the company we were going to start. Or did it?

In 2002, I wasn’t giving a lot of thought to this. Like many companies, we just set out on our way, knowing there was something special about what we were doing but not knowing what it was. In many ways, it was a process of discovery. And we discovered a lot. We discovered purpose, passions, friendships; we discovered lots of ways not to make money; we discovered many things we weren’t good at and a few we were. But more than anything, we discovered a lot about people. We learned about the potential in people and about the intersection of people and work. We discovered how people love to be challenged but also need to be supported; how important trust is; how badly people want to serve in their work—to serve others and to serve each other; how important it is to be part of something, to be included; we discovered that compensation is important and also pretty hollow by itself; and we discovered that healthy organizations can scale.

And we discovered love.

We use the word to mean all kinds of things. Love is talked about in movies. And in songs. And in relationships. Many religions command love. I’m from Cincinnati. I love the Bengals and the Reds, Graeter’s ice cream (if you haven’t tried it, you must), and Skyline Chili. Some people love music, sports, or animals. Some might even say they love their company. But what about love in the company? What about a company built on love? Why don’t we ever start there? What might the work world look like if we did?

In the context of work, love can mean a lot of things. It means caring about people independent of what it means to you, independent of what it means to the company. It means putting the human dignity of the person ahead of the transaction of their work. It means authentically investing in the growth of people because of what it can do for them. It means authentically caring about your clients and your customers because of the impact we can make on them. Love means being a part of the journey of others’ lives. It means being respectful, committed to service, open to dialogue, and interested in exploring the lives and ideas of those we work with and around. It means being honest and trusting and trustworthy.

In the end, we all want to make a difference. We want to do significant things. Steve Jobs called it making a dent in the universe. What making a difference looks like varies from person to person, organization to organization. For many generations before us, work was a means to an end, a way to survive. But in the past few decades, the world has progressed. Perhaps we are more enlightened by a more connected society, perhaps we are more conscious of an increasingly shrinking world, or perhaps we are just waking up to what is possible, but something has caused us to recognize that work can be much more than just a means to an end. We search for something more meaningful. We seek to make an impact.

If we want to make an impact—a positive impact—on people’s lives with our business, I think we have to start with love. Love is the most centered, worthy ideal. I don’t think I know anything more core to the human condition than the desire to love and be loved. I know, for some, this is already feeling flighty (you might have more colorful words). But bear with me. We’re not talking about some hippy culture where people are lazy. Quite the opposite. We’re talking about one that is thriving and growing and challenging, innovative and value-creating, and high-performance. In fact, ours has been on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in the US for fifteen straight years. But to do these things—in a healthy, vibrant, impactful way—I think we have to start with something that is more meaningful, more inspirational, more persistent. And I think at its core, that something is love. In fact, I think most great companies have this same ideal in their core ethos. We don’t talk about it in that light, but maybe we need to begin to.

On one level, love is a simple ideal, just as it’s a simple ideal to say a marriage is rooted in love. But anyone who is married or has been married knows that there’s nothing simple about marriage. That it requires a tremendous amount of work and commitment. And even then, it doesn’t always work. When we enter marriage, we tend to focus deeply on each other and our love for each other. Of course, we recognize the things around us that affect us—financial goals, job interests, perhaps religious differences, family dynamics and beliefs, political views, ethnic or racial differences. But we tend to stay very focused on each other—believing, knowing that the rest of it can be navigated over time.

I think the metaphor applies to businesses; it certainly applies to partnerships. Sure, with a company—particularly a company that scales—it’s a bit different. The relationships are many to many; the combinations quickly become exponentially enormous. Simply holding love for one another works at a personal level, but it feels almost impossible at scale. What we’re really after, then, is a framework, an environment that holds love as a priority. We’re after a loving culture—one that encourages people to love and to be loved.

If we want to build a loving culture, one that makes an impact on people’s lives and thrives and grows in the process, we have to, as Stephen Covey says, Begin with the end in mind—not the end of the company but the end environment that we’re aiming to create. As our companies grow, when they become larger than they are today, different forces act upon them, straining and challenging the very instinctive beliefs that make us healthy early on. If we can start with some perspective on what these forces are and how they are pressuring our businesses through the cycles of growth, we can build better companies along the way. These will be healthier companies, impactful companies, successful companies. They will be loving companies.

I think, more than anything, TiER1 is a love story. It’s not love in the romantic, infatuation, Hollywood sense, but in a deeper, spiritual and relational sense. It’s the kind of love story that is marked by challenge and commitment and compassion and belief. It is colored by tensions and frustrations and stresses and mistakes. It’s filled with belief in the human spirit, in the potential of every person, in the human dignity that lies at the center of each individual. It is the kind of love where people are committed to each other from inside the relationship, not judging from outside the relationship.

This book is written for people who want to make a difference through the organizations they lead, who feel called to make an impact on the world. Some will be entrepreneurs, believing in a cause that can do something more. Others will be rising managers in large companies. Still others will be practitioners—programmers, creatives, accountants—who want to be part of something that matters. They will all be leaders. They will all hold love in their hearts. The act of making a difference, the act of making a positive impact on the lives of others, is an act of leadership—and an act of love.

INTRODUCTION

Organizations Exist to Serve People

In the late 1990s I worked for a start-up company in the so-called dot-com era. The company was very representative of other start-ups at that time: It had a lot of good, talented people and a lot of good energy. But it lacked purpose. I used to half-jokingly say that what we did depended on what was on the cover of Fast Company magazine that week. One day, we were a web development company, another day we were an e-learning company, another day we were a CRM implementation company, then we were something else. But at that time, that dynamic wasn’t particularly unique to us.

The company was started to be sold—not a great reason to start a company as it turns out. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that chasing a transaction was pretty hollow and uninspiring, even when you are working with good people and people you liked. It wasn’t that anyone was doing anything inherently wrong, we just didn’t know any better. The mindset of the day was that explosive growth was all that mattered; that people could be paid millions for doing very little and creating very little value, that you could sell hope and a dream and get investors to buy in. And somehow that would be valuable.

But none of that was even what was most troubling about the environment of that time. What was most troubling was that those things became what mattered. A common perspective was that explosive growth was a worthwhile primary driver; there didn’t need to be any deeper meaning to what we were doing. And in recognizing that mindset, I felt a deep void. I knew there was something missing.

So as I wrestled through that experience, I took a leave of absence and went to grad school searching for something different. And at thirty-one years old, I graduated from the Kellogg School of Management at North-western University. By this point, the country had entered a recession; companies weren’t hiring like they had been. A lot of my classmates who wanted to get into consulting or investment banking or even with premium brand companies were finding fewer opportunities, but we all were figuring out our way. And as I continued to search for something more, I intentionally joined a company very different from that start-up; I took a job in Dayton, Ohio, with a company called NCR.

NCR was established over 100 years ago. I sought it out because I wanted to work in a functional role in an established company to see what that was like. I had lived through large-scale consulting (with what is now Accenture) and I had lived through the dot-com era; I thought maybe the corporate world would have some insights for me. And it did, but not in the way I expected.

The first day I pulled into the parking lot at NCR, I sensed something was wrong. As I walked into the corporate headquarters on S Patterson Boulevard, I saw the faces of the many people who were going into the same routine job—not happy, not miserable, simply accepting. And in the subsequent months, I would come to learn a few things about my coworkers. First, I found them to be really kind and good people. I also found them to be extraordinarily bright and talented. NCR had hired well over the years and had also developed people well. But I also found them to be highly risk adverse.

Early on, my first manager told me, What keeps me up at night, Greg, is someone looking at the slide deck we’re putting together and saying, ‘You idiot. How did you not catch that, or how did you not see that mistake?’ We spent weeks on that slide deck to avoid that reaction. In my mind, we could have just delivered the deck, gotten the feedback (idiots or not), fixed it, and moved on. But the people at NCR had survived a couple decades of rightsizing, a euphemism for layoffs. Those around me were the survivors, the ones who had learned how not to get laid off.

After nearly a century in business, NCR was a shell of what it once was. At the time, I was working in a tech-oriented business unit that was run by a bright, arrogant, and, in my view, self-absorbed leader. Because of his self-assurance and success, people seemed to be in awe of him, perhaps even intimidated by him, probably in part because of his style and in part because of the climate there. I wasn’t particularly impressed; in fact, I was more disappointed in his leadership. I thought he had an opportunity to lift people up and, in general, I felt he put people down. It wasn’t what I would call good leadership.

Leadership is fundamentally about influence. Its real measures are who follows you and where you lead them. Leadership done well is synonymous with impact. Leaders will make an impact, but it may not be what you want. A two-part question all of us as leaders should ask is, What impact am I making and on whom?

Vision is where you lead, the destination and the path. Leaders can’t lead without knowing where they are going. If we are to have a meaningful impact, we have to have a vision of leading people to something worthwhile.

Sometimes that vision is inherited. An individual was designated a leader and told this is a direction that is worthy. We often accept the destinations given to us. In sports, for instance, we are all about winning games or championships. The goal seems obvious. The same is true with business. We’ve inherited an economic system that tells us the destination is financial success, higher profits, greater compensation. Even the belief that, for individuals, the ultimate impact is greater financial success is widely accepted. We take the destination as assumed, as though clarity is implicit and the significance should be obvious. But it’s not. When we stop and step back, we realize there has to be something more. Over and over, we hear from people who reach a certain level of financial success who step back and recognize so many other things matter.

The greatest leaders in sports transcend the emphasis on winning and realize the real effect they have, the real destination that is worthwhile, is far bigger than the wins or the championships. It is the impact they have on players and on teams along the way. Read anything from John Wooden to Mike Krzyzewski to Vince Lombardi and the thing they will talk about most is the people. And how they influenced people and how people influenced them.

Our worldviews—who we are, why we matter, why anything we do matters—as individuals and organizations are reflected in what we value, those destinations that seem worthy of our commitment. Do we value prestige? Accomplishment? Status? Money? What about people? Service? Impact? Love? What we value is defined by what we make sacrifices for. If we value our family, we sacrifice for our family. If we value accomplishments, we make sacrifices to work toward them. If we value money or promotions or status, we make sacrifices to attain them. If we value people—as an organization or as individuals—we will make sacrifices to serve them. More specifically, we will put their well-being ahead of that which benefits only us. In each of these cases, it’s not putting these things first to our own detriment; it’s putting them first because we believe that the intrinsic return in doing so is greater than that which we sacrifice. But when it comes to putting people first, putting others first, there is something deeper going on.

There’s a chasm in our lives and in our organizational mindsets we must transcend to fully realize our potential, to fully live out our individual or organizational purpose. On one side is an inward focus. Its roots are insecurity, fear for our well-being, consumption with our identity, and ego. On this side, our well-being is in competition with that of others. We are focused on individual achievement, consumed by personal reward and recognition, and our individual brand. Social media is a force on this side of our lives, luring us in with clicks and likes and comparing ourselves with others, constantly exposing us to the individualistic, most polished view of others, constantly pushing us to question our own self-worth.

On the other side of this chasm is something very different. It is an orientation toward others. It is rooted in confidence and faith and self-assurance. On this side, we let go of our self-absorption and insecurity. We orient toward the impact we can have on people. Our well-being is interdependent with that of others. We are rewarded by the inner fulfillment we get from service, from being compassionate, from helping other people realize their talents, from delivering services and products that make a difference for others.

There is a specific mindset that is essential on this side of the chasm—a mindset of abundance. It involves a belief that a better world for others is a better world for all. This side of the chasm isn’t about self-denial or about service to others at my expense. Nor is it transactional, believing that service to others has a calculated algorithm where I’ll get something in return. Rather, being other-oriented, being people-centric, means that we recognize that service to others is fulfilling in itself and that it propels a virtuous cycle of relationships, collaboration, and connectivity that makes the world better for everyone.

When we live on this side of the chasm, we recognize that self-absorption is hollow. Self-absorption causes us to continually chase more: to work harder and work more hours, to seek more money and more promotions and more recognition and greater profits . . . and yet still feel unfulfilled. On this side of the chasm, we recognize that no amount of achievement or personal gain will fill this void inside us. The only thing that will fill it is knowing we make a difference, that we make an impact on others. It isn’t until we embrace the purpose of our work—as being service to others, both at an individual level and at an organizational level—that we begin to fill the needs that exist. And often we don’t even know that those needs are there. We may not have a language or name for them; we may not know what we are seeking, but we recognize something is missing, and we recognize when we find it.

This service to others—rooted in love, the unconditional concern and compassion for others, oriented toward impact and the positive influence on the lives of others—is what the healthiest organizations are built upon. Healthy organizations live on this side of the chasm, seeking to serve all people because of the intrinsic value of that service.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners start companies and grow companies most often because of a belief in something more. That may be innovation, it may be the unleashing of new possibilities, it may be because of the desire to create an organization that is healthier and is simply a better place to live and work than the large bureaucratic organizations that many are used to. Sometimes it’s the personal freedom to have their soul—and their families—released from the grind of traditional businesses.

And yet enlightened business leaders of larger organizations know it too. They know that they have an opportunity to shape and affect teams and people and their lives. That their work is bigger than just managing their function or, for executives, than managing their business. That there is something truly impactful to be done.

For many, this is an intuition. There isn’t an explicit formation of thought or structure outside of the intuition that there is something more. These leaders inherently feel that simply pursuing growth and profit is insufficient. They understand that growth and profit and shareholder returns are necessary and important, but they feel incomplete. There is an intuition that the real value of work—and, ultimately, of leadership—is to make a meaningful impact on the world. And the way you do that is to make an impact on people’s lives. Organizations, after all, are composed of people.

Hard work is not what people run from. My wife reminds me that, during the six months I worked at NCR, I painted every inch of our entire house because I simply didn’t have enough work going on. I was miserable, not because I was overworked but because I was underchallenged, unengaged. It wasn’t because it was a bad company. It wasn’t because it was a demanding company. It was because it was an uninspiring company. I would have worked twice as hard if I felt it meant something, or perhaps if I simply knew what it meant.

So as I sat there at NCR in late 2002 reflecting on all of this, a couple of my friends from the dot-com consulting company approached me and said they wanted to start a new one. We had talked about doing this while I was in grad school and even before that, while we were working together at the start-up, but I didn’t know if or how it would ever end up happening.

Norm Desmarais and Kevin Moore, my soon-to-be partners, were entrepreneurs. They were smart, scrappy, optimistic. They had a tremendous level of courage (and sometimes they just didn’t know any better). They knew how to start companies. I didn’t, but they wanted my help. I was operational and organized, I had a good sense of systems, I had a passion for both consulting and a freshly minted MBA, and, at this point, I had a very clear sense of the type of company I wanted to work for. I wanted something different. We wanted something different. And at the age of thirty-one, I knew that creating something different inside an established organization wasn’t going to work. The way to do it was to build it ourselves.

This book is about impact and it’s about leadership. But, ultimately, it’s about people. It is aimed at people who want to think differently about business. It’s for small business leaders who know they are doing something special and are working to articulate it and make it explicit. It’s for large business leaders who recognize the opportunity they have to think and lead differently. And it’s for all workers who want to believe that business can do something positive in the world and are working to give shape to what that can look like.

This is not research based. It is a compilation of experiences that we have had in our twenty-year journey of building TiER1. Today, TiER1 Performance is a strategy activation consulting firm working to improve organizations through the performance of people to build a better world. Part consultancy and part design agency, we’ve served several hundred of the world’s best organizations, helping them activate strategic initiatives and realize their fullest potential. Our parent company, TiER1 Impact, is a professional services development company that is building a network of organizations committed to creating healthy, high-performing organizations in the clients we serve.

Collectively, we are still on our journey, learning every day. Along the way, we have combined our experiences with elements of research that have helped shape our views and connected all of that with the experiences of others we’ve worked with and