Dorothy Spence Tweet
Dorothy Spence is a serial entrepreneur, published author, and speaker. She is the founder of Imaginal Ventures Inc and The Purpose Led Business School. She helps entrepreneurs stay connected to their purpose while they scale their small and medium-sized businesses as a force for good. Dorothy’s twenty-year experience as a skilled Business and Leadership Advisor has helped SMEs catalyze profitability and asset growth. Her work with scaling purpose-led businesses through building supporting structures, procedures, and workflow systems has gained notoriety in the entrepreneurial community. As the Canadian coach for SheEO, Top CEO Award recipient, Innovation Award, and Professional Engineers Service Award recipient, Spence has been recognized for her innovation and leadership.
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Table of Contents
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Dorothy Spence: About 10 years ago, I was watching the movie The Help and was struck by all the unconscious bias in the way humans treated other humans in the movie. And I thought, “In 20 years, what’s the bias we have today that we’ll finally see for what it is?” And I believe it’s how we treat each other in business. The primary motivator in so many companies is fear – fear of getting fired, of not getting the raise, of not making the right choices. There are all of these hyper-competitive work environments – one day we’ll look back and ask how we possibly tolerated all of that? And so I started to think about what might happen if we could shift from fear to love? To love the work we do, the people we work with, our clients, our products, our interactions – what would it look like if we could achieve that change to love instead of fear?
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Dorothy Spence: I’m extremely grateful to some of the pioneering business leaders who communicated business philosophies that support treating each either in a more loving manner, particularly Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia and The Soul of Money author Lynne Twist. I’m grateful to them because their work has inspired me and given me the courage to keep going. It takes a lot to see these lofty ideas and put them into practical steps of what you can do in a business, and leaders like Yvon and Lynne are luminaries in the field.
Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. What’s the worst advice you received?
Dorothy Spence: When I was with my first business, a health tech company in the height of that first tech bubble in the 1990s, one of my investors told me “revenue is a nuisance.” Back then, there was this whole emerging concept of doing a land grab and acquiring users and market share at all costs. According to this investor’s philosophy, revenue, or thinking that customers will pay for your service, was a nuisance. But everything gets solved when you have money flowing through your business! Ignoring revenue means you require outside investors. If the right type of investor isn’t brought in, it can create a lot of misalignment in the business. Under pressure, this misalignment can tear a business apart.
Resilience is critical in critical times like the ones we are going through now. How would you define resilience?
Dorothy Spence: Our definition of resilience is the amount of energy we have in our system, whether within ourselves or our business. Fear eats up energy. When there’s low energy in the business, look to see where the fear is – fear of not being enough, or not being good enough, or not having enough. We teach people to look at the basic needs in their business – financial health, relationships of safety and belonging caring about both the business and one another – and then to look at their quality of performance. Shifting fear to trust creates resilience in the business by increasing the amount of energy you have at your disposal.
What is most important to your organization—mission, vision, or values?
Dorothy Spence: What’s most important are your purpose and your values. Understanding the philosophy and principles you base your business on is critical to success, and that comes from your values. It’s not just an intellectual exercise – your core values need to be embedded throughout your business and should affect recruiting, onboarding, daily interactions, and even define products.
Look at Patagonia and the stands they take – their values are very clear. Their clothing is meant to last forever and therefore you shouldn’t buy a lot of it, but you should use what you buy. They value the health of the planet and they’re taking a stand in an industry that is notorious for waste. Their mission and values come alive in every aspect of their operations, including their product design and marketing, how they treat their customers, and the culture they create for their employees. It’s embedded in the DNA of who they are – the way it should be.
Delegating is part of being a great leader, but what have you found helpful to get your managers to become valiant leaders as well?
Dorothy Spence: Creating conditions for self-responsibility is critical for any organization to grow effectively. That means a manager’s role is to build capability in the people who work with them. My role as founder and CEO is to coach, mentor, facilitate, and teach, to help each member of my team build the capability they need to be a better person individually and in turn to be better at their job.
A lot of that has to do with delegating responsibility in a way that makes people see that they are responsible for results and that they’re responsible for reporting back to me, not the other way around. A lot of micromanaging happens when you are constantly chasing after results from your team, rather than having them update you on progress. Treating one another as adults is what enables flat organizations to operate effectively. There needs to be some level of mutual responsibility – and as leaders, we need to say, “We’re going to teach you and help you and create this climate of self-responsibility.”
Being a CEO of the company, do you think that your brand reflects your company’s values?
Dorothy Spence: We work mostly with SMBs and founders in fast-growth scaleup modes. We know the founder must have a clear understanding of personal purpose and values because that’s what shapes the purpose and values of the business. They’re not the same, but the CEO is the one setting the course and shaping the company values, and that starts with having a firm grasp on their values. There’s no way for people to make decisions without a shared set of company values – until you articulate them, think it through, and consciously shape them, you won’t have the speed to make the impact you want to have in the world.
How would you define “leadership”?
Dorothy Spence: My definition of a leader is someone who goes first. That means leadership is not a role, but rather it is a choice we each make every day in every situation. Are we going to go first or not? You always have that opportunity to lead; you can always make that choice to go first. And I’m not talking about first to talk at a meeting, but the first to make moves that bring the business forward.
What would you say is the main difference between starting a business at the time you started yours and starting the business in today’s age?
Dorothy Spence: I started my first business in 1993. It was a company that built telemedicine networks globally, and I was the co-founder and CEO. The internet was just becoming a thing and even though we were working extremely hard, the speed we went at was much more digestible than what we move at today. Vacation meant vacation – mobile phones were still these big boxes and not something everyone had in their pocket at all times. It was still high-paced and high-pressure, but there wasn’t this same ‘always on’ connectivity that we have today. Work/life balance is a real challenge these days with the always-on mentality, and you’re seeing more and more countries pass laws that limit an employer’s ability to contact employees outside of regular working hours, which I think is a good thing.
The way we discussed and rated businesses was an employer’s market. We could take our time and recruit the best – there was a big pool of people who wanted to work with our companies because we were on the leading edge. Today, it’s a completely different environment. The way we market, the way people look for jobs, the way things like glassdoor.com affected job ratings – people now are deciding whether or not they want to work for you, especially at this particular time.
What’s your favorite “life lesson” quote and how has it affected your life?
Dorothy Spence: Albert Einstein has a quote that I adore, “No problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it.” The way that has affected me is that when I see the same problems showing up over and over, it’s a call to dive into personal transformation and evolution. I need to elevate my consciousness so that I can solve the problems from the old level of consciousness I’ve been working at. It’s amazing how simple some of these problems are to solve once you “level up” and evolve personally. It’s why I’ve invested heavily in personal development over the years and never regretted a single penny.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Dorothy Spence for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Dorothy Spence or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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