The Greenhouse Effect with Steve Perkins
What’s your sweet spot?
Can you answer this question? Whether you are an Uber driver or a Fortune 500 CEO, if you aren’t currently exercising your strengths in your position, then you haven’t fully tapped into your potential. With a few tweaks here and there, you could be living everyday right in the pocket of the very thing you were made to do.
With his company, Greenhouse Culture, Steve Perkins has committed his life to helping people, organizations and companies develop a culture that enables them to thrive and really make an impact. No matter the level of business, this all starts with the same denominator; finding your sweet spot. What makes you come alive? What really energizes you? Greenhouse Culture exists to...
“help people understand what is that sweet spot of their strengths and passions and how they are uniquely wired.” And then to “help them learn to be aware of that and how to put that into practice.”
This simple idea has surprising results as people are often not as self-aware as they would like to believe. But through testing and learning, it is possible for leaders to put their people in the right seats on the bus that increases motivation and enhances their experience within a company.
Perkins was naturally inquisitive as a child, always inventing and tinkering with things. He was wired to be curious and somehow would always try to push whatever he was toying with to see what it was capable of. His career initially began in mechanical engineering for a high tech company. While it was exciting to be doing projects for national labs and the department of defense, he found himself sitting in meeting after meeting studying his co-workers, more than being invested in what the topic was. He could feel himself being drawn more to the culture aspect of organizations and really began to notice that he was surrounded with people who were not tapping into their full potential. This ongoing nudge within him to understand people and how to help them really find joy and love in what they do, becoming his driving force and soon Greenhouse Culture was created.
Although Steve was thrown into leadership positions at a fairly young age, he found it energizing because these opportunities tapped into the leadership bug he always felt he had. Naturally, he viewed the management of people like an experiment and used the resources around him to develop himself personally. Podcasts, books and even mentor relationships played a huge role in helping to develop his own leadership skills. Even now he considers himself a constant learner. Greatness to him means simply leaning into your calling. Steve admits that in his own life he struggled initially to even want to know it, and then became scared that he might miss that one thing he was made to do. But he firmly believes that each person’s calling is right in front of them. It’s the thing we’ve always been wired to do, and it’s extremely significant. We just have to tap into it and draw it out.
Steve believes the deficit to do that very thing, is one major flaw in the way that companies, and society in general, operate. People are encouraged to be good at everything, and if there is an area of weakness that can be identified, all extra time and energy should be spent to improving that weakness. The result is a generation of people working really hard to excel in areas that they just simply will never be great at. We are grooming individuals to be average and mediocre through this ideology.
Greenhouse Culture offers a different solution. What if we simply maintained the areas of weakness so that they don’t become a hindrance, and then focused all our time and energy on improving and becoming even greater, in the areas of our strengths? Each person is wired to be naturally good at some things, while lacking in other areas. But the amount of impact you can have when you put your effort into the things you are gifted at, is so much greater. Things that naturally energize and excite you, are the things you will want to work harder at and do more and more of. It’s about teaching people how to devote their time to their sweet spot.
So, companies today typically operate and meet their needs from a task-oriented point of view. Here is the task, now lets find a person to get it done. As a result, there are many individuals that are being hired to complete a task that would be much better suited for someone else. There must be a willingness to rewrite some job descriptions allowing more room to exercise muscles and opportunity.
How do you step in and expertly guide someone or a team to grow as a leader and to foster a culture?
Greenhouse has three main focus areas:
• Executive coaching (working with the leader of an organization)
• Culture development (devoting time to the teams/groups within a company)
• Online communication (helping individuals find their sweet spot).
His team spends a lot of time simply calling out other’s super powers! Finding your sweet spot is about seeing what’s right in front of your nose, even that thing that is so familiar to you that you don’t even notice it.
So how can you find your sweet spot?
There are many valid tools including personality tests that help to accelerate the identification of what makes you tick. But serious self-examination and reflection are extremely powerful. Leaving room for margin, time to breathe and taking a look at things from a big picture perspective, is critical to figuring out what you love. In fact, margin and reflection might be the biggest difference maker someone can utilize.
“Reflection and margin help you move from being reactionary to being intentional.”
And when people are intentional about finding their sweet spot, then they find some key things that can really start to develop momentum in their lives, both professionally and otherwise.
Another fun and untapped area to explore is to think back and remember what you used to play as a chid. When you could choose anything you wanted, what choice did you make? Remembering your childhood interests serves to clue you in to what you may be drawn to now, in your adulthood. While they may not be identical, this thinking helps open you up to considering things that you put on a shelf and need to explore again. Whatever helps you get there, the most important thing is to start. Put one foot in front of the other and make some small changes. Whether you are looking for the next right fit in your career or to start a business you love, we all should start at the same point; with knowing our sweet spot and how to activate it.
Want to learn more about reaching your sweet spot? Contact Steve below!
https://greenhouseculture.co
