S1: E12 - Elevate The Humanity Of Your Social Impact Organization With Jan Barlow of Better Job Fit

In this episode of Secrets of Social Impact Communicators, I welcome Jan Barlow, founder of Better Job Fit, for an insightful conversation on career transitions, leadership, and purpose-driven work. Jan shares her incredible journey from a successful corporate career in pharmaceuticals to creating an organization that helps vulnerable populations such as veterans and foster care communities transition into civilian work.

Jan opens up about her own career challenges, including the burnout that came from working outside of her strengths and how it led her to rethink her path. She now uses her extensive experience in job matching to help others find meaningful, aligned careers that make a difference. Jan also delves into the critical role of emotional intelligence, behavioral diversity, and creating shame-free environments where individuals and teams can thrive.

Key Takeaways:

1. Career Alignment & Well-Being: Jan emphasizes the importance of working in alignment with your strengths and gifts to avoid burnout and stress. Her personal story highlights how job misalignment can lead to physical and mental health issues for social impact leaders and their teams.

2. Conscious Awareness in Leadership: Social impact leaders must prioritize raising their own self-awareness and make the mindset shift from "me" to "we" to use their strengths for the greater good.

3. Helping Vulnerable Populations: Better Job Fit’s work with veterans and foster care communities provides structured job-matching, helping individuals transition from highly regulated environments (military, foster care) to the unstructured private sector with confidence and clarity. Jan shares several poignant stories of career transformation that will challenge you to take your purpose-driven work to the next level of excellence. 

4. Behavioral Diversity: Jan discusses the importance of recognizing behavioral differences in teams and explains how understanding these differences can mitigate conflict and improve collaboration.

5. Creating Solutions, Not Blame: Building a "solution-oriented" culture helps teams focus on progress, rather than dwelling on problems. This fosters a healthier, more collaborative workplace.

Memorable Quotes:

• "What's really not spoken of or discussed much is the psychological impact when you are in job transition. ... When you are in that food, water, shelter mode you can have a house, you can have everything fine, but mentally, if you're in that fear mode ... you start to get into that psychological spiral. That's really what I wanted to help alleviate." - Jan Barlow
• "It's about deference over difference, respect over talking about how different we are ... . That's really what behavior diversity is about." - Jan Barlow

Resources:

• Connect with Jan Barlow on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Jan and her work at her website, Better Job Fit
• Interested in personalized career consulting? Reach out to Jan at [e-mail].

Call to Action: Be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform, and check out my latest book, 7 Secrets of Highly Effective Social Impact Communicators. For guest ideas or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes, reach out to Nate at [e-mail].

Production Credits: Special thanks to Lee Williams for producing this episode.

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Remember: Social impact work is soul work. Lead like you live.