The secret to making the right career decisions with Patty Stonesifer

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This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of best-selling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Work consumes most of our lives, particularly if you're working 40, 50, or more hours per week. That is a lot of life. Over time, what you do for work can shape not just how you spend your days, but how you think about yourself. And yet, for something that takes up so much of our lives, most of us are basically improvising when it comes to deciding what work we should do. Early in my career, I was definitely in some kind of race. It was a race to prove myself, to get recognition that I was good at things. That recognition came in the form of titles and promotions and compensation and all the visible signals that I was winning. Even though it was somebody else's race and somebody else's rules, for a long time, I let it guide how I made decisions about my career. And then at some point, life made me pause and ask a much harder question. What do I actually want? What does success mean to me? What matters to me in my life? What do I want my life to be about? And how does work fit in to all of that? Most of the big decisions in our careers don't come with clear answers. They come with trade-offs, prestige versus meaning, scale versus proximity, money versus time, safety versus growth. So when all the options look good on paper, how do you stay true to yourself? And how do you decide what's actually right for you? I'm Molly Graham, and this is WorkLife, a show where we untangle the messy human side of work. Patty Stonecipher is one of the people I have turned to most often when I've made decisions in my career. I admire her so much, not just because of what she's done, but because she's always seemed to know how to stay true to herself. It can be so easy to let things like ego and prestige lead, particularly when you've held fancy global jobs. But Patty never has. Years ago, she wrote down a personal mission statement, a short set of principles that she uses as a North Star when she's making career decisions or thinking about how to spend her time. The clarity from this mission statement has guided her into becoming one of the most impressive people that you have probably never heard of. Patty was the most senior female executive at Microsoft in its early years. She then became the founding CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and one of Amazon's first independent board members. And she still sits on that board today. And before you say, well, that sounds pretty fancy to me, she's also used this mission statement to turn down big jobs that didn't quite feel like her. So this episode is about that mission statement, why she created it, how she's put it into practice, and whether the rest of us can build something similar. Patty Stonecipher, welcome to WorkLife. Thank you, Molly. It's great to be here. I'm so glad to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation. So Patty, you have a personal mission statement that guides your decisions. Will you tell us what it is and how you came up with it? Yes. Well, I think at some level, while I call it a personal mission statement, you could also call it personal principles, right? Because a mission statement is kind of, what are we going to do? And the principles are kind of, how are we going to do it? And I've merged those two into a simple statement to both guide big decisions, but also provide a framework for me organizing my days. And so I've been very proactive about making sure that I define success through this statement that I then use as an organizing framework for what am I going to do this week, this month, this day. I'm a person who says no a lot so that I can go deep where I say yes. But I say no a lot. And I have friends who are wonderful, wonderful change makers who just cannot say no. So that need to have a framework that says, I can only keep learning on two or three things, right? And so that means a lot of no's, a lot of no's. And I use that framework plus the discipline of limiting the number of things within each part of the framework as a no device, as much as it is a yes device. I love it. All right, will you tell us what the mission statement is? It's very simple. It is love, be loved, seek justice, keep learning and laugh. I love it so much. How did you come up with it? So I've always been prone to thinking about what values should be guiding things. I came from a family that was very big on social values, but I kind of put that in one bucket and work in another. And my first four decades, I was very consumed with, yes, a young family, but also very big job in the tech world, making money. I'd started out with a nun and began the process of really building asset base for my family. But at age 40, while I had more or less made decisions that I felt good about, I really realized that I'd made more money and had more success than I expected. And it was time to step away at that point from Microsoft and really consider, what more did I want the second half of my life to be? Not just using those values informally, but formalizing them. That's why my statement is so short, because I needed something that I could be thinking of when people ask me to do something, when an opportunity presented itself, when what was I planning for next week came up. I needed to have a touchstone that was easy to go back to and make sure that I was using my time and my power and my resources against that real set of mission and principles. Yeah. How did you actually write it down? When did you first write it down? Did you just sit in a room and come up with it? I think I wrote it down, Molly, the day after that I announced I was leaving Microsoft. The principals of DreamWorks SKG called me and said, come join us. And I said yes, because it seemed so cool. I was ready to step away from Microsoft. It definitely fit my keep learning category, but I kind of just grabbed that next really cool rung. And 12 weeks later, began a conversation with Bill and Melinda Gates about what they were hoping to do with their philanthropy and how we might do some of that together. And I realized, oh, I'm going to have to be far more intentional. Because by that time, several corporations had called. I had begun the process of joining board of directors. But it was necessary to really get a framework to know not just where to say yes, but where to say no, where to say later, where to say didn't hit the top of the priorities. Yeah. So first of all, I wanted to say, despite knowing you well, I didn't actually know you you built the statement this early. And I also think it's really interesting because I think often when other people tell your career story, they say, oh, she left Microsoft and she went straight to the Gates Foundation. But actually, there was a job you took in the middle, which you mentioned the DreamWorks job. And you left it pretty quickly. Like that must that must have been really hard. I teasingly say sometime I'll write my 12 weeks in Hollywood memoir. It'll be very short, but I really just I had worked with the folks at DreamWorks on a joint venture with at Microsoft and I just admired them and admired what they were the boldness of what they were trying to do. And it just seemed so cool. Right. So I said yes, because it was so cool. But you know what? The world is full of a lot of cool things and you can only do a few. I changed the statement over time to be simpler. You know, I think the love and be loved has moved even further up the priorities as I've gotten older and as especially as my husband has needed more attention. You have to look at these things, you know, every year or so and decide, is this still the right composition for me? Yeah, well, and I actually want to go through it piece by piece because I'm guessing each piece actually has a story for like what it means to you. So will you talk a little bit both about the pieces of it and what they mean to you, but also how they've changed over time? Well, let's start with love and be loved. I think of that as how I want to show up in this world But sometimes, that's way harder than it should be. 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Get AT&T Business at business.att.com. Was it hard to leave Microsoft? Not by the time I did. It was really time for me to leave Microsoft. I felt that, yeah, I felt that I had at some level outgrown it. I mean, probably the only brave thing I did was step away and let go before I grabbed, but I grabbed so quick. There was just like 24 hours where I didn't grab onto the next thing. You know, that's one of the first pieces of career advice that you gave me that I repeat all the time, which is you said to me, yeah, you said the hardest thing in the world is to let go of one rung of the ladder without your hand on the other rung. Yeah. So, no, it felt like it was time. It was scary. It was scary in kind of a personal, what am I going to do next? But it wasn't scary leaving Microsoft. Yeah. And then you said you took the DreamWorks job because it sounded cool. I mean, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg were on the phone. You just kind of just, I'm a just say yes kind of girl, right? So I would rather say yes accidentally, you know, and have to unwind it than let something go. And they were so cool, right? Microsoft was a great builder of software, but nobody ever really called us cool. They just didn't. So I think I was seduced a bit by how cool that would be. Okay. And so then Bill and Melinda came to you and asked if you might want to start working with them on their philanthropic stuff. And what was it about that moment that made you feel like you needed a mission statement or needed help in that decision-making? It wasn't just, I mean, I think most people would say these people are ready to have a blank sheet of paper and try to figure out how to use their wealth to change inequity in society, which we had these similar goals, but you know, from different lenses. Most people would say yes to that. The thing that probably moved me further towards needing a framework was I also said yes to the Kinko's board. I was on the Alaska Airlines board. I was on the Viacom board. So I said yes because of these opportunities to learn, to use what I knew how to do, all of those things. And it just was, those were a bad batch of decisions because there was nothing wrong with doing them, but they limited the opportunity for me to spend the time on Seek Justice, spend the time on Love and Be Loved, and they didn't fulfill Keep Learning. But I unwound those and it was helpful that I had the Gates Foundation, which aligned so much with what I needed to do because I could explain to those people, look, I want to pour everything I've got into this effort to do, you know, to find an answer for vaccinations, to do something about childhood nutrition, to see what we can learn about education in the United States. And unwinding those corporate boards over the next couple of years was a very big lesson for me and make your decisions slowly. Make your decisions slowly. And it also sounds like, almost like you realized there was an imbalance. Like you'd leaned like too hard on the learning value, but you hadn't paid attention to the Seek Justice piece. Like it sounds like there was a balance piece to it as well. Well, at the beginning, the Gates Foundation was small, right? I was above a pizza restaurant in downtown Redmond where we moved the desks around on the weekend if I had to add one person, right? So there were, it was teeny tiny. We did the books out of Quicken. So even though I knew what their ambition was, I still felt like I had a lot of capacity. And so I started applying that capacity, you know, to a range of other things where people wanted me. And, you know, there is flattery and being wanted. But yeah, I think I just, I just, maybe I just got a little sloppy and having a more focused framework that you literally can carry around and put things against it really helped me focus. Totally. You waved a piece of paper. So like you actually use this mission statement every day, right? You have a form for how it integrates into your day. Will you just talk through what that is? Yeah. So down this side are those big love, be loved, seek justice, keep learning, laugh and play. And I, most of my activities line up underneath those. But then I have a column for personal business and corporate nonprofit, because there's just a lot of stuff you got to do in life, right? I've got an issue with the back fence in the house and I've got, you know, those things have to be on the list too. So I merge them so that the short term and the long term, the very deep and the very, you just got to do it, all come to one place. And it's such a regular touchstone for me that I was telling my daughter, Sandy, last night about the fact that I was going to do this podcast. And she was explaining to her husband how much I use this process. And I was telling them that their eight-year-old daughter, Della, checks to see that it still says Della, get the thing framed at FrameBridge on it because she knows, she's still waiting for me to get this one particular piece of memorabilia framed for her. And it's on there, and she knows if it's on the list, it'll eventually get done. Wait, so, and I think this is right, but you have basically a form sheet of paper that you use that has this, like the mission statement down the left side and some categories. Across the top and then down the side. And so under love and be loved, I have subheadings for the people that I want to love and be loved for. So I make sure, what am I doing with friends that's going to take it the next step? What am I doing with Sandy's family? What am I doing with Matt's family? What am I doing with Mike? And try to pick some things. So I have a bigger picture of what I want to do about love and be loved with Mike in this coming year. So we work on those big things, but then I make sure that, you know, this weekend Arena Stage has a musical that he loves. So I looked at that ahead of time and we've got that on there. So it's a combination of the things that are telescope and things that are microscope on there. Big things I want to get, keep my eye on and things I just got to, I just want to get done this week, this day. And do you print, Patty? Is it a new one every week or do you use it on a monthly basis? Once a month. Yeah. Okay. Nothing, just scribble all over it. You notice it's a combination of pretty print. This was February 1. It's a pretty print and then a lot of little scribbles all over it. And it just lets you kind of track how your actions and the things that you need to do map to the things that are important to you. So you kind of notice if there's a gap. Yes. And to be honest, a lot of your listeners are probably mid-career. So they can look at certain milestones. I'm at a different point in my career. And I've heard many people who are semi-retired or retired say that the time just falls like sand through the sieve and they're not sure what they get at the end of it. And so this also helps me with that retrospective look to say, yeah, I did do my part for seeking justice. And so it's a level of satisfaction that you get too by knowing this adds up to doing a good job, right? Yeah. So was it different when you were doing things like running Martha's Table or when you were interim CEO of The Washington Post? Like, With HiringPro, you can hire with confidence knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, LinkedIn found that its users are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash work life. Terms and conditions apply. 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Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at Rangerover.com. Okay, so I want to just try to give people the tools to do this for themselves if they can. And we're going to use me as a guinea pig, and we'll see how far we can get. But I am curious, like, let's say I want to make a mission statement, and either I have nothing, or in my case, I have a set of values, but I've always been jealous of your mission statement, so I'm ready. I'm ready for the Patti tutorial. Like, what are the essential building blocks? How do you start? So I think there's just a couple of questions. And the first one is, how do you want to show up in your family, with your colleagues, with life? How do you want to show up? What are the one or two or three major personal characteristics you want people to describe? So when you think about yourself, Molly, how do you want to show up? I mean, well, I'll just talk out loud for a second. But I think that, like, I have love and be loved really resonates with me because I think for me, I have a value called family, but it's the broadest definition, meaning I have friends that I think of as family, and I'm, I really care, like, when someone needs something about being the person that can, like, get on the plane or just show up, you know, wherever you need me and whatever way you need me. And when I can't do that, I often feel like I'm failing. And that's true for my, you know, nuclear family. That's true for my extended family. And it's definitely true for, like, a set of friends. And so I think that's really important to me when it comes to family. So build family, be family, support family. Something in that is how you want to show up. And that goes for your best colleagues, as well as the broader network, as well as those really, really close, right? Yeah, it does. And I think, like, it also probably does actually connect to how I coach and support leaders these days. Like, I've been trying to figure this out, but I used to really care about broad impact. And now I really love depth, which is something my 20-year-old self would have been very puzzled by. But as you say, these things evolve. But I feel like if I can say that something I did, even if it's 30-minute conversation, you know, changed the trajectory of someone's life or decisions, that that's meaningful impact to me. So it isn't always about, you know, hours and hours of time or deep, deep relationships as much as it is feeling like I've had a meaningful impact on someone. So I think those two things are connected, not necessarily the same. I have another value called guiding, which I use. That would be your special purpose, right? So the second thing is, the first one is, how do you want to show up? How do you want to be in relationship to the world or to the people around you? The second one is, and then what is your special purpose? And there's just, to me, Molly, that kind of guiding, building, et cetera, those are related. You want to be family, you want to build strength. Or I don't know, what would you say your special purpose is? Oh my God, the questions are so big, Patti. That's why it takes a while to build this out. This is not one of those lightning round things, but this is just for the purpose of the straw man. Yeah, the example. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, I mean, I think, by the way, I have another value that's called authenticity, which I actually think is probably related to the family one. It may be your final one, right? Yeah. Because you want to always do all these things in a way that, that's why laugh for me, because I don't want to be self-important. I desperately do not want to be self-important. And if you keep laughing, you do it. So authenticity is kind of that, maybe that trailing element too. Oh yeah, that really resonates, because I've thought a lot about how to authentically do this podcast, the Molly version. Yeah, special purpose. Like, I do think at this point, it is about helping people feel less alone and feel more confident and more sort of seen and supported in their work. And that's what I think the guiding is about, which is, like, to whatever extent I can use the tools at my disposal to help people feel more sane and more clear and more, you know, less alone. I don't know how that would end up in a statement, though. That's okay. But I've got build strength and connections and guiding. I've also got authenticity. I've got be family, build family, show up for family. Yeah, and so the questions were, how do you want to show up is the first question. What's your special purpose or your special power? And yours, you know, the building strength and connection, probably your special power is guiding, right? Because you are really a great, great guide. And then what is a key area of personal growth you highly value? Mine is the same as yours. Actually, my value on this one is extreme learning because I tend to only, like, I feel like I'm at my best when I'm actually terrified. I mean, one of the reasons why saying yes to this opportunity to take over this podcast was such an easy, to your point about saying yes to Jeff Bezos 15 minutes after he asked you or whatever, I said yes as soon as they asked me because I was like, that sounds terrifying. I have no idea if I would be good at it, but I'm gonna learn so much, you know? Amen, amen. Okay, so here's just the straw man. Now, obviously, this takes weeks of thinking about it. So be family or build family. Let's say be family for now. Build strength and connection. Bold and risky learning, authenticity. And somehow in that, you would have to make it a little snappier, a little better, but wow, there's a lot in that. If you really had a framework that said, am I being family, right? What am I doing to be family, to build strength and connection? Gosh knows, what are your highest priorities right now for building strength and connection? And then bold and risky learning. And then authenticity, I love that because it keeps you from thinking too much of this, the rest of it, right? So for me, you know, there's this framework, but then part of the reason I kept it short was a whole series of things about brevity. And one was this book that I dug up. Did you ever see this book? It's called Not Quite What I Was Planning, six-word memoirs. There's a website for it. It was from Smith Magazine. And there's all these people that said in there, next time, better parents, better hair. Somebody else's memoir was, I just randomly opened this, Little Bit Lucy tempered by Ethel. I mean, I love it because it's sobering. Not quite what I was planning as your six-word memoir. And I kind of I'm a planner, right? I want my memoir to be something close to practice love and justice, learned, laughed. You know, that would be sufficient for me. I would feel really good if people thought I really, truly, my memoir was practice love and justice. I learned and I laughed.