They were right that their problem solving had nothing to do with their purpose and values. In fact, despite the signs on the wall, they did not have a purpose or values. If the words on the wall were authentic, they would have permeated the consciousness of those at the meeting. This consciousness would have altered how they did the downsizing. They would have done what Nick Craig taught us: follow purpose to do the “hard, right things.” Hard, right things differentiate an organization from the pack, and they produce unusual, long-term results. Every person who left or stayed would have had an experience demonstrating that the company values people and has an exceptionally positive culture. The commitment of those who stayed would be higher. The value of the company would be greater.
In many organizations, stating a purpose is simply an exercise to meet expectations. It is a game that results in increased hypocrisy, which produces increased workforce cynicism. In stating an inauthentic purpose, the leader does positive harm and lowers the value of the organization. A test of authenticity is constancy. Is the purpose the arbiter of all decisions?
Social Pressure and Inauthenticity
Many organizations state a purpose because of external social pressure. Today, most organizations are expected to have a purpose statement. Even leaders who do not believe in purpose face pressure from board members, investors, employees, and other stakeholders to articulate a higher purpose.
This pressure sometimes leads to statements like the one produced by the task force at the oil company mentioned in chapter 8. When a company announces and displays its purpose and values, but the words do not govern the behavior of senior leadership, the statement rings hollow. Everyone recognizes the hypocrisy, and the workforce becomes more cynical. The process does more harm than good. An authentic purpose is not the outcome of a technique to produce a dazzling PR statement but a genuine reason for being. It is communicated with authenticity and constancy.
Splitting Versus Integrating
One of our associates helps companies discover their highest purpose. A leader he works with said, “We have discovered a financial problem, so we are going to put aside our work on purpose until things get better.”
That CEO has categorized his to-do list. One objective on the list is to create a purpose-driven organization. Another is to remain financially viable. Since remaining financially viable is a short-term issue of survival and establishing a higher purpose is not, the former drives out the latter.
While he does not realize it, his logic keeps him in the reactive and conventional mind-set. He logically separates all his problems and works on them individually. He treats purpose as just another task on his to-do list, a nice tool to bring to the organization, but in doing so, he destroys the ability of the organization to discover its purpose.
He cannot see that continually clarifying and communicating the highest purpose is the highest purpose of a leader. He does not see the connections between purpose and all else that is done. Simply put, leaders should not split the pursuit of higher purpose from other business decisions. Rather, they should integrate the decision making so purpose is the constant driver.
Constancy of purpose means purpose is the tie breaker when the organization chooses between making higher profit and acting in a manner consistent with the “why” of the organization. It is not a message on the walls that is meant to fool employees. It is the constant integrator of all decisions and guides the solving of all problems.
The Constant Arbiter of All Decisions
Of all the people we interviewed, no one spoke of leadership and constancy of purpose more eloquently than Tony Meola. Tony is the recently retired head of US consumer operations at Bank of America. Tony is a leader who understands the ongoing nature of purpose work. He says that leadership is relentlessly difficult because it involves moving the institution—and existing cultures tend to impede movement. As extensions of the culture, managers end up resisting the change as well. Organizational complexity and competing demands also impede movement.
Tony overcomes these obstacles by treating operational excellence as a destination and allowing no other pressures to distract him from it. He emphasizes operational skills and leadership in employee training and development, and he brings that focus to every conversation, every decision, every problem his team faces. He is always asking, “Will this make us better operators?”
Over time this constancy of purpose wins. Tony says, “When you hold it constant like that, when you never waver, an amazing thing happens. They realize that the purpose is real. The purpose sinks in to the collective consciousness. The culture changes, and the organization begins to perform at a higher level. Processes become simpler and easier to execute and sustain. People start looking for permanent solutions rather than stop-gap measures that create more inefficiencies through process variations.”
Tony told us that embracing this position has meant saying no to anything that doesn’t reflect it. In the call center, for example, a proposal was made to invest additional resources in technology and people so that the group could answer customers’ questions faster and better and handle 25 percent more inquiries. But the project was rejected because when managers and employees asked themselves whether it would make them better operators, the answer was no. That realization forced them to ask how the operations themselves could be changed to eliminate failures that produced call center inquiries in the first place. The focus on higher purpose transformed the thinking and improved the outcome.
When a leader communicates the purpose with constancy, as Tony has done, the purpose becomes the arbiter of all decisions. Employees internalize the commitment. They begin to believe in the purpose. The change is thus signaled from the top, and it unfolds from the bottom.
Summary
Because of the focus on contractual outcomes in the traditional principal–agent model, organizations do not typically rely on higher purpose as a driver of decisions, so the question of constantly communicating the higher purpose does not arise. However, for an organization to make purpose the arbiter of all decisions, leaders must constantly and clearly communicate the purpose. This constant message reduces reliance on costly, explicit, contractual incentives. The fourth counterintuitive step in creating a purpose-driven organization is thus to turn the higher purpose into a constant message and make the purpose the arbiter of all decisions.
Getting Started: Tools and Exercises
Phase 1. Have everyone read the chapter.
Phase 2. Hold a meeting of your work group to discuss the following questions:
In introducing higher purpose, why would a CEO ask, “When will I be done?”
What is constancy of purpose?
What does it mean to have a purpose that is the arbiter of all decisions?
What happens when economic value added is the arbiter of all decisions?
What was General Perkins communicating when he eliminated the many toxic managers and micromanagers?
What happens if an executive like Tony Meola responds to every proposal by asking, “How will this make us better operators?”
Phase 3. Have each person consider their current organization and propose a question like the one Tony asked. Have everyone share their question. Attempt to specify an integrated statement that could be the constant arbiter for the entire organization.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
STEP 5 Stimulate Learning
One day, we were in a studio making a presentation, and one of the sound technicians seemed to hang on our every word. After the session, he approached us. He told us that at one time he was a supervisor of a team of technicians in the company, but he had given it up and retired. That day, he was working as an independent contractor. He reflected on the time as a supervisor and said, “I made a lot of mistakes. After all these years, I still remember some of the things I did, and I ask myself, why did I do that?”
He looked away and reflected, then turned back. With some feeling he said, “You know, very few of those issue
s had anything to do with producing things. They had to do with relationships. I did not understand. I made lots of mistakes. It is hard do the right thing when you do not see the people and the relationships; you only see the job to be done.”
That same day, another man who does similar work spoke to us. With deep admiration, he talked of his boss. He said his boss had evolved into a man of wisdom, and everyone in the organization held him in high esteem. This fellow told us about a performance review: His boss indicated that this man’s performance was fine, and he needed to keep up what he was doing. Then he said, “Let me be clear. The most important thing is your family. You stay here too long. You need to get your work done, go home, and be with your family.”
As he shared this, displaying vulnerability, the man was near tears. He said, “Can you imagine what it means when you hear words like that from your boss? I cannot believe how lucky I am to work for a man like that.”
In these stories we can see an important contrast. One man saw only the task to be done. People were simply a means to an end. To this day he regrets what he did as a supervisor. He now recognizes that it is “hard do the right thing when you do not see the people and the relationships; you only see the job to be done.”
The other man had a boss who, showing greater cognitive complexity, recognized the need to get the job done and also saw people as having inherent value. It was his responsibility to care for, inspire, challenge, and support his people.
The first man had a conventional view. He was independent and task focused, and his job was to solve problems by conceptualizing and implementing strategies. The second man was interdependent, and he had an inclusive view. He was focused on a task, and he was focused on people. He was about strategy, and he was about culture. He was about getting the job done, and he was about meeting the human needs of his people.
Convention and Inclusion
People tend to be promoted into management according to length of time in the organization, technical expertise, and their track record in producing results. The emphasis on producing results makes people self-serving and tends to put emphasis on task completion.
As General Perkins pointed out, conventional culture values results more than relationships, with little focus on how the results were achieved. This splits results from culture, emphasizing the results and destroying the culture. As the first man said, “It is hard do the right thing when you only see the job to be done.”
Purpose and Prosocial Behavior
As we saw in chapter 2, when people embrace a purpose-driven life, they benefit from many scientifically demonstrated health benefits. They are also more likely to take initiative, persist in meaningful tasks, and listen to negative feedback. That is, they are more likely to learn how to be successful.54
Yet their success orientation is not selfish. They are also more likely to assist and motivate others, stimulating them to discover new ideas and engage in creative acts. Purpose-driven people are personally growing, and they desire to promote the growth in others. This is called “prosocial motivation.”
An Orientation to Growth
Recently, we were picked up by a limo driver named Louis. He immediately engaged us in conversation, often interspersing in it a full-body laugh.
We learned that Louis, a 60-year-old African American, grew up in Tennessee, left school in the eleventh grade and moved to Detroit. His one talent was that he knew how to work hard. He started off making $1,000 a week when many of his neighbors were making $200. Yet they were better off because he squandered his money on alcohol, drugs, and women. He was going nowhere.
Sharing a spiritual conversion story, he said, “I just could not go on living a meaningless life. I began searching for something more, and then I started meeting people and learning things.”
Louis loves learning, and he loves helping other people grow and learn. He told of a recent conversation in his car. He picked up an executive who had had a six-hour flight delay and was in a very bad mood. Given his purpose to help others grow, Louis said he had to figure out how to lift the man.
After considerable reflection, Louis asked the man, “Tomorrow are you going to feel better than you feel right now?”
The man nodded and said yes. Louis said, “Why wait until tomorrow?”
The man was shocked. Then he laughed. He said, “You are right. Why wait? You just made me a better person. My family is going to have a better evening tonight because of you.”
As Louis finished the story, he launched into another full-body laugh. Then he said, “That is my life. I am here to help people. I never want to stop learning, and I never want to stop helping other people learn.”
Louis may or may not recognize it, but he is a transformational leader. The story of Louis the limo driver is the same story we heard from many CEOs of purpose-driven companies. They originally had a conventional perspective, but then they had some personal experience that brought deep change and a sense of purpose and meaning. They began to grow, and their orientation to others changed. Purpose-driven leaders tend to become facilitators of human growth.
An Orientation to Growth
Psychologist Carol Dweck identifies two measurable orientations she calls “the fixed mind-set” and “the growth mind-set.” In the fixed mind-set intelligence and talent are an either/or proposition. You have them, or you do not. People with the fixed mind-set tend to be self-oriented in that they strive to look smart, avoid failure, and avoid the embarrassment of exposed incompetence. Their learning is dampened because of the anxiety that comes with a fixation on avoiding mistakes and performing well.
People with the growth mind-set are different. They believe that talent and intelligence can be enhanced through effort. They yearn for learning and seek out challenges. They see failure as an element of learning.
If a manager has a fixed mind-set, Dweck’s research shows that the person tends to punish dissent, seek revenge when rejected, reduce effort in the face of setbacks, see employees as incapable of change, convey a willingness to judge, provide little coaching, and ignore improvements made by employees. If a manager has a growth mind-set, the person is open to dissenting opinions, tends to practice forgiveness, persists to win-win solutions, assumes employees can be developed, tends to both challenge and nurture employees, has a zest for teaching, and reinforces observed improvements. A leader with a growth mind-set is focused on and committed to the growth of others.55
Louis is an example of a person who shifted from the fixed to the growth mind-set. Many CEOs enter their role carrying the mind-set of the conventional principal–agent model, which assumes that people are effort averse. They believe that people work for money, and if they are not monitored, they will underperform; they will withhold their effort. So it takes money plus control to get people to simply meet expectations. Managers have to work hard just to get people to do what is expected and do not expect them to exceed expectations. Their perspective makes it difficult for them to see how organizational higher purpose can lead employees to give more than their explicit monetary rewards incentivize them to give.
Managers with a higher-purpose perspective accept that work can be unappealing but see that an authentic higher purpose can change how people view their work and lead to an organization in which the workforce is highly engaged and willingly exceeds expectations.
The research on engagement shows that compensation is a contributor to engagement, but it is not the most important contributor. The most important contributor is the quality of leadership and the creation of a positive culture.56 In an organization of high engagement, people have a sense of clarity and control. Leaders provide clear expectations and the necessary technical resources to support what needs to be done. Leaders also recognize and respond to individual needs. They also do one other thing. They attend to the need for meaning, purpose, learning, and development. They connect their people to a meaningful future and help them see opportunities for growth within their current jobs and in future job
s inside and outside the organization. The paradoxical, empirical fact is that leaders who accelerate the learning, growth, and development of their people have the highest retention rates.57 Their people are learning and growing and willingly contributing to the common good.
Zingerman’s
Zingerman’s is a company, started in 1982 by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, that has a collection of restaurants and food-related organizations in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan. The company is one of the local treasures, legendary for great food and great service. Many consider it one of the top 25 food markets in the world. It is often mentioned as an example of a purpose-driven, positive organization. We interviewed co-owner and cofounder Ari Weinzweig and asked him what the higher purpose of Zingerman’s was. He shared the company’s mission statement:
We share the Zingerman’s experience
Selling food that makes you happy
Giving service that makes you smile
In passionate pursuit of our mission
Showing Love and care in all our actions
To enrich as many lives as we possibly can.
Note that the highest purpose is to show Love, with a capital L, and enrich as many lives as possible. Ari told us he wanted to train each of his employees to be a future entrepreneur. He did not expect all the employees to be lifetime employees. Someday they would leave, and when they did, he hoped that they would have developed the capabilities to start their own businesses, even if they were not restaurant-related businesses.
The Economics of Higher Purpose Page 14