To understand organizational higher purpose, we need to understand the role of individuals, especially leaders, in the discovery of higher purpose. This chapter is devoted to the role of the individual in organizational higher purpose. For the individual the acquisition of higher purpose in life changes everything.
When people embrace higher purpose, they begin to transcend convention, access new capacity, and behave in seemingly counterintuitive ways. Conventional economic thinking focuses on contractual ways to deal with individual self-interest in organizations and align employee behavior more closely with the behavior the owners of the business want. In this approach, employee self-interest is taken as a given, and the goal is to design employment contracts that do the best job of bridging the divide between those who own productive resources and those who manage them to produce economic value.
If we study purpose-driven CEOs, we begin to uncover an alternative worldview. Purpose-driven CEOs do not reject conventional economic thinking. They transform it, and the change is driven by focused imagination rather than conventional fear. Instead of seeing employees as being purely self-interested, purpose-driven CEOs see them as potentially responding to a call for purpose that is larger than themselves, and even larger than the organization itself. This response creates in their employees a desire to contribute to a legacy, to being part of a larger contribution to society that they can be proud of.
As purpose-driven leaders move forward, they build purpose-driven organizations. But this is not easy. The challenge they face is that they confront the paradox we discussed in the previous chapter. How do you pursue organizational higher purpose in light of the demands of your investors to produce tangible economic results that may be jeopardized by pursuing higher purpose? In this chapter we show how the paradox can be confronted. We show how embracing a higher purpose transforms human perspective and how scientific research supports our claims.
One day when we were talking with undergraduate students at the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, the students expressed anxiety about their careers. We told them that when you live a life of higher purpose, a life of meaningful contribution, a transformation occurs. Work is no longer an exercise in dreadful labor, an economic exchange for money. Work becomes a pleasure because the more you do it, the more you actualize your potential. You create and discover a more dynamic and virtuous self. You experience more self-respect, and you have more respect for others.
When you love what you do, extrinsic rewards such as wealth and power become less motivational. You begin to orient to intrinsic motivators such as meaning, integrity, love, and learning. You are thus less determined by your culture and more able to shape the culture in which you operate. That is, you become a leader, a person who effectively invites others to make new, good things happen.
When you make this shift, you have more and more opportunities to contribute to others. You spend more time in a self-reinforcing, positive cycle. This does not mean you have no challenges. It does mean that you tend to have the energy to fight through your challenges. When you have a clear purpose and love pursuing it, you become ever more masterful at making contributions that matter. You begin to live for significance rather than success.
In a session with undergraduates about personal purpose, we were asked a practical question: “How do you find your life purpose?” Bob responded by telling a story.
One day our daughter, Shauri, called to tell us her boyfriend had just broken off their relationship. She was churning with negative feelings. She announced she was coming home to recover. The next morning, I went to the airport.
She climbed into the car and immediately started talking about her unfortunate situation. She was in a deep emotional hole, and as she agonized, the hole seemed only to get deeper and darker. Finally, I asked her if she was problem solving or purpose finding. The strange question jolted her, and she looked at me quizzically.
I suggested that most people tend to live their lives in a reactive mode. They are always trying to solve their problems. People are sad or happy depending on where they are in the ebb and flow. This is very common. Normal people tend to live in the reactive state.
I suggested an alternative. We can become initiators or creators of our own lives. When we initiate, we tend to eventually create value, and we tend to feel good about ourselves. If we continually clarify our purpose, we live with vision. We are drawn to the future we imagine. We begin to pursue our purpose, and our negative emotions tend to occur less frequently. We experience victory over the reactive self, and we feel good about who we are. We feel better because we literally begin to have a more valuable self. We are empowered, and we become empowering to others.
Shauri was not buying it. She ignored me and spent another 15 minutes questioning her self-worth. She paused for a breath, and I again asked her if she was problem solving or purpose finding. She ignored my question and continued wondering whether what had happened to her happened because she “was not good enough.”
We repeated this pattern four times. The last time I asked, she stopped talking and just looked at me. I could tell a big challenge was coming.
In order to stop my insensitive questions, she asked, “How would I ever use purpose finding in this situation?”
“You can use it in any situation,” I replied.
“How do you do it?”
“Whenever I am feeling lost or filled with negative emotions, I get out my life statement and I rewrite it.”
Just then we were turning into the driveway. She asked me, “What is a life statement?”
I explained that it is a short document in which you try to capture the essence of who you are and what your purpose is in life.
“You have an actual document that does that?” She seemed truly surprised.
Something had changed. I had her attention. She was expressing genuine curiosity. Here was a chance for meaningful contact and the exploration of profound possibility.
“Let me show you my life statement,” I said.
She followed me into my study. I reached into a file, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. Shauri read the document carefully and then looked up. She asked, “When you feel bad, you read this, and it makes you feel better?”
“No, when I feel really bad, I rewrite some part of it or add something new. The document is always evolving. When I finish, I feel clearer about who I am. By clarifying what I most value, I become more stable. When I clarify my purpose and my values, I center myself. My negative emotions tend to disappear before I even start to act. Just clarifying who I am and what I want to create seems to energize me. Even the thought of movement becomes uplifting.
“There is another reason for rewriting,” I continued. “People think that values are permanent, like cement. Clear values can stabilize us, yet they are not cement. They need to evolve. Each time we face a new situation and reinterpret our values, they change just a little bit. Rewriting a statement like this one allows us to integrate what we have learned and how we have developed into our values. Hence, our values also evolve with us. We co-create each other.”
I told Shauri that I have executives in my classes write their life statements, and they find it hard. They begin with very simple life statements.
I suggested that instead of spending the weekend feeling bad about what happened and working through all her reactions to the event, she might instead spend her time writing her own life statement. What happened next is telling.
Shauri finished writing her life statement and headed home. A few days later she sent me a copy of an amazing letter. She has given me permission to share it.
She began it by describing her painful experience and her decision to fly home:
Dad picked me up from the airport, and on the way home he started to ask me questions about what and how I was feeling about the situation with Matt. At first the focus was just on the pain I was feeling and the self-pity. I wondered what was wrong with me and if I would ever find anyone to love. I was just going over and over the problem.
Dad turned the conversation from solving my problem to finding my purpose. My gut reaction initially was to bring it back to the problem. I wanted to wallow in the pain of the problem. I thought I was looking for a solution, but it wasn’t until I allowed the conversation to really flow into my purpose that I found the solution.4
Negative emotions pull us into a reactive mode. They drain us of energy and lead us to ruminate on the problem.5 They cause us to go around in circles. When Shauri at last found her purpose, her entire outlook changed. She began to rise above her day-to-day problems. She shifted from problem solving to purpose finding.
Shauri’s letter brought about a surprising turn of events. She shared an email message she had recently sent to her old boyfriend. It turns out that he had contacted her and indicated he missed hearing from her. In response she wrote an unusually open, authentic, and seemingly vulnerable letter.
When her roommates saw the letter, they argued that the message was too honest! They could never imagine opening themselves up to someone who had just rejected them. In coming to this conclusion, they were making conventional assumptions: Dating is a marketplace of self-interested search. It is a transactional process—when someone dumps you, you respond in a way the person deserves.
Previously, Shauri might have agreed. Yet something had changed. She was suddenly less normal, less fearful, less driven by a need for justice. What Shauri wrote to me next is of great consequence.
The funny thing is I felt a huge sense of peace about it all. It was liberating. . . . I was no longer worried about his response or reaction to me or to what I told him. I chose to act rather than react. Because I did, it freed me and empowered me. By giving up control in this situation I gained control of the situation. I wasn’t worried about his response. I had been completely honest with him, and strangely it gave me confidence.
My purpose is to purify myself of ego and to serve others. Since I began working toward purpose, I have been set free from my problems, and they are resolving themselves. I feel filled with light and I know that as I continue in my purpose my light will grow brighter and brighter and I will lose myself in it.
Shauri’s experience illustrates some important points. First, it is normal to be reactive and to have negative emotions. We are all pulled in this direction. While most of us would claim that we hate the negative emotions we are feeling, we do not behave as if we do. In fact, we often choose to stay in our negative state. We seem to become addicted to the process of wallowing in “the problem.” It is natural and, in a strange way, it is comfortable to be in such pain. At such times, this victim role is our path of least resistance, so we willingly take it, perhaps because it is a role we know how to play.
Second, we can control our being state. We do not have to stay in the victim role. We can choose our own response. We do this by leaving the external world, where it can seem to us the problem is located. We go inside ourselves, not to the problem but to our imagined purpose. When we go inside to clarify our purpose, our perception alters dramatically.6 The original problem does not necessarily go away, but it becomes much less relevant. We outgrow the problem.
Third, changing our being state changes the world. As soon as Shauri started to clarify her purpose, her negative emotions turned positive. She felt more empowered and empowering. To become more empowering is to become a leader, someone who helps others empower themselves.
Why do we believe that Shauri made these three changes? Shortly after her change in outlook, we saw a change in her professional life. She brought initiative and creativity to her job. She was promoted, and her career took a sharp upward turn, a turn she had not previously imagined.
In her new job, she presented herself in a much more peaceful and confident way. The new Shauri was more valuable to her company than was the old Shauri. The new, purpose-driven Shauri was making the company more effective, and they needed her emerging leadership at a higher level.
In sharing the story about Shauri, we are making a lot of claims about the payoffs of finding higher purpose. Scientific research suggests that our claims are generalizable but not comprehensive. There are actually many more payoffs. In his book Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything,7 our colleague Vic Strecher reviews the scientific literature on some of the benefits of having a life purpose.
The research suggests that having an authentic higher purpose will do the following: add years to your life, reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, cut your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, increase sexual enjoyment, help you sleep better at night, reduce the likelihood of depression, increase your chances of staying drug or alcohol free after treatment, activate your natural killer cells and diminish your inflammatory cells, and increase your good cholesterol. It has also been found that higher purpose or prosocial motivation predicts persistence, performance, and productivity.8
People with a purpose in life stay more optimistic in the face of adversity. Research shows that optimism is often a self-fulfilling prophecy—your optimism about the future generates a stronger commitment to working to achieve the positive outcomes you are more optimistic about.9 For example, if you think you are going to live longer, you invest more in going to the gym, which makes you healthier, and you may actually live longer! A person with an authentic higher purpose in many ways functions above the norm or outside convention. The person accesses valuable life assets. The data suggest that we are designed by nature to transcend nature.
When Shauri embraced purpose, her perspective changed and she found new capacity, and she began to conduct herself more effectively. As the research suggests, she was more optimistic, she was more oriented to commitment and achievement, she behaved in new ways, she performed beyond expectations, and she drew new resources into her life.
She also began to lead other people. As you will see in this book, finding personal purpose often transforms a person, and they begin to lead. This transformation, as we will also see in this book, is true even for CEOs. When they finally discover purpose, their perspective changes, and they seek to create a purpose-driven organization.
The notion of a purpose-driven organization raises an interesting possibility. Is it possible to create a social system in which there is a culture of excellence? Is it possible to create an organization that regularly exceeds expectations because the personal interest and the collective interests are one? Is it possible to have a workforce that is so optimistic and committed that the organization exceeds financial expectations and holds together when others would begin to splinter?
The answers to all these questions are in the affirmative. In the chapters that follow, we will see numerous case studies that provide examples.
An organization benefits from having an authentic higher purpose in two main ways. First, an authentic purpose binds people together, forming a “moral glue” and inspiring employees. People are motivated to act in the collective interest of the organization rather than to pursue narrow self-interest. People do not cut corners ethically because they know that doing so is not consistent with the culture of the organization and that their fellow workers will not endorse them in doing so.
In an organization of higher purpose, employees expect one another to do the right thing. Employees work harder, do less to sabotage one another in competitive intraorganizational games, and are more likely to stay with the organization, meaning lower turnover of valued employees. As a result, the economic output of the organization increases. In one organization we worked with, the CEO told us about how higher purpose had changed the culture: “Now when they have a conflict, they just ask what I would say if I were there, and most of the time they know the answer. So I do not have to arbitrate disputes. People sort things out. There is no backstabbing where people come to me to complain about others.” The result is a strong focus and energy that flows toward the goal of exceeding customer expectations.
The claim that purpose-driven leaders are able to achieve these outcomes is supported by large-sample research. A survey of 20,000 employees across 25 industries suggests that people in positions of authority who have clarity of purpose and communicate it have great impact on the workforce. Employees of purpose-driven leaders are reportedly 70 percent more satisfied, 56 percent more engaged, and 100 percent more likely to stay with the organization.10
Second, an authentic organizational higher purpose helps to clarify the organization’s deepest intent to external stakeholders. This clarity reduces conflicts with those stakeholders, including public regulators, competitors, suppliers, and customers. Just think of the scandals involving systematic falsification of emissions data by Volkswagen, Toyota’s accidents in North America involving stuck gas pedals in its cars, and the huge fines and negative publicity that many financial institutions were subjected to in the aftermath of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis.
These incidents were very damaging to these organizations in a tangible economic sense. By contrast, Southwest Airlines, which has a much better reputation than most companies for an organizational higher purpose that attends to both employees and customers, has been able to do things other organizations cannot do.
An organizational higher purpose is neither charity nor a panacea for doing well. To do well, the organization needs all the other business capabilities: a core competence, a strategy tied to that core competence, a good product, the ability to execute plans, sound financial management, and operational excellence. Moreover, what we seek is an understanding of the intersection of higher purpose and business strategy, not some charitable cause distinct from the company’s business. Thus, the organization must stress operational and economic success while it embraces higher purpose. In fact, it is hard to imagine an organization being able to make the short-run sacrifices in pursuit of higher purpose unless it is also financially healthy in the long run.
An organization can embrace an authentic higher purpose, but that purpose has to also make economic sense in the overall business of the organization. A nice illustration of this is provided by an episode of Shark Tank, in which a farmer named Johnny Georges, who had invented a tepee that would cover trees that were being watered in the field in order to conserve water used in irrigation, was seeking funding from the sharks to grow the business. The product was called “tree T-PEE,” and it was an ingenious yet strikingly simple water and nutrient containment system.
Georges’s stated higher purpose was to conserve water in farming and to better serve farmers. The sharks asked him how much it cost to make each unit of the product and how much he was charging for it. They thought he was charging too little—the profit margin was too low. But he kept saying that these were farmers he was serving, and he did not want to gouge them with higher prices. Shark after shark turned down the request for funding because of the perceived lack of commercial viability and the seeming impossibility of scaling up the business with such low profit margins. Eventually, one shark, John Paul DeJoria, stepped up and provided funding, insisting, however, that the selling price would have to be raised to a level Georges was comfortable with but higher than what was currently being charged. The business went on to become successful. The day after the episode of Shark Tank aired, Georges’s inbox was flooded with more than 56,000 emails, and he sold thousands of tree T-PEEs that night. The product is now sold internationally, and Georges has a secured a deal with Home Depot.11
This example illustrates the importance of the word economics in the statement of corporate higher purpose. Pursuit of higher purpose is not charity. If you’re a manufacturer, you don’t need to give the product away. Having a profitable business does not conflict with the pursuit of higher purpose.
We now turn to the issue of imagination.