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 issues 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 jobs 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.
We were intrigued by this unusual commitment to learning and growth. How did Zingerman’s integrate its higher purpose into its business operations? Ari said that one of the things the company does consistently is to emphasize the positives and develop in each of its employees a very proactive and growth-oriented outlook on life. Cultivating positivity in employees serves the higher purpose of delighting customers, and the delight of customers loops back to the employees.
Ari spoke of numerous unusual management practices that build trust, promote growth, and facilitate collaboration. For example, the company practices open-book finance: The company opens its books to trainees and teaches them how to run Zingerman’s. The employees have to make all the decisions that Ari and other senior executives make routinely—procurement, menu determination, pricing, hiring, and so on. The training program serves two important purposes: First, it teaches employees how to run the business and prepares them to become entrepreneurs. Second, it engenders trust and collaboration.
When asked why he engages in this and so many other unusual practices, Ari answered, “Let me explain to you how many companies are run, and you’ll understand why we don’t behave like that. Imagine that you have a football team and you have 11 players on offense, each very skilled in playing his position. But while 6 of the players are individually skilled, they don’t really understand the larger game. So you might have a wide receiver with great hands and speed but who catches a pass and then hands the ball over to the defensive back—an intentional fumble—because he wants to be a “nice guy” who wants to “share.” And you might have 4 players who are individually skilled and know the game but could not care less about the outcome. So you are left with one player—say the quarterback—who is individually skilled, knows the game, and actually cares about winning. Now, no one in his right mind would ever field a football team like that, right? But that’s how many companies are run. We don’t do that here.”
Ari and Paul clearly march to a different drummer. In 2006 Zingerman’s produced a vision written from the perspective of the company in 2020. In it we find many statements regarding learning and growth. Here is a small sample:
We feel to express ourselves and tap into our deepest creative potential. We believe in what we are doing and integrate our sense of purpose into who we are.
We must be profitable in order to survive but our primary purpose is to contribute to a better life for everyone we touch. We do this by providing meaningful work, dignified employment, beneficial goods and services, and relationships of trust and caring that are at the foundations of a healthy community.
Everyone who comes in contact with our organization—employees, customers, and suppliers, people asking for donations, journalists and reporters, public officials—leaves with the perception that we exist in order to be of service.
People come from all over the world to learn about almost everything we do.
We are inventing and rediscovering ways to work, constantly teaching them within and outside Zingerman’s. We teach people to learn so they learn to teach. Many employees have come to work here especially to further their education, be it about food, people, or organizational development.
When employees move on it is with a sense of self-confidence and with experiences they can use to better the next organization they are a part of.
Education is one of our passions. The more we teach, the more we learn. The more we teach, the more customers and staff are drawn to visit and shop with us. The more we teach and learn together, the more effectively we connect with each other, strengthen our culture, and improve the lives of everyone we interact with. We thrive on sharing information lavishly.58
As observers of the company, we can attest that the vision for 2020 has been mostly accomplished as we write in 2019.
At the end of our interview, Ari invited us to order dinner and to feel free to speak to any of the employees, which we did. Each employee radiated with positive energy. One young lady said that working at Zingerman’s had changed her life. It had helped her create a much more positive relationship with her daughter and her mother. A young man, a student at the University of Michigan, was working at Zingerman’s during the summer. He hoped to someday start his own business and expressed gratitude for the company. Both raved about their experience. Their work was meaningful, they were learning and growing, they were part of a collaborative whole, and the company was flourishing.
Summary
We learn from previous experience to make the standard principal–agent assumption that employees are people who work for monetary incentives and promotions. We do not see much of a role for learning and growth as things that agents want in this incentive system. But stimulation, learning, and growth are one basic need, which purpose-driven leaders understand and focus on. The learning has value in itself, but it also produces benefits. In purpose-driven organizations like Zingerman’s, unusual practices that revolve around growth and learning end up producing trust, collaboration, and higher performance, which reduce the contracting frictions in the principal–agent model. Thus, the fifth step in creating a purpose-driven organization is to create a purpose-driven culture that stimulates leaning.
Getting Started: Tools and Exercises
Hold a discussion and structure it as follows:
Phase 1. Have everyone read the chapter.
Phase 2. Give everyone a list of the seven points in the Zingerman’s vision as listed on page 141.
Phase 3. Have each person take a personal perspective and rank the seven planks in terms of desirability. Combine everyone’s scores.
Phase 4. Starting with the most highly ranked plank, discuss the extent to which it reflects the culture of your organization.
Phase 5. Add any new planks that emerge from your discussion.
Phase 6. Make a list of actions that your organization could take that would create a purpose-driven culture focused on learning and growth.