CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STEP 7 Connect the People to the Purpose
We flew to Atlanta to work with six people from a company that is trying to execute change and move into the future. When we work with companies, we try to introduce the basic concepts and tools from our work in positive organizational scholarship and the economics of higher purpose.
Often, we find the going tough because executives are suspicious of ideas that violate their conventional expectations. In Atlanta we had the opposite experience. The people immediately took in the ideas and extended them in creative ways. It was a joyful experience.
This willing reception came about because the people had previously lived through and benefited from a positive transformation. Their unconventional experience had already predisposed them to the positive and inclusive mind-set.
The company, Interface, makes flexible floor coverings including carpet tiles. In 1994 the CEO, Ray Anderson, had an unusual experience. Here is his account of what happened as he prepared to speak to a group of professionals:
Frankly, I didn’t have a vision, except “comply, comply, comply.” I sweated for three weeks over what to say to that group. Then, through what seemed like pure serendipity, somebody sent me a book, Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce. I read it, and it changed my life. It was an epiphany. I wasn’t halfway through it before the vision I sought became clear, along with a powerful sense of urgency to do something. . . . I agreed with his central thesis. . . . Business is the largest, wealthiest, most pervasive institution on Earth, and responsible for most of the damage. It must take the lead in directing the Earth away from collapse, and toward sustainability.60
As result of this experience, Anderson determined to maintain his business goals while also leading the world in industrial ecology (being friendly to the planet). He had gone through a paradigm shift. Acting on it required courageous leadership.
Everyone in the company believed that Anderson had lost his mind. When he gave his first public speech about his intention, the people outside the company agreed. Investors also seemed to agree: the stock price fell 40 percent in one day. The company entered a dark valley. But it nonetheless began to move forward, building the bridge as it walked on it.
Since that time, the company has grown into a billion-dollar operation that does business in 110 countries. It became one of the Forbes Most Admired Companies in America and one of the Forbes 100 Best Companies to Work For. One executive told us the Interface story in detail. He kept saying, with emphasis, “It was a miracle. I lived through it, and it was a miracle.”
One of the women present understood the concepts of emergence and self-organization and she responded: “I am not sure it was a miracle. We had a purpose, and we made connections. When you make connections, new things grow. You flourish.”
In her short statement, she captured the essence of why it is important to connect employees to the higher purpose of the organization. When the organization is connected to an authentic higher purpose, culture changes, and people empower themselves to do the right thing. As they move forward, they collectively learn to do what was not previously possible. The organization flourishes because the people go into accelerated collective and individual learning. Afterward, they sometimes lack the language to conceptualize what took place.
While they may lack the language, they do have the memory. When they hear the concepts related to organizational higher purpose and positive organizing, they are able to extend and apply the concepts. This is why the Interface session was so generative. People who have experienced higher purpose and positive organizing are more prepared to accept the concepts associated with creating positive organizations. They are anxious to increase collaboration.
As the Interface example suggests, a major challenge is getting the people at the lower levels to envision and understand the highest purpose, getting them, the agents, to act like Ray Anderson, the principal. In the last chapter, we examined the process of enrolling midlevel managers into higher purpose. Few companies do this. In this chapter, we examine the process of bringing the entire workforce, particularly first-line people, to higher purpose. Fewer companies do this. We begin with the insights of a man who has spent his life shrink-wrapping corporate speak.
Shrink-Wrapping Corporate Speak
Jim Haudan is the chairman of Root Inc., a consulting firm that focuses on purpose and engagement. Root has gifted artists who take 300-page strategic plans and turn them into a few pictures. This is a process of massive simplification. The people at Root use the pictures to engage people in authentic discussions that become both interesting and generative.
Jim says that many executives think they are imbuing the organization with purpose when they formulate and communicate a corporate strategy. Typically, brilliant people at the top spend months analyzing and reducing complexity. Then they formulate a plan. Members of the senior team, with help from corporate communications, make presentations of the strategy to people at lower levels. But not much happens; the emphasis is on presentation.
The frustrated executives think, “If the people could see what we see, they would behave differently.” This is actually a sound assumption—they would behave differently. The unfortunate truth is that the people do not see what the executives see because executives cannot communicate what they see. What they see is a right-brained vision. What they communicate, however, is a left-brained set of words. The words lack authentic passion and the clinical communication of strategy leaves people cold.
Jim says that moving communication from the linear left brain to the visual right brain reduces vast amounts of complexity. The process of visualization helps people discover, simplify, and communicate the purpose. “When they have a simple visual they begin to see the purpose, they show childlike zeal, they open up and they are willing to learn.”
Jim tells the story of a major company that had not met its financial plan for several years. It was in the process of transforming from a carbonated soft drink company to a total beverage company. Everything at every level was going to have to change. For example, the unionized truck drivers would have to become salespeople. It was a huge shift in expectations.
Jim ran a meeting that included a truck driver named Bob. Bob’s every other word seemed to begin with F. From the first moment, Bob made it clear that he was not going to cooperate. Jim put up a simple visual that reduced pages of strategy and showed how the business was going to work. As people examined it, Bob walked over. He suddenly volunteered the information that 55 percent of what was on the truck each day came back. He pointed out that 40 percent of the invoices were wrong. He began to scream about the incompetence of management and how it was going to cost everyone their jobs.
Then one of Bob’s peers interrupted him and explained that the entire process was undermined by the fact that every day there was a stack of information sheets that Bob threw in the garbage. In fact, he had just done that very thing. Bob stood in stunned silence. Then he said, “Give me back those sheets.”
In a matter of minutes, Bob, the unreachable resister, discovered how what he was doing was affecting the business, and that discovery changed his attitude. Bob was transformed and became an engaged employee. The process was extended to 32,000 people, and the entire company transformed.
Jim told us that when transformative learning takes place at the bottom of an organization, it loops back to the top of the organization. When executives see radical change at the bottom, it challenges their existing assumptions. Often the conventional mind-set crumbles, and the positive mind-set emerges. Executives suddenly see resources they never knew existed.
In this case, the CEO and his team were “dumbfounded” when they discovered the untapped potential in their people. The CEO said, “You know, we’ve spent the last 10 years trying to teach them how to do a better job, assuming they would improve the business. But we never thought to share the business with them and let them take control of improving it.”
They had never thought to do that because the idea is counterintuitive. A woman from HR, who was in charge of the process and witnessed the meetings, also explained the executive transformation. She said, “It was welcome to the church.” By this she meant that the senior executives experienced a conversion, a shift from the conventional mind-set to the positive, inclusive mind-set. It was the same transformation we have seen throughout this book.
Sounding like the above woman from Interface, who understands the power of connections in the emergent process, she went on to say, “We pigeonholed folks according to our perception of their limitations. They had no way to be engaged because we were preventing it. Then, after years, we clarified the purpose, and we watched them connect and come alive. They were full of potential. We had resources in the organization that we could not see and that we had never before tapped.”
We could extend the woman’s assertion to almost all large organizations. Executives look down at the hierarchy and see many people who bring only their bodies to work. Given what they see, these executives make an assumption that only partially reflects reality. They come to believe that the people in the organization are agents who seek to minimize their personal costs, people who will not engage and bring their discretionary energy to work.
When executives act on their assumptions, they create organizations that are based on the notion of transactional exchange. They seek to control people by designing systems of external rewards and punishments. “We will give you money and other rewards, and you will do what is in your job description.”
This basic assumption turns people into robots, yet people do not want to be robots. Seeing no other alternative, they disengage, and a few put their creative energy into disrupting the organization. They become like Bob the truck driver, who threw away his forms. When executives witness this kind of disruption, they make another flawed but comfortable assumption: “The fault is in the people.”
The inclusive, or positive, mental model is more complex than the conventional mental model. It recognizes that the dynamics we’ve described exist, but it does not put the fault in the people. It does not put the fault anywhere. Instead, it focuses on the purpose and on the strengths of the people and on the fact that, under the right circumstances, they can become genuinely committed and connected and willing to go the extra mile.
Jim told us that organizations need leaders who can “shrink-wrap” the complexity of “corporate speak” and give the people a picture or a metaphor that allows them to see and understand the whole system in a simple way. When people at any level come to understand the whole system, they become whole people who begin to connect to other whole people. The social network becomes a system of positive energy, learning, and adaptation. When this happens, reality challenges conventional theory. Executives begin to see that their organizations are filled with resources they could not previously see. Jim’s approach of simplifying and visualizing is a practical way to connect people to the higher purpose as well as to the strategy of the organization.
Reaching Everyone
Creating a purpose-driven organization is a great challenge. It requires understanding and implementing many principles that are counterintuitive. It means seeing the principal–agent problem as the principal–agent opportunity. It means believing that people want to contribute. It means taking the responsibility to extend this transformation all the way to the bottom of the organization.
In chapter 12 we examined the evolution of KPMG and how the firm turned its midlevel managers into purpose-driven leaders.61 The story continues as KPMG did something that few organizations ever do. It reached everyone.
Bruce and John saw the need for a bottom-up effort. People needed to see their own purpose and how that purpose can get realized at work. They encouraged people to share their own accounts of how they were currently making a difference. This effort evolved into a remarkable program called the 10,000 Stories Challenge.
The program gave the 27,000 employees access to a digital program and invited them to create posters. In the process, it asked them to answer the question “What do you do at KPMG?” It then asked them to write a headline such as “I Combat Terrorism.”
For example, under the headline “I Combat Terrorism” are statements such as “KPMG helps scores of financial institutions prevent money laundering, keeping financial resources out of the hands of terrorists and criminals.” Under the statement is a picture of the author. Finally, the poster reads; “Inspire Confidence. Empower Change.”
In June the company announced that if 10,000 posters were submitted by Thanksgiving, it would add two extra days to the Christmas break. For the leadership of an accounting firm, this was a risky undertaking. As is almost always the case in initiating a positive culture, many people believed the entire process would be seen as “corny,” no one would respond, and the leaders would be left embarrassed. The leaders spent considerable time debating about moving forward.
Nearly all leaders who desire to create a positive culture experience genuine fear. They need courage to overcome that fear, as we have seen in earlier chapters. When they succeed in such an effort, they are often euphoric.
The program at KPMG produced a shocking outcome: The 10,000 stories were produced in a month, and the people earned their two days off. Not only that, but the process went viral. Although the reward was already earned, the posters continued to appear: 27,000 people submitted 42,000 posters (some people submitted multiple times, and teams submitted as well as individuals). It turned out that the people of KPMG had a pent up appetite for purpose and meaning. The company had found a brilliant way to help the people connect the collective purpose and their individual purpose.
Did all the work on purpose matter, and did it affect performance? The company’s surveys showed that pride increased, engagement scores went to record levels, good-place-to-work scores jumped from 82 percent to 89 percent. KPMG climbed 17 places in Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For list, making KPMG the highest-ranked firm of the Big Four. It saw its turnover go down dramatically, generating advantages in terms of continuity, recruiting, training, and comprehensive savings. While we cannot show a causal link, we can note that the firm had an outstanding financial year and also achieved the highest growth rate of the Big Four accounting firms.
A Warning
We’ve seen the work by Jim Haudan in the beverage company and by executives at KPMG that provide brilliant examples of approaches for taking purpose to the bottom of the organization. You might yearn for tools that you could implement with minimal reflection and minimal risk.
We wish to warn you that in nearly every case in this book we have learned of leaders having to enter uncertainty and learn how to create a purpose-driven organization. Human systems are not technical systems; they are complex, living systems, as are all individual human beings and collections of human beings.
When the connections between the parts of a system elevate in quality, new collective properties emerge. When an individual like Shauri finds her personal higher purpose, she integrates her heart and mind, and a new, more integrated and authentic self-emerges. Sharui then becomes a leader. When a leader invites people to a higher purpose and they accept, the quality of connections in the network changes and new properties emerge.
The process is not linear. The process is not controllable. Initiating the process requires both the inviter and the invited to engage in a journey of learning from experience. The journey seems to contradict many assumptions that hold in the conventional mind-set. To create a purpose-driven organization, you need the courage to learn while stimulating learning as it is happening in real time.
Learning While Stimulating Learning
The field of positive organizational scholarship was born at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.62 Ross has spawned much research on how to create organizations of higher purpose, organizations where people flourish in positive cultures and exceed expectations.
Amy Byron-Oilar, who was hired as chief people officer (head of HR) at Ross, was exposed to such ideas and determined to apply some of the research by building a positive work community. Amy and the dean of the school agreed that the principles of positive organizing should be applied inside the school.
Years later, we talked with Amy about the initiatives that were launched. The process started with two efforts in 2011, and the number increased every year. Yet Amy pointed out that the process was not so linear or systematic. What emerged was not the result of a conventional master plan. She said that what was done in subsequent years “could not be imagined in the previous years.” The process was an emergent one that required purpose, courage, and learning.
Consider this unusual statement: “I wanted a plan. I tried to write a plan . . . over and over. That’s what we’re taught. Figure out where you are. Determine where you need to be. Chart your path. Execute, and, voilà, success! It was part of my personal journey to let that thinking go.”
In Amy’s first year, she encountered high levels of staff dissatisfaction. So in 2011, at the suggestion of the dean, she established a staff involvement group with representatives from all areas of the school. This effort eventually gave rise in 2012 to a community learning group inspired by faculty research on the importance of learning in creating positive cultures. That group spawned mini-conferences that explored best practices and resulted in lists of “tips, tricks and new great stuff.” That in turn spawned better staff meetings, a staff lounge, and the return of a popular past practice called Green Clean, in which all members of the workforce were invited to participate in a day for deep cleaning the buildings.
In 2013 faculty and staff members worked with a Zingerman’s training group (see chapter 11) to create a future vision. This seemingly small act clarified purpose and legitimized creating a positive future, and it empowered people. Suddenly people felt that they could create new initiatives.
One initiative began when a few people were trained and certified in teaching a program on crucial conversations. Then 150 members of the staff were trained. The staff had long complained of a lack of respect from faculty, and in one discussion, someone proposed that the solution might be for staff to increase their own respect for faculty. This led to a classroom observation program where staff could sit in on classes and see both faculty and students at their best. And it led to a comprehensive onboarding process to expose new employees to every aspect of life in the school.
In 2014 a campus-wide effort toward “shared services” affected the staff of the business school. Many staff members were interviewed, and it became clear that they did not feel connected to one another or to the school. This led to a networking effort including bimonthly community-building exercises.
Another initiative launched a selection boot camp that was run by staff to help other staff hire people more likely to contribute to the positive vision. An initiative put in place an annual health rally, and another one redesigned the performance appraisal tool to foster positive knowledge, skills, and abilities.
In 2015 HR developed specific new modules for the onboarding process. Every other month the department selected a staff member and profiled the person to the entire school. With the new shared services program in place, many people were suddenly sharing workspaces, and this turned out to be as likely to generate conflict as it did cooperation. HR put in place a program to help people cooperate. It created a video that captured what it means to create and live in a positive community.
HR also developed a related program on knowledge and practice sharing. Faculty members published a new edited book on developing positive leadership, and the department invited individual faculty authors to teach various chapters to the staff.
HR recruited staff members to help share the positive vision with new staff by speaking about their own positive stories and experiences. Finally, it created a vision statement that contained many aspirations such as “Operate with the positive end in mind” and “See the good in others.” It turned these aspirations into an assessment tool so people could analyze themselves individually or collectively and explore avenues for their improvement. With all these efforts, the department intended to convert everybody in the organization into purpose-driven leaders in a way that had not been experienced before.
In 2016 we met with Amy again. She shared with us the results of a recent employee engagement survey. The gains were large, and changes on 17 indicators were statistically significant. The producers of the report said they had never before seen a shift of such magnitude.
As Amy reflected on this achievement, she returned to the notion of emergence. She said, “Someone recently suggested that we create a video about the faculty like the one we did about the staff. Two years ago it would have been impossible to have that idea. Every time we do something, it creates new possibilities. The process keeps expanding; we are learning our way forward.”
We asked Amy about the impact of the achievement on her. She said, “Early on, I attended an executive education course on positive leadership given by our faculty. One of them taught me to ask, ‘What would you do if you had 2 percent more courage?’ Over and over, I have asked that question because building a positive work community requires courage. The impact on me has been very real. I am amazed, and my thinking has expanded immeasurably. I can do things now that would have been impossible at the start.”
Amy has learned how to create a purpose-driven, positive organization inside a business school by creating a culture that invites everyone to commit to a higher purpose. Creating a purpose-driven organization required leadership, the courage to embrace a purpose, and the ability to involve the top, the middle, and the bottom levels of the organization.
Summary
It is not enough for an organization to simply discover an authentic higher purpose. The organization has to connect the purpose to the people and their emotions. Both middle managers (chapter 12) and first-line employees have to take ownership of the purpose and be energized by it. Connecting the purpose to the people requires leaders to act in ways that contradict their basic assumptions about how they should behave in organizations.
Some leaders learn to do this. They transcend convention and provide leadership we do not expect to see. They communicate an inspiring and authentic vision in ways that help people find their purpose and the organization’s purpose. Purpose-driven leaders understand the importance of doing this, for everyone including those at the bottom of the organization. Thus, the seventh counterintuitive step in creating a purpose-driven organization is to discover the possibility of connecting first-line people to the higher purpose of the organization. In other words, the seventh step is to connect the people to the purpose.
Getting Started: Tools and Exercises
Hold a discussion and structure it as follows:
Phase 1. Have everyone read the chapter.
Phase 2. Have everyone write answers to these questions:
What do you understand about purpose, connections, and emergence?
What key principles can we derive from Jim Haudan’s work at the beverage company?
What key principles can we derive from the implementation of higher purpose at KPMG?
What key principles can we derive from Amy’s journey at the business school?
Phase 3. Discuss the answers and review the list of guidelines for engaging middle managers that you created in chapter 12. Now jointly create a list of guidelines for engaging all the people.