What’s a company’s purpose? Too often it has been hijacked by one extreme or the other claiming it’s either the unbridled pursuit of profit on behalf of shareholders or it’s anything but profit. I also take issue with the idea that purpose is enshrined in a company’s mission statement.
In my new book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies, I explore how some leaders embrace “deep purpose” as a generative force that can be a catalyst to achieve both impressive economic results and positive social impact. The book demonstrates how purpose-driven business leaders find success by focusing on delivering not only for their shareholders and customers but also for their employees, communities, and the environment.
In the video below, I speak with Deepak Chopra, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, about why it’s important for businesses to contemplate having a purpose the way individuals might do so. Aiming for a higher ideal elevates our thinking and expands our ambition that in turn allows us to imagine the possibility of doing things that might otherwise have felt overwhelming. Leaders need to not only find ways for employees to discover their purpose in life but to then find a connection between our personal life purpose with the purpose of the organization where we work.
The great resignation under way over the past year has shown us that employees today expect more out of their jobs. No longer are they willing to compartmentalize their work as separate from the rest of their lives. And so, it is incumbent upon leaders to find ways to create a positive work context in which employees not only feel inspired but also feel there is a way for them to live their life purpose through their work.
“The purpose of any organization or business is to improve the quality of life, period,” Chopra says. “Focus on the quality of life for your employees because if your employees are happy, then your customers are going to be happy. If your customers are happy, then your investors are going to be happy. So start with your employees first, and then everything else will fall into place.”
Book Excerpt
Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies
Ranjay Gulati
Chapter 6: Be Yourself, Be Candid, Be Kind
Generations of scholars have seen culture as a powerful control system within organizations, a means of subduing individuality and ensuring conformity. Culture offers an inexpensive and informal way of regulating behavior that is all the more effective because it occurs inside the minds of employees and relies on peer pressure as a mechanism.
“When we care about those with whom we work and have a common set of expectations,” one scholarly article observes, “we are ‘under control’ whenever we are in their presence. If we want to be accepted, we try to live up to their expectations.”
In companies with strong cultures, norms of behavior are pronounced and widely accepted without constant oversight on the part of managers. Individuals voluntarily regulate themselves, refraining from behaviors that clash with the culture.
Over the past few decades, many corporate leaders have sought to build strong cultures that define their organizations for stakeholders. In addition, they’ve paid attention to the specific content of their cultures, shaping them to inculcate specific behaviors relevant to strategic execution. Eager to support goals like innovation, quality, growth, and excellence in customer service, companies like Southwest and IBM became famous for their finely tuned cultures, which many took as the key to their business success.
More recently, the limitations of “strong” cultures have come into focus. As important as conformity is, leaders and companies have recognized that organizational performance hinges on the ability of employees to project individuality in the workplace, at least to some extent. Organizations understand that they must become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive places, and that they must reach out to people as individuals of different backgrounds, engage with them on their terms, and make space for them. In addition, organizations want all workers to feel engaged and highly motivated, and they want those workers to muster creativity and diverse perspectives to solve problems. If workers have latitude to express themselves, they’ll feel more inspired and do better work—not because of a boss dangling a carrot or leveling a stick, but because they themselves feel an internal desire to excel.
The question, though, is how to inject more individuality into the workplace without inviting chaos. Some companies and leaders have tried to graft individuality and related values like authenticity, creativity, and diversity/inclusivity onto their existing, conformist cultures. The results are not terribly compelling. These organizational cultures seem mismatched and contradictory—like a car whose front door has been replaced with one of a different color. But many other companies haven’t even tried to accommodate more individuality. One study of companies’ formal statements about their cultures reveals that most don’t proclaim concepts related to individuality as core values. Only 22 percent listed “diversity” as an official value, only 11 percent listed “creativity,” only 8 percent listed “boldness,” and only 3 percent listed “authenticity.”
Rather than modifying an old-fashioned, conformist culture, the deep purpose leaders I studied try to reinvent their organizational cultures more fully as bastions of individuality. They aren’t going to the opposite extreme, allowing their organizations to become individualistic free-for-alls in which anything goes in the name of “being yourself.” Rather, they clear space for individuality alongside conformity. They even adopt a somewhat paradoxical stance, seeking to generate collective alignment and ensure a measure of conformity through individuality. They develop inclusive cultures that encourage individuals to contribute in their own, unique ways to the common purpose, within certain bounds defined by leaders and with the expectation that individuals will meet rigorous performance expectations. These cultures include a strong emphasis on allyship and a sense that everyone should support their teammates in their personal development, no matter who they are or what their background.
The Boston-based women’s technology company Ovia Health is the leading digital health platform in the United States for women and families, with some fourteen million women using its mobile apps to improve their and their children’s health outcomes. Ovia seeks to improve poor maternal health outcomes, particularly among women and children of color, adopting as its existential intent the provision of “equal care, longitudinal support, lifesaving interventions” to “every woman, parent, and child” so that they can enjoy “a healthy, happy family.” In building its culture, the firm focuses squarely on recognizing and affirming employees’ individuality. One of Ovia’s core values is “Be yourself, be candid, be kind.” Elaborating on this, an internal company document related that “We are a team of agile, imaginative and analytical individuals.”
Ovia’s CEO, Paris Wallace, grew up on government assistance in California’s Marin County, one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. Raised by a mother who was single and disabled, he managed to gain admission to elite local schools and to attend on scholarship. “It was always very clear that I was different,” Wallace told me, not just because his family was poor but because he was also one of the few Black students. Talk to Wallace for more than a few minutes, and you realize that he’s unusually comfortable in his difference and unabashed about expressing his individuality. He speaks passionately and directly, unafraid to let his personality shine and to make himself vulnerable.
But Wallace wants everyone in his company to feel and behave like this. As he recognizes, it’s very difficult for employees to engage fully with an organizational purpose—or, frankly, with anything related to their jobs—if they’re holding back important parts of their identities or personalities. “Who are those people who can’t wait to leave work every day, who are leaving right at five p.m.? And why are they leaving? To be someone else, right? That’s the only answer. If you’ve been pretending not to be gay all day or changing your accent, then when five p.m. comes, you’re out of there.”
Wallace knows he can’t simply model individuality at work—he must build it into the culture. As a result, Ovia espouses individualism at every turn, starting with recruiting. “We’re very clear that in an interview, and just in general, one of our core beliefs is be yourself,” Wallace says. Relatedly, the company places a strong emphasis on inclusivity. As COO Molly Howard notes, interviewers ask every prospective hire about their gender identification and the pronouns they use. “That question says from the beginning that we choose to value our employees as individuals.”
In daily meetings and communications, leaders and coworkers promote the value of diverse opinions and the notion that every employee has a stake in the organization. They also draw people out, so that they can feel accepted and their coworkers can get to know them more deeply. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company ended every meeting by inviting participants to discuss “moments of joy” in their lives. Some employees discussed the small daily pleasures that made life worth living, while others took the opportunity to divulge very personal information. In one case, a female employee shocked her colleagues by relating that she had breast cancer and had been having treatments for months. On that particular day, her oncologist had told her that her cancer was in remission. That was her moment of joy.
Ovia encourages people not just to bring their personal lives into work, but to share their opinions about substantive business issues. Wallace explains that the company operates as a meritocracy, with leaders publicly acknowledging that they don’t have all the answers and that employees often are better equipped to come up with answers to pressing questions.
“It’s really about saying, ‘I care about what you’re interested in and you can help set the direction of this company and you’re contributing to what we’re about and what we’re doing and where we’re going and really able to make a meaningful contribution, and I’m interested in your diverse thoughts and backgrounds and helping us get there.’” The company also provides employee-led online forums that allow people to express and pursue their unique passions and interests—book clubs, cooking clubs, a skincare group, and the like. And it holds “innovation days” during which employees can pursue their own work-related projects.
DEEP PURPOSE. Copyright © 2022 by Ranjay Gulati Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
[Image: iStockphoto/nortonrsx]