TALKING HEADS
T
Throwing a spanner in the purpose works
T
Bruce Daisley
Purpose needs to be
more than a tokenistic
endeavour if it’s really
going to stick.
hese days, there’s a lot of talk
a b o u t o rg a n i s a t i o n a l
purpose. I accept that it
s o u n d s p owe r f u l a n d
motivating. But hang on a minute. What
if one of the outcomes of something
becoming well known is i t s
misappropriation by the baddies?
For example, there is some evidence
that discussions about emotional
intelligence (EQ) have particularly
benefited psychopaths. Books on EQ
give people with a personality disorder a
clear pattern of behaviour that they can
emulate in order to get on in life.
Could talking too much about
organisational purpose give bad firms
the vernacular to look progressive?
Of course, there’s good evidence
for the power of purpose. Workplace
psychologist and Wharton School
professor Adam Grant earned his
status as the ‘wizard of the workplace’
by researching the impact of purpose
on people. He argues that where people
gain a visceral sense of why they’re
doing something, it has a demonstrable
positive influence. For example, he
showed that a five-minute meeting
with beneficiaries motivated university
fundraisers to increase their weekly
productivity by 400%.
The learning from this has been
adapted to all our jobs. It’s why we’re
increasingly implored to explain why
“Purpose needs
to feel personal,
emotional and vivid
— which makes it
very hard to run at
scale across
a company”
we do what we do. If we can connect
(ourselves and our people) with the why
— the purpose — motivation will follow.
The challenge is that we then find
ourselves back at our jobs. Real events
take over. Emails fly around; meetings
clog up the week. The ‘purpose’ we
wanted to cascade to our teams seems
vague and distant.
At some point, business leaders recall
that they need to connect their team
with their purpose. The boss allocates
someone to cover off the purpose stuff.
Soon enough the head of HR, or that
talented new recruit in marketing, has
made a short video. It looks okay, their
kids liked it. It’s the story of someone,
a real person, using the product, or
benefiting from the money they make
from it, surrounded by their tight-knit
(ethnically balanced) group of friends. To
support the Purpose Video, photographs
and mission statements are stuck up on
walls in the main meeting spaces.
And then it doesn’t achieve anything.
People still look drained; staff turnover
remains ahead of the market. People
start muttering “the video wasn’t
that good”.
Because purpose doesn’t work
like that. Purpose isn’t contained in an
email that we scroll through; it’s what
motivates some of us to work evenings
to pay our way through college, or to
fundraise for people with whom we’ve
made an emotional connection.
Maybe it makes me subversive to
throw a spanner in the purpose works.
But I’m actually looking at what the
research says. Time and time again,
it warns that anodyne sloganeering is
exactly the sort of purpose initiative that
fails. Purpose needs to feel personal,
emotional and vivid — which makes it very
hard to run at scale across a company.
The lesson for all of us is that purpose
is immensely powerful when it’s
individual or delivered at a team level.
Empowering teams to develop and
foster their own cultures is a crucial way
of bringing this to life.
Bruce Daisley is the former EMEA
vice-president of Twitter and author of
The Joy of Work.
February – May 2020 // 45