Winning the purpose battle

Building your purpose into how you do business means a reassessment of your operations at all levels. In practice, purpose rollouts often focus on the formulation and announcement of the new purpose, and any realignment required at the strategic level. Below the executive suite is where it gets messy, and where the attention of the organisation often starts to waver.

But famously, for the want of a nail the battle can be lost. Your purpose has to reflect the experience of everyone who comes into contact with your organisation: every instance where that is not the case eats away at the engagement of your customers, shareholders and employees, and creates the risk of inefficiencies and lost value.

It’s a complex task, and every organisation will face a different set of challenges. Here are some of the general principles that will help you to win the battle to realise your purpose.

Value what is valuable to you

Reward systems are rightly the focus of many purpose rollouts. As a marker of the value an organisation places on skills, experience and behaviours, they are hard to beat. Conditions of employment (flexible working, security of tenure, facilities) are also important signals. However, pay and conditions are too often ignored further down the organisational structure.

Pay structures and working conditions more than a couple of levels below the executive suite are often driven by a blanket benchmark of the prevailing market practices. This can lead to your reward reflecting the value placed on certain work by society at large rather than its value to your organisation.

If your organisation is absolutely reliant on hygiene to achieve its purpose, for example, then should you be employing your cleaning staff on casual contracts, paying them minimum wage or making them use separate entrances and facilities from other staff? Or if your purpose is to help your customers be smart with their money, but you incentivise salespeople to push inappropriate products, what does that say to them, to the rest of your employees, and to your customers?

Maintain the challenge

Most purpose programmes allow for nuance and are flexible enough for line managers to reflect purpose-aligned performance across their teams. But for that to work, you also need to challenge your line managers to recognise the real value of their team members’ contributions. The employee who does the tedious slog of everyday process checks may well be contributing as much as or more than the one driving your latest high-profile reporting efficiency project.

What’s more, the priority of that work will shift over time as needs and circumstances change – today, the process check may be critical; next year the efficiency project may come into its own. Identifying these shifting contributions can help you create a responsive team that is eager to find opportunities and escalate issues that could contribute to the larger whole.

Build line management strength

Tone from the top is absolutely important. For most of your people, however, the ‘top’ they look to most is not the CEO but their own boss.

At the team level, leaders don’t have the luxury of remoteness from those who look to them for leadership. They are often working at close quarters with their teams over long periods of time. This makes the dividing line between their personal and professional personas much less defined.

At the same time, line leaders are far more likely to have been promoted on the basis of their technical or specialist skills rather than management skills, and to have had less invested in their leadership development.

Promoting, developing, monitoring and rewarding leadership skills at the line level is therefore all the more critical – and often where organisations fail. Aligning to a purpose usually means that the ceiling for promoting to incompetence gets lower, as technical skills are deprioritised in favour of leadership skills.

Collaboration is king

Being purpose-led means prioritising a problem-solving mindset, which means collaboration. In practice, this means that fiefdoms built on expertise may be eroded or even broken down in pursuit of the higher purpose. There is obvious potential for resistance to this, and leaders throughout the hierarchy need to have clear KPIs around collaboration at their own level and below.

Collaboration can be particularly tricky (but also often particularly productive) between parts of the business that are most different. Teams such as finance and HR, or engineering and community relations, often have very different cultures and ways of operating. Everyone may come to the task with all the best intentions of achieving the common goal, but with unspoken assumptions about the best (the only!) way to do so. These interpersonal dynamics should be addressed from the start by equipping teams to identify the different operating styles, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Support your change agents

You cannot expect all your employees to have the time, ability and willingness to become deep collaborators. There will also be functions where you need a focus on the core capabilities without the distractions of the broader view.

Identifying roles that can act as change agents can help. Look for people who have the skills to be able to act as ‘glue’ between functional experts. These people will need to challenge entrenched behaviours, often when they have no direct authority or senior position in the existing hierarchy. For them to achieve what is needed, they need strong sponsorship from senior levels and their mandate needs to be clearly communicated.