The Real Teal: Does defining a purpose really have a purpose?
The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky… I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it’s not just divinely assigned
– Michael J. Fox
The Teal approach encourages companies to work from a clearly defined evolutionary purpose, which sounds esoteric, airy-fairy and vaguely soviet. But stick with me, as in reality, it can actually serve a useful, for lack of a better word, purpose when done correctly.
We all want our companies to be financially successful, but not at all costs and not in spite of a broader set of goals that people can feel good about. For example, does it feel great working for a company that makes life-saving drugs for kids and in pursuit of a shareholder-driven strategy, the company decides to drive up the cost of those medicines to unaffordable levels? Probably not.
In fact, we have watched for nearly 40 years how shareholder-driven, bottom-line management disconnects workers from the companies they work for and their own personal values. The solution initially was to turn employees into shareholders, through stock and option awards, so that they could (along with the C-suite) watch their retirement accounts grow with the company share price. But the various market bubbles of the last 30 years have clued people into the fact that stock prices can go down as well as up, so its power to motivate isn’t as great as it used to be.
How about slogans, visions and values, and the ever present mission statement? Surely these get the job done, particularly if you get them printed on a mouse pad or stress ball! We have all grown very cynical about these things, particularly when they are subject to change every few years depending on the need of a CEO to demonstrate that they are shaking things up.
And therein lies the weakness in a lot of those traditional approaches to defining a company’s purpose — they don’t typically work, because the purpose is driven from the top down and not from the bottom up. Also, in many cases, these slogans are about the company being great at something, irrespective of it being a good company while it seeks to achieve that greatness.
An effective purpose should be simple enough to state but is usually much more apparent in how a company conducts itself. It should reflect the what, but also the how. It should support the needs and aspirations of all of the various stakeholders: employees, customers and shareholders in a way that truly respects and values each group. It means that a company should avoid bottom-feeding on its way to achieving a bottom-line result.
This is not an easy thing for a organisation to articulate and it is even harder to accomplish in practice, but one thing that usually differentiates Teal companies from non-Teal companies is that the discussion about purpose is rarely limited to the upper echelons of management. For it to work in practice means that companies and employees must invest the time in discussing, debating and agreeing how their day-to-day activities fall in line with the agreed purpose.
So does this mean that every morning when an employee at a Teal company wakes up they shout out their company’s purpose like a mantra to start their day? Not really. But it does mean that they understand what their company is all about and how they and others contribute to it achieving that purpose. It should therefore encourage them to take an interest beyond their immediate area of influence and engage more broadly in helping the organisation achieve its aims.
Of the three main pillars of Teal — self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose — purpose is probably the hardest one to achieve consistently and comprehensively. Companies still have to compete with a variety of other factors that influence people’s motivation to work at a particular firm: compensation, work environment, challenge and flexibility to name a few. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try. In my experience, an effective purpose can be very useful and if you can get it right, it can have significant benefits for employees, customers and shareholders.
