How To Guide Your Team With Purpose
The following is an edited excerpt from the book The Economics of Emotion: How to Build a Business Everyone Will Love by Kyle M.K.
Purpose underlies everything.
When organizations find their purposes, they develop the foundation for all future business decisions. A great purpose offers more than a simple goal; it offers emotional value to both employees and customers, and a company’s stated purpose will serve as a powerful explanation of what it wants its customers to experience at an emotional level.
A meaningful purpose goes beyond making money. Certainly, increasing your revenue and becoming profitable is a necessary goal, but profit is an outcome of great work, and great work is achieved when your leadership and employees have emotional ties to the purpose and success of the business.
Defining your purpose begins by getting to know your audience, discovering how you want to serve them, and recognizing how you want to make them feel. In this way, a company’s purpose will become closely tied to a valuable emotion and not merely to a logical marker like bargain prices or convenience.
For instance, if “successfully delivering packages” describes your entire company’s purpose, you may have a strong business model and a high completion rate, but you will always be vulnerable to competitors. Another business will eventually come along that figures out how to deliver packages at the same price with the same completion rate but manages to include happiness in the deal. The result? Your customers, who have no emotional affiliation with your company, will be lured away with ease.
When Apple and Microsoft first began to compete with graphical user interfaces based on windowing technologies, they offered essentially the same product, with nearly identical operating systems. But Microsoft’s mission was merely a cold “[to put] a computer on every desk and in every home.” Apple, on the other hand, openly stated that its mission was “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”
Apple didn’t say it would solve all of your problems. It didn’t even say it made computers. But its mission felt a lot more significant than “we’ll put a computer on your desk.” It was the difference between an emotional and a rational purpose. It was also the difference between a short-term and long-term strategy for success.
Microsoft might have beaten Apple in the short term, but Apple’s understanding of emotional purpose is what made it the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
Clarifying Our Terms
Before we dive more deeply into “purpose,” let’s clearly separate the concept from two other overused but undervalued terms, “values” and “vision.”
“Values,” “vision,” and “purpose” have real-world meanings that go beyond corporate cultural jargon. Think of these three words as roughly corresponding to the concepts of “how,” “what,” and “why.”
The values a business establishes describe how it plans on doing business. “Values” are the beliefs, ideals, and guidelines on how that business wants people to behave when working with it or for it.
Vision provides the what. “Vision” establishes what a company plans on accomplishing and when it plans on accomplishing it. Vision usually changes as time goes on. Values should rarely change.
A company’s purpose should never change, however. The why of a company’s existence should be fixed in place, like the North Star. In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek asserts that a company’s purpose must be the first step, before vision or values are determined.7
Starting with purpose and then preserving it as a fixed star gets everyone headed in the right direction much more quickly than starting with your “what” or “how.”
Why start a business at all? Whose life will it enrich? How will it enrich their life?
The answers to these questions are a good start to finding your emotional purpose.
Inspiring Employees And Customers
Only an emotional purpose can truly inspire great work. That’s because a well-crafted emotional purpose turns an assignment into an achievement.
Go back and reread the quote at the beginning of this chapter. In this very famous incident, President Kennedy was touring the NASA facility when he passed this janitor and, in his friendly way, asked the janitor what he did for NASA. When the janitor answered, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping send a man to the moon,” he demonstrated just how important purpose should be to any company. This man, whose name was never recorded, saw himself as part of a great enterprise organized around a clear, motivating concept.
This janitor felt that by keeping a clean facility and by reducing clutter and stress, he was helping engineers do their jobs so astronauts could do theirs — essentially, he was helping put a man on the moon.
If someone in your company cannot answer the question “Why are you doing this?” with the same forthright clarity, it’s probably time to consider finding an emotional purpose for the business.
Creating Happiness
When your purpose becomes deeply ingrained in every one of your employees, it will come out in your marketing campaigns and in your products and will be instinctively understood by your customers.
The stated purpose of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts is to “create happiness.” As simple as it is, the company’s mission statement elegantly articulates this purpose:8
“We create happiness by providing the best in entertainment for people of all ages everywhere.”
The Disney guest may not recognize that statement, but every Disney Parks cast member embodies it. Every employee had that emotional purpose impressed into them. As a result, the guest not only reaps the benefit of the company’s efforts but also experiences the company’s purpose every single time they step through the gates. The purpose of creating happiness effectively drives every design choice, every magical moment, and every janitor in the park.
Developing A Cult Following
Disney is considered a cult brand, meaning it has a passionate and loyal following among its customers and employees. But this is not because of the age of the business or the far-reaching influence it has in the entertainment industry — lots of companies are influential and have been around for a while.
Businesses with cult followings have one simple thing in common: they put people before their product or process. These are the Apples, the Disneys, the Nikes, the Starbuckses, and the Coca-Colas of the world. Many younger companies, like Zappos and the Alamo Drafthouse, are also establishing themselves as companies that value the people who work for them and the people they serve.
Let me reiterate: these companies put all people first, not just their customers.
Among the cognoscenti, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company also has a powerful cult following. So it may be no surprise that the company’s motto is centered on people:
“We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”
With this idea, the company simultaneously states its purpose and sets a standard. Its employees are not mere women and men but ladies and gentlemen who are at the same level as the distinguished guests they serve. The employees are professionals serving professionals, and both groups are valued and respected, equally, by the company.
Lots of organizations say their most important resource is their people. Ritz-Carlton goes a step beyond and puts that message right into its mission statement, its training, and its daily operations.
Creating A Motivating Purpose
A good purpose statement might provide intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations inspire us from within. They’re the desire to help, the desire to connect with others, and the desire to grow. Extrinsic motivations inspire us using external factors like money, image, or social status. The best purpose statements offer more intrinsic values than extrinsic.
Maybe because intrinsic motivations have longer shelf lives.
Extrinsic values have a habit of changing and morphing over shorter periods of time. The value of money changes dependent on your location, as does social status. Neither has an absolute and fixed value: I can go to a small town with $100, and it would provide me more options than if I were in a city like New York.
Intrinsic motivations, being more fundamental to life, change very rarely. People have always been driven to help other people, and hopefully always will. If a company convinces me it exists to help others, or exists to help me help others, it will more easily attract my business because it’s connected to one of my foundational motivations.
Even if your selling point is that you make other people money, you should build intrinsic motivation into your purpose statement and your actions. Real estate agents, for example, make money for real estate brokers. Why do that rather than work on their own? They don’t do it because the brokers say “do it our way, and you’ll be making six figures in no time.” That extrinsic motivation is nice, but most agents join the broker for more meaningful reasons: membership helps them build financial security and build a community. Those are intrinsic messages that speak to people’s core motivations.
Six Flags And The Never-Ending List Of Adjectives
Let’s contrast the Disney mission statement, or purpose statement, of “creating happiness” with that of Six Flags, which also runs large-scale theme parks:
Disney: “We create happiness by providing the best in entertainment for people of all ages everywhere.”
Six Flags: “[Our mission is] to surround the best rides in the world with entertainment from the fields of music, theater, sports, film, and television.”
Notice something? The Six Flags statement has no mention of people, only product, and offers little in the way of inspiration. Rather than a genuine purpose, the statement seems to offer nothing more than a direct sales pitch around the quality of the company’s offering.
To be fair, the company does stay true to its mission — the history of Six Flags does indeed demonstrate a quest for the world’s fastest, tallest, most sensational roller coasters. But like the parks themselves, the statement makes the company seem uninterested in how its product makes people feel and offers little to inspire loyalty.
It must feel strange to be upstaged by the Disney experience, yet try so hard to avoid any similarity to the Disney experience. It seems, to a customer experience enthusiast, the team at Six Flags can’t seem to grasp the underlying reason for Disney’s success: emotional value.
Six Flags has already gone bankrupt once, at least partly because it offers this limiting experience. After you’ve ridden the roller coasters, what emotional attachment do you have with these parks to bring you back? Even though Six Flags has the intellectual property of Looney Tunes and DC Comics to leverage, it has failed to create the kind of experience and “emotional rides” you find at the Disney parks. Six Flags may do a great job building rides for its guests, but it doesn’t seem to understand the need to build experiences for its guests.
Going Head To Heart
It’s not difficult to find stark differences in purpose statements between companies that compete head to head. The purpose statement for Adidas is the following:
“…to be the global leader in the sporting goods industry, with brands built on a passion for sports and sporting lifestyle.”
Here’s Nike’s purpose:
“…to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
By now, you no doubt see the huge difference between these statements — one centered on product quality and the other centered on people.
Nike goes for a direct emotional connection with its athletic customers — and it considers anyone with a body an athlete. To no one’s surprise, every bit of Nike’s marketing is designed to appeal to its customers emotionally. Do you know the tagline for Adidas? Probably not. But what about Nike? “Just do it” has become a global motto and instantly relates consumers to the Nike brand.
Dunkin’ Donuts’ purpose is as follows:
“to make and serve the freshest, most delicious coffee and donuts, quickly and courteously, in modern, well-merchandised stores.”
Dunkin’ Donuts modestly discusses its product, its process, and its stores. Nowhere does it mention its people or the people it serves. People make the coffee and donuts, and people consume the coffee and donuts — shouldn’t they be mentioned somewhere in the purpose statement of a company that makes coffee?
In stark contrast, Starbucks’ purpose is this:
“to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”
You gotta admit, that’s more refreshing than the “freshest, most delicious coffee.”
When your “why” is centered on people and how you intend to enrich their lives, you inherently become a more loved brand from the start. People respond positively when you make it clear that your purpose is to serve them. Six Flags, Adidas, and Dunkin’ Donuts all focus on themselves, offering only extrinsic, materialistic value: “best rides in the world,” “brands built on a passion for sports,” and “the freshest, most delicious coffee.”
Disney, Nike, and Starbucks go for happiness, personal growth, and connection. Each expresses strong intrinsic values and their direct effect on people.
Employees With Purpose
In today’s job market, where you work has become just as important as what you do. More than ever, people read corporate culture reports when they’re job searching, and they analyze current and former employee reviews on websites like Glassdoor.
When companies have an emotional, people-focused purpose and clearly communicate it on their websites and live by it on a daily basis, they easily attract like-minded people who trust them and believe in their purpose.
SpaceX, for example, didn’t have a difficult time finding engineers, because its stated purpose is to “help the human race become a multi-planetary species.” What committed rocket scientist wouldn’t be interested in solving that problem?
When Pixar is looking for people, it highlights its corporate culture and the workplace environment — not just salary, revenues, or the number of accomplishments its employees have achieved as a team. Pixar makes it clear that employees will be working with the smartest and most creative people in the industry.
A Purpose-Driven Career
Your employees’ purpose matters not just to them but to your customers.
If you get a chance, compare the employees you see at a Six Flags to the cast members at a Disney park, and you will immediately notice a difference. The Disney employees seem genuinely happy to be there and eager to create happiness. Just looking at them makes you think, “They must love their jobs.”
If you can’t make it to a theme park anytime soon, you could also see the difference in attitude of the people working at Dunkin’ Donuts versus Starbucks.
If your goal is to make the freshest, most delicious coffee and donuts, you’re inherently less interested in the people coming through the door than folks are at Starbucks. The baristas at Starbucks have been given the purpose of inspiring and nurturing the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time. The neighborhood part is as important as the human spirit part. Starbucks employees know they see the same people every day, and they have the opportunity — every day — to follow through with the company’s mission and purpose.
At my favorite Starbucks, a barista named Reggie always remembers my name and my order, and we pick up our conversation where we left off the day before. (He’s studying hotel management, and I won’t shut up about this book.) I don’t mind Dunkin’ Donuts, but I feel more connected when I visit Starbucks.
These principles apply no matter the size of the organization. If you are a small jewelry maker who sells at a booth once a month at a local fair, you too must identify your purpose, just like big companies do. Maybe you want to make people feel more adventurous — if so, everything you design should do just that. If a design doesn’t make people more adventurous, then it’s off-brand, and it shouldn’t be sold.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Despite my incessant endorsement for carefully worded purpose statements, actions do ultimately speak louder than words. You can moralize all day, but people will not fully trust you until your actions reflect your stated purpose.
You simply have to practice what’s being preached.
As a leader, that means that although you use data, projections, and forecasts to steer decisions, you can never forget that emotion, not logic, provides the driving force behind all human activity. In the long run, it’s lucrative to let your emotional purpose take the wheel.
When CVS stopped selling tobacco products to stand behind its purpose of enabling a healthier society, it lost money on smokers but gained lifelong customers from others who agreed with its purpose. These increasingly loyal customers loved that CVS had chosen to follow through on its stated purpose.
Khan Academy and Wikipedia took huge economic risks by offering free education and knowledge; yet, overall, they’re extraordinarily successful organizations with long-term, sustainable models. Through the years they have stayed true to their missions and developed passionate fan bases and extensive libraries.
Thanks to the power of the internet, people now react more quickly than ever when a company fails to live up to its purpose. When Philadelphia police officers handcuffed and arrested two black men who asked to use a Starbucks restroom, for instance, it was immediately captured on cell phone video and widely broadcast. The video went viral, pulling in millions of views. The backlash against Starbucks for calling the police was immediate and harsh.
If you go against your stated purpose, people will notice.
How To Define Your Purpose
When you set out to craft your own statement of purpose, you need to approach it carefully and intentionally. After all, this will be the light that guides your company for years or even decades to come. (No pressure.)
For starters, defining your purpose means explaining why you started the business in the first place. Are you solving a problem? Are you hoping to contribute to the happiness, success, or maybe the security of others? Next, whose life will you enrich? Think about how their life will be enriched. How do you want them to feel when they interact with your business? Don’t just say “happy.” Dig deeper. Are you trying to remove Fear or frustration from their lives? Maybe trigger a sense of relief or inspiration? Lastly, it’s not a bad idea to describe what you do or what you plan to do. This is not the same as “why” or “who” or “how” — this is simply “what.” Do you provide food, tools, know-how, social connection?
There. That wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s look at some companies that went through this exercise.
Kellogg’s purpose, for example, talks about “nourishing families, so they can flourish and thrive.” In other words, Kellogg’s states it cares more about your family’s well-being than about cereal.
The insurance company AIG identifies its purpose as “helping people manage risk and recover from the hardship of unexpected loss.” This statement has two parts, each of which elegantly answers the questions of “what” and “why.” Each part also has a core emotional component. Managing risk promises the reduction of Fear, and recovering from loss promises the reduction of Sadness.
Notice these companies are directly telling us how they will enrich our lives, and that enriching their customers’ lives is the purpose of their business.
A few years ago, Greg Ellis, CEO of REA Group, said that his company’s purpose was to create a real estate process that was “simple, efficient, and stress-free” for people buying and selling a property. Had he just said that the company wanted to make the process simple and efficient, REA Group would be no different than any of its competitors. When he added “stress-free” to the mission statement, Ellis upped the ante by promising to remove anxiety and Fear from a process that invokes quite a bit of stress.
Emotionally, REA Group acknowledges that its potential customers might be anxious, and that REA can help alleviate this kind of Fear for them. In this way, it builds trust with its words.
Do the words matter? Absolutely. But if REA performs the phrase “stress-free” in its training and in its customer journey, this application of its purpose will definitely matter emotionally to both employees and customers. No follow-through? No point.
If you craft an authentic purpose statement, it won’t be necessary to refer to it every time you or one of your employees makes a decision. Your purpose-driven actions will become second nature. As you and your team begin to embody your company’s purpose, customers will start to catch on and start to embody it too, sometimes unknowingly.
It’s important that your purpose statement resonates with customers, helps inform business decisions, and inspires staff members to do their best work, but mostly it has to matter to you, the person defining the very future of the organization.
If your purpose statement doesn’t inspire you, you can’t lead by example, and you won’t attract or retain the employees needed to act on your purpose.
To keep reading, pick up your copy of The Economics of Emotion: How to Build a Business Everyone Will Love by Kyle M.K.
