Let’s not give up on Purpose. It works, and I should know.
Today, Saboteur launched its “purpose” toolkit — the latest in a series of giveaways available in the tools section of our website. This is a story about why we created it, and why purpose matters now as much as ever.
My first encounter with “organisational purpose” came as an undergraduate. Exhausted from my first full academic year of socialising (with too few lectures to recover during), the last thing I wanted was a summer job. But alas, I was getting under my parents’ feet — and the latest edition of Championship Manager wasn’t going to pay for itself — so I signed up for the least enviable (and hence only available) job at my local Co-op. I was to be their “news and mags lad”, a kind of bikeless, grown-up paper boy responsible for getting in at 6am (in spite of everything I stood for) and racing against the clock to stack the news on the supermarket’s shelves before it opened.
If this sounds like a tall order for a bone-idle student-type…it was. But not for long. Because a few days in, I discovered what is now commonly known as a “Purpose”.
The Co-op took employee inductions very seriously (and no doubt still does). Every new recruit was taught not just how to keep the shop running, but why the shop matters in the first place; how it serves communities (branches are typically within walking distance of residential areas) how it pioneers accessibility (it was, for instance, the first supermarket brand to introduce braille to its packaging) and why this ethos is a part of its DNA (it is so named because it began as a co-operative movement).
Suddenly — only days into my role — I had a reason, beyond pay, to wake up so damned early. Our customers had been reframed as members of my community: Busy parents. Elders. Children running errands. I was part of an important service to those who depend on a helpful, local grocer. Within weeks I was volunteering for overtime, bonding with regulars, telling friends and family what I was doing with my summer and why I was proud to do it.
It’s this need to be part of a cause “greater than ourselves” that Daniel Pink identified as one of the three dimensions of motivation in 2011’s “Drive”; that Jim Stengel used to transform the fortunes of numerous parts of P&G (as recounted in his book Grow); and that Simon Sinek linked to the biology or our brains in one of the most popular TED talks of all time.
These authors, and others like them, helped the “Purpose movement” to gather pace in the 2010’s to the extent that prominent businesses from Unilever to Blackrock pledged to put purpose at the centre of their strategies.
Creative-types also got in on the act, crafting “purpose statements” with the memorability and impact more commonly seen in great advertising than corporate strategy (Air Bnb’s “To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere” has always been a favourite of mine). This helped these purposes “go viral” through their organisations, and sometimes even beyond.
And yet today, the very notion of having a “purpose” is under attack. The movement has suffered its share of failures, overreaches and absurdities, and critics have been quick to attack them. Casualties include Jim Stengel’s (doomed) attempt to link purpose to stock market performance. They include the countless organisations who’ve adopted a purpose so lofty as to lose touch with anybody’s lived reality (I’ve worked with more than one company whose purpose, according to them, was simply to “to make life better”). And they include the many who have attempted to use “purpose” as an advertising tactic when there simply isn’t a credible higher purpose to advertise. Think razors taking on toxic masculinity, fizzy drinks that quell police brutality, and mayonnaise that fights food waste.
These are all overextensions. But unfortunately, those who point them out often go on to call for an abandonment of “purpose” altogether. This would be a tragic mistake. On paper, when the Co-op hired me, they took on a temporary worker looking to fund a teenage video game habit. In practice, they got a motivated colleague and a company ambassador. Someone who didn’t just understand the role of organisation he worked for, but who would go above and beyond to help fulfil it. The difference was “purpose”, and while some communications missteps have been taken in its name, the science behind it hasn’t changed. Let’s not throw out the psychologist’s baby with the advertiser’s bath water.
At Saboteur, we have put together a ‘toolkit’ to help organisations to discover and articulate a purpose that does what a purpose should: providing motivation, inspiration and the opportunity for fulfilment that can only come from being a part of something bigger than ourselves. As with all of our tools, it’s free to download from the Saboteur website. We hope that you find it helpful, and welcome any comments or questions you might have.
