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Engaging with a Sense of Purpose: Recognize the Positive Effects and Inhibitors of Purpose Alignment with Dan Pontefract, Chief Envisioner, TELUS
Positive Effects
So what happens when everything is in alignment between our personal purpose, organizational purpose and role. Well Joseph Campbell might refer to this as the pathway to bliss. I refer to it as the sweet spot. As it turns out a longitudinal study done over a 14 year period found that if you have a sense of purpose in your life which corresponds to the role you actually have 14 percent less disease or unwellness in your lifetime. That’s amazing.
If I want to live a little longer or not have these sort of diseases that some of us are afflicted with I want to live with a life of purpose because I’ve got that 14 percent less chance that I’m going to inhabit one of these particular diseases. So I’m in just by that stat alone. But that said I mean it’s not just about that. It’s about what you’re doing in your community. There’s so many different studies that suggest that when you give – if you follow Adam Grant’s work with Give and Take. If you give you get a sense of responsibility, a sense of accolade, a sense of giving, a sense of hope.
And so this notion of a sense of purpose both in life and at work when you’re able to give, when you’re able to contribute in the role and in your life like good things start to happen quite quickly and that’s great. So it’s a sweet spot for you when you’re balancing again who you are, what you’re about and how you’re acting each and every day with the organization that you’re a part of and obviously with your role. Now what about the organization? What do they get? Well as it turns out lots of studies have found that when the organization is engaged, when the organization has defined a sense of purpose and when the organization acts on that sense of purpose through the engaged employees, business results increase.
So the example that I’d like to bring up probably would be Salesforce. Salesforce is a CRM company, customer relationship management. It was founded and operates still as president and CEO by Marc Benioff. And Marc Benioff said look, the three things that we’re going to instill inside of this company from day one we’re going to be a cloud based company. We’re going to be a subscription based company. And we will create what’s called the pledge one percent program. Pledge one percent. What does that mean? Well it’s quite fascinating, 1999 don’t forget. They still to this day commit one percent of their profit to community charitable donations. They commit one percent of total employee time to volunteerism. And they commit one percent of their services to community donations, et cetera. That’s a lot of bucks.
So by example whenever an employee is first starting at Salesforce they fly to San Francisco. And of the three-day orientation, one day, the first day is spent in the community. When they’re what’s called the Sales Club. So the President’s Club – the sort of top 200ish winners that have best quota match for the year. They go to Hawaii. They go to Greece. Wherever they go guess what they do for the first day of their usual week long expose somewhere in the world? They volunteer a day in the community. These are the behaviors and habits that then when instilled inside the organization people want to work for that company. People feel a sense of purpose inside the role. It just becomes common sense. That’s a sweet spot. And we know all too well now the success that Salesforce has had.
Inhibitors
So there are some inhibitors, some roadblocks inside of this world of ours that disallow us to find the sweet spot. I think there’s a few I need to mention today. One is power. When an organization is rife with power. When people are not caring about the humanity of the organization or its employees. When power trumps purpose that is a disenabler to a higher sense of purpose in that organization.
A second one however, is greed. So when the organization and its C-suite or its Board fixates on shareholder return or profitability over purpose, not balanced. When it’s only fixated on the stakeholders that are called shareholders, not stakeholders that include employees, customers and society, blinders are on and they make poor decisions based on the fact they’re only serving one stakeholder. That is the shareholder.
And the third one I like to bring up ultimately is role itself. When we’re confused about why we’re in the role that has been defined by the organization. When the role says that you’re supposed to be doing one thing yet those behaviors or those actions have been taken away by that leader or that organization. When you’re not entrusted to actually deliver on what’s said in that job description of your role, what happens? You feel disenfranchised. You feel as though your role and the actions you signed up for had been stolen. That’s not role purpose and that ultimately then is another of the inhibitors towards that sweet spot.
One of those additional inhibitors I suppose of the purpose mindset in an organization is the performance review or specifically the annual performance development cycle process. So how might that be changed in fact? Well what happens in an organization far too often is that the objectives that are set in the beginning of the year are task-based or objective based. Or you must do this by this date based. And so what happens? The mindset of the individual in order to get their bonus or perhaps more pay during the annual payroll review is that they must complete these actions by this certain date. Come hell or high water, whatever elbows they need to use in order to complete it they’re going to do it. That’s sort of a human motivator. But what if the company still wants to do these annual performance reviews. What if they were to value values? What if they were to use attributes that are purpose attributes? So let’s say for example being collaborative or being a giver, being reciprocal, giving in to the community.
What’s your time that you volunteered this year? What if there were a certain number of arbiters that were set up at the beginning of the year, perhaps half your performance review was based on these values attributes? These ways in which that we expect you to behave in your team, in the community, et cetera, if the organization obviously has come up with a higher sense of purpose. But what it the organization did that? What if it then evaluated of 100 percent time, 50 percent are on our objectives, 50 percent are on your behaviors with purpose, with culture, with community, et cetera. Wouldn’t that at least go towards creating identify a sense of purpose in the organization? That to me is a way in which if you have to have an annual performance review basis cycle, there’s a way in which to actually calibrate it 50-50 between us – human emotion, heart, purpose – and actions. And the objectives that you need to carry out every year.