Executive Summary
It’s extremely difficult to instill purpose in others. It takes more than motivational talks, lofty speeches, or mission statements to spread purpose. In fact, if overblown or insincere, those methods can backfire, triggering cynical reactions. Purpose is a grand word, but in the end, it’s about helping people see their impact on others and helping them develop a story about why they love what they do. If you keep that in mind, and take a personal, authentic, and perpetual approach, you’re likely to find success.
No one wants to be a nine-to-five robot. People want to feel inspired, find meaning, and see the impact their work has on others. And when they do, they’re more engaged, innovative, and productive. That isn’t a secret or a revelation. It’s common sense.
If you’re a leader, helping others feel a sense of purpose can be a powerful tool. So, why then do so many leaders have trouble lighting up their employees?
The simple answer is it’s extremely difficult to instill purpose in others. It takes more than motivational talks, lofty speeches, or mission statements to spread purpose. In fact, if overblown or insincere, those methods can backfire, triggering cynical reactions.
Purpose is a grand word, but in the end, it’s about helping people see their impact on others and helping them develop a story about why they love what they do. If you keep that in mind, and take a personal, authentic, and perpetual approach, you’re likely to find success.
Make it personal
First, purpose needs to be personal, and, because purpose is meant to elicit an emotional reaction, purpose needs to be felt. You can’t just talk about purpose.
Imagine you’re the head of a college fundraising effort to help fund scholarships for underprivileged kids. How would you motivate your volunteers? According to a study by Adam Grant, if you stood in front of the group and talked about the impact of their work, you probably wouldn’t improve anyone’s performance. But, if you invited a current scholarship recipient to share their personal story, that would be much more impactful. In fact, in Grant’s study, after volunteers had listened to a scholarship recipient, they raised almost 400% more money than average.
When I was telling some leaders from F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, about the fundraising study, one of them lit up and blurted out, “This just happened to us!”
She explained how her team worked in the medical-devices division. Her group was sometimes looked down upon by people in the organization who thought that chemistry was “more sexy” than engineering. Many people in the division were not fully engaged, and the morale of the team was pretty low. One day the leader arranged for a customer to tell the team her personal story.
This customer had diabetes and had to test her blood daily to make sure her insulin dose was right. Unfortunately, this poor woman misunderstood how much blood was needed and was pricking her finger more than she needed to in order to get the blood. It not only hurt every day, so that it became something she dreaded, but she also was making a mess of her fingers. She would work her way down one finger from the tip to the knuckle, get it all inflamed and sometimes infected, before moving to the next finger. She said it got to the point where she would sit on her hand to hide the damage from others. She stopped going out to dinner because she was so embarrassed.
The diabetic then told the group how they had improved her life when they invented a little finger-pricking device. You put it on the end of your finger and click it. It takes the absolute minimum amount of blood, is almost painless and leaves almost no cut at all. She told how, because of this device, her hands have healed, and she can go out to dinner without feeling ashamed about herself. She told the group: “You people changed my life.”
The Roche leader told us that the medical device team was really affected by this patient testimonial. She said that it was very emotional in the room during the meeting. And for months, people felt more purpose.
It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in. If people see the cause and effect between their inputs and their team’s progress, or understand the impact of a customer getting their product on time, or experience first-hand how their role is necessary to other people, they’ll feel a sense of purpose.
Make it authentic
But here’s the thing. You need to believe what you’re saying and doing. This makes all the difference. If your attempts at creating purpose do not align with your other leadership behaviors, employees will view your tactics as manipulative rather than inspirational.
Right after the woman at Roche shared her inspirational story, for example, a man raised his hand on the other side of the room and said, “Yeah, they tried that bullshit on us too.”
“I have this boss who has never talked about anything but quarterly profits and hitting shipping targets,” he continued. “Well, he must have come to London Business School and heard you talk about this study because one day he drags a patient in to our weekly meeting and makes her tell us this story of how the drugs saved her life. I mean, trying to exploit our emotions to make us work harder? Using a patient to manipulate us!? That’s pretty low.”
We can learn so much through this exchange.
If you’re a leader, and you’re trying to sell people on purpose but you haven’t acted consistent with that purpose in the past, your message will backfire. Humans are authenticity-detection machines: we’re attracted to sincerity and repulsed by lies and insincerity.
So tread lightly. If you’re personally inspired by listening to customers, and really believe in what you’re saying, then go for it. If you’re not, you might create more feelings of manipulation than inspiration.
Make it perpetual
Even if you make purpose personal and authentic, you can’t just do it once. Instead, you need to make it a routine.
Dr. Dorothee Ritz, the General Manager of Microsoft in Austria, encourages her employees to go out in the field and experience the clients’ problems first hand. One small team spent a week out on the street with police officers, trying to understand when and where remote data could help them. Another team spent two days in a hospital to observe and understand what it would really mean to help it become paperless.
Ritz said these immersion experiences were enlightening for people. She said they came back illuminated, and it was clear to her that employees’ personal experiences increased their sense of purpose, since they witnessed the why of their work. Ritz watched employees dive into their projects with more energy and enthusiasm after they had witnessed the clients’ needs themselves.
So after a year of experimenting with this initiative, Ritz put something more secure in place. She selected a set of key customers (whom she calls partners) across industries ranging from car manufacturing to retailers to hospitals. And then 15 people from Microsoft — a team ranging from senior leaders to associates — go on-site at each company and ask lots of people at lots of different levels: “What are your challenges?” They talked to people in IT, of course, but they also talked with business decision-makers across different functions.
At Tesla, for example, Ritz told me how Microsoft employees at different levels got to practice a conversation that started with Tesla’s needs instead of Microsoft’s products. They focused on holes in the process that Tesla needed to address. At a major retailer, a Microsoft employee who was very close to the Xbox asked some very grounded questions about issues with the console. This led to a useful, practical discussion rather than high-level executive speak, which helped move the whole conversation toward practical solutions that the team could go back and work on. These Microsoft teams came away with a few new contacts. But Ritz said what was even more important, these teams understood the purpose of the projects based on witnessing the situation and hearing about the companies’ issues first-hand.
Ritz invested deeply in client experiences that allowed employees to witness the impact of their jobs first-hand, which helped them build emotional connections with the client and the work, and which helped Microsoft explore and learn as an organization.
Purpose can be a powerful tool for leaders who want to inspire people to bring their best to work. But most leaders agree that employees do not “get” their organizations’ purpose. This is because purpose is personal and emotional. It is often managed poorly by transactional leaders who deliver speeches about lofty societal goals rather than helping put employees in direct contact with the people they serve. Purpose can work wonders for employee contributions when leaders start with a personal, authentic, and perpetual approach.
Adapted from Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Dan Cable.