Organisational purpose looms large on leadership agendas as we move out of the pandemic. In this episode, Jenni’s broad look at this big topic will help you think differently about the chaotic impact purpose can have on an organisation when it disappears and the length of time it takes for that impact to be felt. Plus three questions to help you turn chaos to calm.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Four pillars of employee engagement by Nita Clarke and David McLeod
Purpose-driven, wellbeing focused organisations by Simon Farrell
The Field Report by Jenni Field
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Hi and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about organisational purpose. Not a small topic, but one that seems to be a focus for many leadership teams this year as we move out of the pandemic.
Now, it should be a focus for leadership teams regardless of a crisis. But if it was on the agenda before COVID-19, then it’s definitely going to be on the agenda now. A crisis will always just escalate an existing trend. So, if it was already there, we’re definitely looking at it in 2022 and beyond.
Now, organisational purpose is a topic that I’ve been researching and reading about for around about the last three years, looking at the impact it can have on organisations when it disappears, and importantly, the length of time it takes for that impact to be felt.
So, when leaders lose their focus on the purpose of the organisation, how long does it take for that impact to be felt by employees, by the market, by the economy? How long does that last? I don’t have an answer to this question at the moment, but it’s a question that I’m often asking and thinking about as I’m looking at the importance of organisational purpose for leadership teams and organisations.
Now, this is a big topic for us to cover in 15 minutes. I’m going to be broad and ideally make you think a little bit differently. I’m going to start, as always, by looking at the different types of chaos that can come from losing your focus on your purpose.
And then I’m going to share three things for you to think about or for you to consider as you look to go from chaos to calm.
What does chaos start to look or feel like when organisational purpose is lost?
Well, the first is a lack of strategic narrative, a lack of understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing. We know that strategic narrative is one of the core pillars for employee engagement. So when we don’t have organisational purpose, it’s very hard to have a strategic narrative that’s linked to that. So people could end up feeling a little bit lost about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
We can also see a loss of focus on the right thing. So without that kind of guiding light, that north star, which is often called of purpose, we can lose focus on the right things that we’re doing. It can make decision making very difficult because there isn’t that guiding principle to everything that you’re doing.
We can also see a long term impact on commercial performance. And there’s several studies that demonstrate and prove the impact of purpose on commerciality. We can see an impact on employee retention. Again, there’s several studies that demonstrate that not having a purpose means that people often don’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. And that can often lead them to going elsewhere.
And finally, it can have an impact on reputation. It can be damaging to not have your purpose or to lose your purpose, because it impacts so many different aspects of your organisation.
Now, these are all really big things. And if you work in HR or communications or PR or marketing, these are all things that we know already, but often as a leader, it’s easy to make decisions that are not in line with the purpose, especially when you’re juggling multiple stakeholders and different pressures.
Does your decision making align with your organisational purpose?
It’s also easy to make decisions, actions and purpose. And in my work, I often spend time with leadership teams exploring changes to strategy or communication in the organisation. And, these conversations can include questions and statements like; your prioritising X over Y, yet you state that Y is the most important and a call to your purpose.
Now, that’s a conversation I was having not that long ago, where we were exploring how things need to change from a communication perspective, but the root cause of the chaos was actually that decision making wasn’t aligned to the organisational purpose.
Other statements and conversations might include things like: this is a significant cultural change due to business transformation, and it won’t happen overnight. So we need to work through what you want that to look like.
This also comes back to purpose.
If you’re looking at significant cultural change, it won’t happen overnight. And therefore, in order to work through what that needs to look like, we have to come back to the purpose.
The correlation between purpose and employee engagement is really high. So, when it comes to looking at that retention, productivity, efficiency, all routes lead to purpose. And when I was writing my book, Influential Internal Communication, and I was talking about the core things that we look at when we’re fixing organisational chaos, all of them are kind of under that purpose umbrella. So, it covers so many different aspects of organisations.
So, how do you successfully build employee engagement?
Now, I’ve mentioned that strategic narrative is a core pillar of employee engagement, and this comes from a white paper that was produced by Nisa Clark and David Macleod back in around about 2012, and they share four pillars of employee engagement. Now, strategic narrative is one of those, and it’s incredibly important to get right. And in my experience, it’s actually the most important pillar. If I think about working in organisations where we haven’t had a strategic narrative, retention was hugely challenging. It was very difficult to tell stories. It was very difficult to hook anything back into a clear purpose, a narrative.
Whereas in other organisations where I’ve had a very strong narrative, albeit maybe not one that everybody liked, the retention was much lower, people were very clear on why they were doing what they were doing. So, that narrative piece for me will always be the most important.
Now, I’ve already mentioned my book, and in it, I also share some case studies around the impact of chaos, and some of these link to purpose in that broad sense. We talk about Patagonia, Carillion, Patisserie Valerie, and Tom. So, all of those case studies are available, so I’ve popped some links in the show notes to those as well.
They are probably brands and stories that you are familiar with, that you’ve seen in the press, and so much of the activity that led to some really difficult situations was all linked to purpose.
So when it comes to losing your purpose, how do you get it back?
What should you be doing? How do you stop it from going in the first place? These are all really big questions, but these are sort of my three bigger questions that are the foundations to the things that you need to consider to go from chaos to calm.
1. Is culture a key aspect?
The first is that nearly every organisation is looking at culture as a result of the pandemic, and this has to link to purpose. So if you’ve lost it, which might be the case with changes being made as a result of the pandemic, then we have to focus on what it is now, not what it was. What it was has gone, and while the change might be painful, the organisation is different.
Now, I talk a lot about organisations being purposeful or purpose-led, which is linked to the work carried out by Simon Farah and his purpose equation. So, if your organisation has been around a long time, it might be that you’re more purposeful, rather than being purpose-led, in the sense that you were created from a core purpose, and everything else kind of runs from there. So, I’ve put some links to Simon’s work in the show notes because there’s some really great stuff there to think about the role that you play in society.
So, the things to consider when we’re looking at culture is, if you’ve lost your purpose, you know, you need to get the leadership team in a room to discuss why. Talk about what’s changed, what you want the organisation to feel like to its stakeholders. Now, there’s always a debate about where culture sits, whether it’s leaders, whether it’s the employees. Now, it has to start with the leadership team, and I will say that every time I talk about culture and purpose. So, we have to have that conversation with the people that are directing, that are responsible, that are accountable, that are leading the organisation.
Now, the other thing to consider is that not everyone will be with you on changes, so you’ve got to make sure you’re looking at the people in the organisation too.
I always say that organisations are people, so when it comes to purpose and organisational change, the people are fundamental. You can’t just do it quietly in one big room, you’ve got to look at the people, the way it’s structured, how people feel. There’s lots of different component parts to think about there. The important part to this point though, is that if you’ve lost your purpose, then you have to realise that what your organisation was has gone. And while that change might be painful, it is now probably a different organisation, and we have to lean into that and accept that and move forwards with that frame of mind.
2. What is your purpose?
The second is to think about what your purpose should be. And people always say, you know, what should my purpose be? What should we be here for? Are my values and purpose aligned to our clients and customers? Really, your purpose is whatever you want it to be. And in 2022, there’s going to be links to ESG, there’s going to be links to technology, there’s going to be links to diversity and inclusion. But why your organisation exists and why you do what you do is unique, and that’s the important thing about purpose. It should be something that is unique, it should be something that stands you out from other people. It should be a reason why people want to come and work for you and not someone else. So it has to be linked to your values, your behaviours, maybe a manifesto if you’ve got one.
All of these things need to be linked together, but importantly, it’s about being about you and your organisation. It’s not about being like anybody else, and that’s really important to think about.
3. How do you preserve purpose so it doesn’t disappear?
The third thing is how do you stop it from going in the first place? A purpose doesn’t live on a wall. You know, it has to be embedded in the behaviours, in the processes, in the meeting structures, in the decision making. You know, if you’re going to go through an exercise to look at your purpose, it has to be pulled through into every day. If it’s just in an induction set of slides, if it’s just on a wall, then it’s not real. You know, it has to pull through into those decisions. And when I was talking about the chaos earlier, and I was sharing some of those examples from the conversations that I’ve had with teams I’ve worked with, where they’re making decisions where X is more important than Y, but they talk about the fact that Y is more important than X.
All of that just leads to confusion and disruption, inefficient, disengaged. You know, it’s kind of leading to all the cause of chaos, really.
So, to stop it from going in the first place, you have to make sure that it’s real and it’s embedded and it’s part of the everyday. This last point is really important, because if we say we’re going to be doing something, and if we say something’s the most important, then it really does have to be. You know, if messages aren’t aligned, if we’re saying one thing but doing another, all of that leads to people feeling very confused.
And we get into really difficult territory of people trying to justify decisions and really complex areas around sort of psychology and how we feel about work and people and decisions and justifying things. So it’s really, really difficult. And I think if we don’t align messages and actions and all of that together, we then get into questioning integrity. We start to lose trust. The whole thing can spiral.
Now, I don’t mean it’s going to suddenly fall like a big house of cards in a week, but that spiraling can take years. And it often will happen. If we think about organisations that maybe no longer exist today, they didn’t all fall very, very quickly. Some of them took a long time to do that. So if you lose your purpose or you forget that big guiding star of why you’re doing what you’re doing, it can take a long time for things to fall. And it can be chaos all the way through that time. But eventually, it will happen.
Thank you for listening!
Now, I’ve popped some links in the show notes to the work from Simon, the case studies that I’ve mentioned, my book, and I’ve also popped a link in there to the field report that I published at the end of 2021, which shares some of my thinking on culture in a bit more detail.
Now, in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about team friction. We all want a workplace where people are free to share ideas, celebrate success. But it’s not going to happen where we have environments of gossip, disagreement, low morale, you know, passive aggressive behaviour. The list could go on around friction. So, I’m going to delve into some of those challenges and, of course, some ideas on how to fix them as well.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me.
As always, there are details in the show notes on how you can stay in touch. I’d love to continue this conversation on how you can stay in touch.
