Why Purpose Is Foundational in Leadership

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0:20Welcome to HBR on Leadership. Case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I'm HBR Executive Editor, Alison Beard. While business profits and growth make headlines, it really is a sense of purpose that inspires companies and their employees to work hard and achieve greatness. In this 2019 IdeaCast episode, host Kurt Nickish speaks with executive coach, professor, and pastor, Nicholas Pierce, about the value and necessity of organizational purpose. Nicholas Pierce didn't always know the path that he was meant for.

1:00He grew up on the south side of Chicago. He was good at chemistry and math. He graduated near the top of his high school class. At MIT, he studied chemical engineering. But along the way, he realized that wasn't what he was passionate about. He really cared about people. He began to focus on engineering something else, leadership and organizational success. Pierce is now a professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He's also a pastor at a big Chicago church and an executive coach. He has three jobs but one vocation, as he describes it. All those roles add up to a fulfilling life.

1:39And he says that too many of us are looking for jobs without thinking about purpose. And he says companies as well should be as purpose-driven as they are profit-driven. His new book is The Purpose Path, a guide to pursuing your authentic life's work. Nicholas, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Kurt. If you take maybe as a given that the most successful companies are purpose-driven or have a clear mission, do the people who work for them also have that too? The best companies are ones that not only have a purpose for themselves, but also attract and hire people whose individual senses of purpose align with the company's purpose.

2:23Purpose is simply the reason why someone or something exists. So purpose ought to motivate what companies do every day because the why should drive the what. And similarly, we can say the same for individuals. Their why should also drive their what in terms of what they're doing every day. I just wonder, when you survey kind of the landscape of companies out there, how many do you feel like the why really drives the what? For a lot of companies, they have been focused on profit maximization. And unfortunately, that is not a compelling purpose. That's not a compelling why. Certainly, making profit is an important outcome.

3:09But it is not the reason why an organization exists. An organization's purpose should distinguish it from other organizations. It's like the thumbprint or someone's DNA. It is what distinguishes it from someone else. So every company on the Fortune 500 is going to say, we're here hoping to make money. This is not a public charity. Yet what distinguishes one from another should be their why. So there's an increasing importance on purpose because there are a lot of people, particularly millennials, who are making employment decisions not based on profit potential or even salary potential and earnings potential, but on purpose alignment.

3:51So it may not be a lot of companies right now that are focusing on purpose, but that number is certainly increasing sharply. What else makes you say that? I had the opportunity to talk to 50 of the top 100 leaders in a major global company, and I asked them, what is the purpose of your company? What is the reason why you all exist? And you could hear a pin drop. They looked around at each other, perplexed, confused, and speechless. Finally, someone said, well, we want to remain in existence. And so I said to them, you mean to tell me the reason why you exist is to keep on existing? That is not going to motivate me to wake up and go to work.

4:36It's not going to motivate me to come early or stay late or to give my best ideas or to be an ambassador for the brand. Can you do better? And after about 15 minutes, we really got into an understanding of the situation they were in as an organization and how they found themselves trying to not only transform their industry, but also transform the quality of life of people around the world. And so by getting them to think about their bigger picture purpose, their reason for existing, and perhaps stated differently, what would happen or who would care if you ceased to exist, they were able to rally around a deeper sense of purpose that they were then able to cascade throughout the organization and really revitalize people's morale and reason for being there.

5:24Do you think people, individuals, have this easier or harder than companies do? individuals and organizations have it equally as difficult organizations are not special they're simply comprised of human beings and so if human beings are not thinking about their own purposes then organizations are not going to be thinking about purpose individuals in many cases are on autopilot just going through life one day after another with an endless string of activities never really asking why they're doing what they're doing. The benefit that individuals have is centuries of philosophical and theological thought.

6:05Some philosophers have written that we're here for our own pleasure and happiness. Some think that we're here just to propagate the species from a genetic perspective. Others think that we don't have any real purpose at all. I'm reminded of Nobel laureate James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, who said we're not for anything. We're just products of evolution. But then others have recognized that there is a big picture, more transcendent, spiritual and eternal dimension to our lives. That regardless of one's faith tradition, there's more to life than just what can be seen or experienced with our senses.

6:50And so for individuals, when we recognize that we've been made for more, then it encourages us and inspires us and challenges us to listen for the voice of the one who has created us to give us our life's assignment, which evolves and grows with time. Beyond career, beyond job, what is my life's work and how can I pursue it? You're a Christian, right? You're a pastor. And so you have deep convictions about people having individual purpose, something that really makes them unique. For that reason, they have their own individual purpose path and a vocation that they can go after that means more than a job.

7:30It's something closer to a calling. That's right. And there are a lot of people who may not subscribe to a particular faith tradition who can at least acknowledge the fact that there is something more to this life than what we can see in the here and now, which is what drives a lot of people to be concerned with questions of legacy and questions of meaning. those folks have the capacity and even the hunger and thirst to ask these questions regardless of whether they anchor or tether them to a particular faith tradition. What if you don't know what your life's work is? Like how do you find that personal mission statement?

8:13Because, you know, finding the right job or choosing a career is a lot of work in itself. I believe that our life's work is deeply connected with who we are and why we're on the planet. So we have to start asking the deep questions of purpose and identity in order to get to life's work. The idea of life's work requires a degree of human authenticity. But this idea of authentic life's work is not only letting our best and highest values guide how we do our work and how we behave at work, but letting those values guide what work we do in the first place. It's about the work and the impact we feel most called to make at any given point in our lives.

9:03It's the work that we cannot not do. It is engaging in the radical act of connecting our souls with our roles. Now, what's authentic for one person may be completely inauthentic for someone else. This is not just a push or ploy to get people to engage in nonprofit work or low-paying work or some explicit social impact work. It's just the work that you are uniquely called to do in this moment and season in your life. When you ask these questions, how do you know if you're in the wrong job in terms of feeling like you have a purpose? In terms of trying to figure out whether you're in the wrong job or maybe it's time to shift gears, there are a few things that come to mind.

9:52Certainly some of the more tactical reasons why one might be ready to leave are if they have stopped learning and growing or if they are in a toxic culture that is adversely impacting their well -being and their quality of life. or perhaps if they feel that going to work every day is an act of inauthenticity, if the work they're doing is disconnected from their purpose and the outcomes that they're working to accomplish feel meaningless or aren't aligned with who they are and what they stand for, it may be time to consider walking away. And I say that with all due respect for those who are just working jobs to try to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family's heads.

10:41I recognize that some people may not feel that they have the luxury of this kind of a conversation right now, but even in jobs that may not have a glamorous career trajectory to them, we all owe it to ourselves, given that we only have one life to live, to spend our days doing what we feel is best suited for what we should do with our lives. Do you find that it's harder for people to find that now that the geek economy is here and the working world is more complex than it used to be? I think it's not only easier to do now, but much more necessary to do now because of the way that companies are treating people.

11:24There used to be a social contract between an employer and their employees that said, we will take care of you as long as you do the right things. We will look out for you. And when you retire, we will throw you a party, give you a watch and a pension. We will take care of you for life because people were the greatest asset that an organization had. But now what we're seeing is that many companies are treating talent as though people are a commodity and money is the asset that they prize and cherish. So if you're working in an organization that treats you like employee number 742 ,017, you are probably a lot more personally incentivized to figure out what am I doing with my life?

12:12because obviously this company doesn't think a whole lot of my life. This company thinks that I am an interchangeable cog in a wheel. And as artificial intelligences continue to proliferate and machines replace more and more people, it's going to push us as human beings to really clarify what does it mean for us to be uniquely human. If it's not physical effort and it's not even cognitive capacity that make us unique as human beings, what do we have left? And what we have left is the soul. What we have left is deep and abiding self-awareness. What we have is the capacity to experience the transcendent.

12:54And as organizational leaders, it is incumbent upon us to not ask our people to leave that part of themselves in the parking lot, but rather to bring that part of themselves into the company, into our daily work, Not so much to try to convert people to a particular faith tradition, but rather to be their authentic, fully present selves. How do you learn that? Because that's, you know, I mean, you teach at Kellogg. I had got a degree at Questrom. I don't remember ever being told how to do this. I believe strongly that our educational system is complicit in the problem you just described. I grew up on the south side of Chicago and went to elite public schools in Chicago and then graduated from some top tier universities and currently teach at one.

13:50But as I reflect on my own life, everything was geared toward matching interest and passion with career track. So as I've spent more time with students in the classroom, including some school leaders and executives in the public and private sectors, I've recognized that the very people who are responsible for the education of our young people are wrestling with these very same questions themselves. So they may not be well positioned to lead young people to a place where they have not themselves gone. It is a radical act to reframe the purpose of education as being for the advancement of industry and the selection of career path.

14:37To reframe that and say your education is to give you the skills, the tools, the exposure that you need to be able to accomplish your life's work, whatever it may be. Some think that the purpose of education is lighting someone on fire, not filling an empty pail with facts and knowledge. I believe it is in our best interest not only as individual human beings but as a society to route people in the direction that they are uniquely designed to burn brightly. And it is not suggesting that everyone necessarily needs to have a white collar job in order to have meaning and purpose. I don't think that meaning and purpose are correlated with one's title or prestige or salary.

15:23There are some people at Northwestern who clean the whiteboards after I teach, who have a lot clearer sense of their life's why than some of my faculty colleagues who are doing quite well financially. So this is not a class conversation. This is a deep, intrinsic, transcendent soul conversation. What does all of this mean for companies and managers? If you work somewhere, chances are that, you know, a number of people that you work with may feel like they're not in line with what they feel like they should be doing. And so as a manager or as a leader, as a coworker, maybe you feel like you're doing what you want to do, but can you help the people you work with?

16:12I believe that as leaders, one of our biggest responsibilities is to provide people with a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. I believe for leaders, it is a critical, critical conversation because in many cases, we are complicit in the devaluation of our people. What I mean by that is sometimes, and I've seen this in my own work, sometimes you'll have a leader who has a really A-plus performer, a rock star on their team. The problem is not that this person underperforms, but that the leader can tell in their bones that this person is not where they belong. This person is not connecting their soul with their role.

17:05This person is on autopilot doing great work, meaningful, valuable work for the company, but it's not valuable for themselves. Not from a financial perspective, but from a much more meaningful and deep sense of purpose perspective. And sometimes that leader or that manager has the temptation to hold on to that person because you don't want to lose a good person. But from a human perspective, we owe it to that person to not hold them hostage and to release them or to free them. I don't mean fire them, but I do mean coach them and then be willing to put our social capital on the line to help them land in a place that will allow them to merge their daily work with their life's work.

17:57Perhaps that's at another organization, or perhaps it means that we need to find them a different seat within our current organization. But as leaders, we have a significant role not in making purpose for people, but facilitating the realization of the purpose that our people are coming to us with. As leaders, we are stewards of people and how we take care of people to help them be their highest and best is a critical dimension of how I measure the effectiveness of leadership. Yeah. Are there things you can do without shaking it up horribly? Like, can you turn your organization into one that, you know, does more community service and volunteer work together, builds in and incorporates some things that give people more of a sense of purpose?

18:50Yeah, without really mixing it up or shaking it up. A lot of companies are trying to put corporate social responsibility patches on purposelessness. And ultimately, that does not really help. Just because we get a bus or two or three full of colleagues from the workplace and get T-shirts that match and go into a community that may be socioeconomically disadvantaged and do some good deeds for a couple hours and take pictures. but at the end of the day, we actually spent more money on the buses and the t-shirts than we spent impacting the lives of the people in the communities we went into, we've actually not done a whole lot.

19:32And people and organizations are seeing through that. This is not about creating a community service activity or creating some type of committee to be able to put on the website that we are committed to doing good things. This is a much deeper and abiding sense of why we even exist as a company that animates everything we do, whether it is in the community or in the civic space or in terms of the decisions we make with our customers and clients or the decisions we make in terms of how we form and nurture a healthy workplace environment and culture and how we treat each other as colleagues. This is a matter of purpose, not just practice.

20:19And when companies try to tinker with practices that look good on the surface, but when you drill deeper, they're devoid of any meaning. People can see through that a mile away. What are things that you like to hear or recognize when you visit companies or talk to leaders? What are the kind of tip-offs that you know that you're dealing with or working with a company that is in tune with purposeful principles? One thing that matters deeply in terms of being able to tell whether a company cares about purpose is to be able to ask people how what they're doing right now helps the company to achieve its purpose.

21:03And if people look back at me with a puzzled look as though they've never been asked that question or never considered it, it tells me that the purpose is just a statement on the website. It is not the very lifeblood that animates everything happening in the organization. When I go into an organization that is doing things on purpose, one that I think about is Mary Kay. Some of the people who I have met at Mary Kay's corporate headquarters treat Mary Kay as though it's almost a religion. They feel such a sense of pride talking about Mary Kay. Not only Mary Kay Ash, the founder, but talking about the impact that Mary Kay is making in the lives of women everywhere.

21:48They believe that in their bones. This is not something that they're faking. They're not faking the funk on this. They believe that with their souls, that the work they're doing every day is not just for economic profit, but it is for social impact, empowering and unleashing the innate power of 50 percent of the global population, which is women. When I can see that, it's unavoidable. It's contagious. And they almost made me want to work at Mary Kay Curt. And I have no interest in doing the work that they do. But there's a contagion that spread because the excitement and commitment they have to their purpose makes you want to join the team because you know that they're doing something that's worthwhile and meaningful.

22:39What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about purpose that you want to clear up? I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about purpose is that it is a consolation prize when you can't be profitable. A lot of people think that purpose is the plan B that a company should default to when it can't make money. So since we don't have money, at least we have purpose. I would argue instead that purpose is a driver of profit, whether you're thinking about profit from an economic perspective, from a human perspective or from a social perspective. Profit is enhanced by purpose and purpose is foundational to any organization, not just to those that are explicitly out to create social good.

23:37Nicholas, thanks for coming on the show and talking about this. Kurt, thank you so much for having me. That's Nicholas Pierce. He's a clinical associate professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He's also a pastor, an executive coach, and the author of the new book, The Purpose Path, a guide to pursuing your authentic life's work.

24:02HBR on Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation from Harvard Business Review. If this episode helped you, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. While you're there, consider leaving us a review. When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at hbr.org. This episode was produced by Mary Dute. On Leadership's team includes Maureen Hoke, Rob Eckhart, Erica Truxler, Tina Tobey-Mack, Ramsey Gabaz, Nicole Smith, and Anne Bartholomew.

24:40Music by Koma Media. I'm Alison Beard. Thanks for listening.

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