5 things to get right in your purpose journey

I’ve been part of a significant and quiet transformation for the past 5 years, and its time to share a little bit of that excitement today. I don’t write on behalf of the company but as an employee who has experienced a little magic, and as a marketing professional engaging with peers on similar journeys.

Worth $42 billion, the Shell brand is the most iconic and powerful trademark in the energy industry over the last 120 years. Transforming the brand and the company via the Shell Purpose journey (from definition to embedding) has been the sort of multi-year transformation that had a million moments of truth, the adrenalin rush from dozens of ripples in a giant pond that rise to become a tsunami of change. From a quiet ‘brand team’ project in 2015 to being reflected in the global strategy of the company shared with investors in February 2021, it took the relentless effort of the brand team in Shell (leading this) and dozens of ‘brand jedis’ and passionate purpose champions who partnered with us from over 70 multi-billion dollar businesses within the company. With the belief that each situation is different, we individually engaged with businesses from Brazil and Canada in the west all the way to Brunei and China in the east. In each case, we executed a carefully designed/refined ‘Purpose to CVP’ (P2CVP) program over 6 methodical steps for each business where we worked with the leadership team to craft a refreshed business strategy, goals, ambitions and action plans that would deliver against the evolving needs of a multi-stakeholder world. As we then handed over the baton from the central brand team to the business, capable workstream leads took over to deliver against these ambitions – whether it was via R&D pipeline changes, supply chain innovation, cleaner sources of energy for our operations or carbon relevant products to our customers. You can listen to Dean Aragon (my boss & the ‘brand guy’ from Shell) talk more about this journey in this podcast or in my own podcast with Deborah Malone in this link.

What’s changed after all this? At the root, it’s the mindset of our junior most people and leaders, who, more than ever before, passionately believe it’s possible to deliver against multiple stakeholder needs and are excited by the possibilities (reflected in stronger people survey results on purpose and pride). After all, Shell attracts and recruits the top talent in the world and when the smartest people in the world get excited, the world will see (and is seeing already) amazing stories of purpose driven innovation! We now have more than 100 stories of actual change made by our staff into business operations and plans, empowering lives, reducing carbon footprint or giving back to nature (you can see many of these captured in our website). We call these ‘proof points’ that serve as catalysts and sources of inspiration for bigger and broader impact actions. This accelerating and growing list of proof points is the reason why I come to work each day, sharing, encouraging and pushing for more! While the initial focus was on ‘storydoing’ and not ‘storytelling’, we are slowly encouraging more and more of the latter internally to inspire change.

As I speak to CEOs and CMOs worldwide, many companies are embarking on their own purpose embedding journeys . It’s important we all get this right, if we are to together help make our impact on the planet and its constituents. In that spirit, we’ve reflected as a team and am capturing 5 things that anyone has to get right in this journey.

1.??????Setting up for Success: Leadership & governance in place to ensure prioritization, ownership and tracking. One needs to ensure strong, ongoing messages from leadership of each business unit. Each strategy shift conversation takes several months to move from ‘I get it’ to ‘I love it’ to finally ‘I live it’ and this needs resilience but also resourcing for success. Ambitions need to be tracked, reported and actions need to be followed up. The more successful Shell businesses had dedicated program / change managers appointed for 6-12 month periods and visual dashboards for both in-process and outcome KPIs. Don’t get started if you’re not set up for success.

2. Customer centric: In all large organisations, its easy for office based staff to lose sight of the humans along & at the end of our value chains – the communities we serve, the customers, distributors and their employees etc. A very important factor for success for us was to ‘humanise’ the stakeholder, giving them personas, names, habits/quirks/hobbies and families. Using some of the techniques I had picked up in my P&G marketing days, we took hours to do this with each leadership team, helping them to articulate the deep, unmet and unarticulated needs of each key stakeholder group. On reflection, I can honestly say, this was probably one of the most important factors driving motivation to change and improving quality of strategy in all of our partner businesses.

3.??????Methodical & Deliberate: Every business has many initiatives and projects they’re working on. However, purpose embedding is more strategic with a longer lasting impact and thus needs a few things to succeed. First, it has to be clearly embedded into the core strategy of the business and not become a separate checklist of things to do. The actions have to be aligned with the annual, quarterly and monthly planning processes of the businesses. Finally, one needs a multi-year roadmap to delivery since true transformation is not achieved overnight. A professional central team needs to ensure rigour and discipline.

4.??????Staff engagement: This is not a leadership only exercise. We learnt that helping large numbers of staff become ‘ambassadors’, connect to the Purpose and to their own business’ purpose-rooted strategy helps unleash discretionary effort and engagement. We worked with some experts from the UK theater industry to find techniques that could get our coldest traders and engineers to become emotional about the purpose and their legacy in the company. Leaders shared powerful and personal stories on why this mattered to them. Next level leaders were allowed to be cynics and throw darts at their bosses and their strategy, before coming around in safe, authentic and personal conversations. We ensured a clear link to the day job and annual targets for staff (compensation of senior leadership of the company had been linked to various purpose related metrics for a while anyway). And finally, we tracked results on people engagement - new and relevant questions in the annual people survey were shared with executive committee members every 2 months (for several years).

5.??????Consistency and pragmatism: One needs both. The central program team (Andrew Evans and I) didn’t change for 5 years, and neither did the expert ‘brand jedis’ we had trained up to help with this. We called on these experts regardless of whether their ‘day job’ had changed in a few years. At the same time, the pragmatism came from the realization that not all businesses or leaders are ready for change at the same time. We allowed some businesses and leaders a few years (sometimes) to stabilize and come around to becoming believers, before accelerating. We also had to move really fast in some cases (a few weeks) if the business required urgent strategy intervention.

Hope this was useful. As always, welcome comments, questions, reflections from your own experiences and ideas to improve effectiveness and efficiency for those organisations that are starting this journey now.