How Unilever’s Purpose Inspired Paul Polman to Lead Courageously

Like most career professionals, Paul Polman was well aware of the tremendous pressure that CEOs typically faced – both from within and without. So when Unilever approached him in 2009 to lead the company, he thought, “Is this worth the price I will have to pay?” He knew that accepting the position would come with skeptics fully expecting him to fail. Not only would he be taking over Unilever at the height of the financial crisis, but he would also be tasked with turning around a company that was quickly losing market share to its competitors.

So what gave him the courage to accept the challenge?

As Polman shared on my podcast Deep Purpose, he was inspired by Unilever’s overall purpose – one that was forged by its founder, William Lever, back in the late 19th century. By developing a new kind of soap (made from vegetable oil rather than tallow), Lever aimed to make personal hygiene commonplace in Britain at a time when squalor and disease threatened people’s health.

William Lever was also a believer in the concept of “shared prosperity,” Polman said. This philosophy led Lever to build housing and establish pensions for his workers, then-progressive ideas in 19th-century Britain.?

In effect, Lever was promoting a 19th-century version of sustainability, and after Polman took over in 2009, he sought to make that clear by defining the company’s purpose: “to make sustainable living commonplace.” In the 21st century, this purpose now encompasses hundreds of Unilever products, from soap to food and vitamins.

“I’ve always said that the reason I joined Unilever was to serve the underserved,” Polman said. This led him to implement the company’s Sustainable Living Plan, which focuses on improving people’s health and well-being; reducing the company’s environmental footprint; and advancing the livelihoods of underrepresented stakeholders, including women and small-business owners.

During his tenure, Polman proved that businesses were capable of both doing well and doing good: Shareholder returns climbed 300 percent while Unilever steadily gained a global reputation for sustainability and employee engagement.

Pursuing sustainability did not always lead to win-win situations, however. Polman’s courage was frequently put to the test – especially in 2017, when Kraft Heinz launched an unsolicited $143 billion bid for Unilever. Polman faced intense short-term pressure to accept the deal. But knowing the acquisition would hurt Unilever’s long-term capacity to deliver on its purpose, he forcefully resisted it – until Kraft Heinz eventually withdrew the offer.

Since leaving Unilever in 2018, Polman has been connecting with other businesses on issues like climate change, inequality, and social responsibility. “We are working now with broad industry groups that we bring together to make CEO’s collectively more courageous to make them do more together than they can do individually,” he said.

Polman sees a need for this kind of outreach because he believes that too many leaders ignore their responsibility to the planet. Certainly, most CEOs don’t actively desire more unemployment or people going to bed hungry, but collectively they tend to act that way – perhaps unconsciously – because of the pressures of what he calls “market short-termism.”

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This “market short-termism” among executives has been well-documented by academics. Still, Polman argues that such collective apathy to social issues has wider implications: “The issues that businesses now face are of such magnitude that nobody can really solve them by themselves anymore.” The scale of these issues, according to Polman, is why he believes it’s more important than ever that CEOs build the courage necessary to tackle them: “It requires broader systems changes, which require partnerships and sometimes uncomfortable alliances. That takes courage… Ultimately, we will not solve these issues if we don’t get governments behind us and have the right frameworks to operate.”

Listen to our full conversation here - or if you've already listened in, check out Polman's more recent work on conscious quitting here.

An adapted version of this newsletter first appeared on Inc.com.