Looking good, doing good or being good – which box are you in?

Pride in our work life is a really good feeling and one we all strive for. Figuring out what we value about our jobs and what about it makes us feel good comes up every time we’re asked what we do for a living.??

Are you the type to dread the question and skirt quickly around it, naming the organisation where you work and swallowing your words, or desperately trying to find a way of making the work sound as interesting as it can on a good day? Perhaps you focus on the tasks you perform more than the outcomes they achieve.?

Or do you enjoy your work a lot, it not only pays the bills but also stimulates the mind and you’re deeply committed to your organisation’s mission beyond the day-to-day tasks, and the normal ups and downs. ?

If you work in business, do you still define success in terms of quarterly and annual results or do you think about more than money? Do you focus on the purpose of the work or your job title and benefits? ?

These questions have no right or wrong answers. We are merely asking them to help get your mind to consider the difference between what’s most important to you personally about your work – in other words, the difference between how important it is to look good, do good, or be good.?

This is particularly interesting at present as many companies are looking inwards to see if their policies, culture and values are fit for purpose and align with the expectations of their employees.??

For instance, it’s meaningful that the questions businesses ask of Skating Panda today have moved on significantly from a decade ago. We continue to do our campaigning work with non-profits and also now crucially and proudly work with many businesses who are genuine about delivering systemic change that benefits the planet and society.? So, why the change??

Skating Panda’s purpose is about making good stuff happen in the world, and by good stuff we mean helping create a thriving planet and a healthier, fairer society through systemic changes alongside and importantly not to the detriment of more traditional (and Keynesian) measures of success.??

When we started out, most businesses were focused on just looking good for short-term gains – it was a practice we didn’t want to be part of. Instead, we focused on creating cut-through on the biggest issues of our time, working with foundations, NGOs, and individuals to affect systemic change, change that still benefits those organisations and citizens everywhere today.?

The reality was that the short-sighted businesses were not necessarily doing good or even being good behind the scenes. Looking good turns out to be somewhere on a spectrum between vanity and half-decent but detached and temporary Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). And we weren’t interested in that.?

In the last decade, we have seen businesses going a little beyond this, asking us to help align mission and business activity with doing good. And it’s a fact that doing good almost always also looks good and may even start to feel good. That’s because – again, not to the detriment of financial objectives – firms are acting beyond profitable objectives in a concrete way that can pave the way to a safe and certain future.??

Questions asked of us include –??

• We have got a great idea about doing good in the world and we want to now make it happen, but how???
• How can this division or our new product launch have longevity???
• We want to act differently, and we know we need to align on purpose but how do we do that???
• We want to define our purpose and make sure it is the driving force behind everything we do – can you help us??
• How can we create something that becomes a case study and catalyst to prove the case for being profitable through purpose throughout the organisation???

Fortunately, change is happening faster now. Enter being good, a difficult but possible next step.??

If you’re a new business, purpose will likely not be baked into your organisation. Your main challenge might be to break even, maintain or increase margins and/or scale. If you’ve been around longer (think big FTSE, Eurostoxx or DJ), you will need to make systemic changes to achieve the goal – something that businesses are often afraid to tackle. You could be risking some fallout both internally and externally as well as some short-term dips in revenue or profits but the latter is likely to recover quickly. If you’ve got 6-36 months of patience and grit, most things are possible, provided your business is well-governed. ?

For most employees and employers, being good is the nirvana. You can be who you are at work, you can come up with new and strategic solutions, you can typically demonstrate new processes, behaviours and ways of thinking rather than being bound by them, and you can focus on competitive advantage in the industry and impact terms rather than risk mitigation. If you want to reinvent the acronym we’d call it Complete Strategy Response – CSR.?

So, who are you really at work and who do you want to be? When you speak to your colleagues about it, try out the looking good, doing good, being good test on them and ask which of these apply to their work and why? Is it just about the same dopamine kick that an Instagram like might generate today or something much more than that? Answers on a postcard, please.?