Why Aligning Corporate Purpose with Employee's Purpose Works?

According to McKinsey & Company's quarterly survey “Purpose, not platitudes: A personal challenge for top executives”, 44% of respondents say their company's purpose is aligned with the strategy and business activities in practice and also coincident and aligned with employees' sense of individual purpose. Therefore, the workforce is more loyal, engaged, and willing to advocate for their company, as well as they feel accountable to act in line with it to also reach a positive impact on customers and society.

CEOs and other top executives should enlist the organization’s help to fulfil the purpose, not as a checking list to be completed, but as a series of ongoing conversations about purpose and its predictable dilemmas with the key people. Starting dialogue in a meeting with your top team can prompt mindset changes to occur, especially when it comes to giving it relevance by assuming the business is not shareholder value only. However, many leaders confess to having hold back their mission discussions to give a solid appearance as a strong executive.

Lack of discussion should not be taken as agreement

McKinsey survey shows that pursuing greater social impact is one of the main goals for most of the company’s leaders: 39 percent want to change the purpose of their company, compared with 24 percent of all other employees. But how should CEOs frame and start the conversation? Team-wise the disruptions, pressures, and challenges around your business should be considered, and see what as an organization you can do about it.

As a beginning point, McKinsey suggests an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) benchmarking by comparing the company’s purpose with its rivals’ one and using ESG priorities as the focus to define more objectively how the firm is perceived. Through these discussions, the organization should point out which issues are more relevant to executives and why, and then move to comparisons of performance thus to spot pain points and rethink the approach.

Assuming lack of discussion equivalent to agreement equals to say your company’s purpose is good and ambitious enough to cover everyone’s ambition and expectations. But for a leader, it is key to initiate tough conversations aiming to recalibrate in a collaborative way where things stand.

Learning within the organization with your employees

When agreed on the terms and conditions for a way forward, still another challenge awaits you: to define and prioritize what is meaningful for you and what is that for your employees. By aligning them to the cause is the only way to get the most from purpose and thus executives should first find out employees’ sources of meaning and acting to make them embrace the company’s mission in their work.

But including employees in purpose discussions does not happen that often. As the McKinsey survey proves, “72 percent of top leaders said they involved employees in the process of developing the organization’s purpose, yet only 56 percent of frontline employees agreed (and 29 percent disagreed)”. This explains that 72 percent of frontline employees do not consider the company’s purpose matters to them compared to 89 percent of leaders believing so, as well as the first ones are also uncertain how their role contributes to the purpose. Divergences are not showing a lack of interest from the workforce on the purpose of their organization, but that they differed with leaders in terms of what that purpose should focus on.

Commitment and listening are key to connect with employees and seek the equivalences between their personal sense of meaning and the company’s purpose. Convince demotivated people on the significance of this move in the current pandemic and upcoming crisis may take persistence and, as a leader, to go beyond simply communicate plans to tell an engaging story. 

Take time to reflect prior to execution

Before getting into action mode, start a dialogue with yourself before scaling up a purposeful effort. The goal should be introspection, reflection, and humility thus avoiding instant action and instead of testing if both the company’s purpose and your own are suitable for your day-to-day behavior. In other words: How does the organization’s purpose implicate you? What does it require from you to put into practice? This is the only way to find the intersection of individual and company purpose.

Moreover, it is key to accept both vulnerability and the need to accomplish uncomfortable changes to step into the purpose learning zone. McKinsey found from its survey that 44 percent of respondents consider their companies’ purpose isn’t activated as action plans seem inconsistent with it, whereas 15 percent said that their “leaders would pursue a business opportunity that wasn’t in line with the organization’s purpose”. Therefore, to transcend the theory and keep this dialogue useful, it is necessary to reconsider all participants’ behaviors.

As mentioned before, “predictable dilemmas” await along with the conversations within the organization and its potential incongruences could damage the efforts to define and execute the company’s purpose. Nevertheless, addressing them early in the finding of your mission is crucial for the success of this dialogue. The leaders’ discussions can point out underlying challenges and help to assure employees that the company is true to its purpose by giving people proof points and tools to overcome dilemmas in their daily work. Undoubtedly, keeping a strong dialogue with employees is a constant task that should be used to improve the company’s purpose and challenge individuals to make the most of them.

Source: McKinsey Organizational Purpose Survey, October 2019 (n = 855 employees of US organizations with the identified purpose)