The winding purpose of my B Corp journey

Rogerwilco has just become a B Corp which means we’ve made a commitment to doing business for good. And damn, it feels good.

Our journey towards B Corp certification was unusual, so this is not your typical agency leader braggadocious post. It’s actually an admission of failure and I share it in the hope of inspiring others who may be experiencing challenges similar to the ones that set us on this path.

As a business, we’d somewhat lost our way in recent years. Awkwardly, like most digital agencies, we had a ‘good’ covid. But as the grey clouds of 2020/21 lifted and we tried to return to normal, we realised that normal wasn’t where we thought we’d parked it.?

Our team was scattered all over the world. Our values had evolved. Different things mattered. WFH aided focus … but it smashed culture. We stuck a band aid on it in 2022. But it wasn’t a cure. And by the time 2023 rolled around, our staff attrition was out of hand.? Valued colleagues were jumping ship and while it wasn’t all our fault, it was evident that there was a whole lot we ought to be doing to address it, most of which centred on the P word.

Purpose is the foundation on which so much corporate success is credited. It’s such an easy word to deliver in speech but such an incredibly difficult one to deliver in practice. And it’s a word that’s barely given me a moment’s peace in the past 18 months.

Mid last year, after a period of intensely critical introspection, I realised that all the stuff we’d been saying about purpose inside my agency was horseshit. There were lots of nice words .. lots of carefully crafted words …inspirational words … aspirational words. Damn, look how good we are!

But were they believable? Could we really demonstrate that we lived our purpose? Of course not. Pretty much every single word was a meticulously polished turd - beautiful at a glance, but peel away the veneer and you’d soon be enveloped in an all-too-familiar reek.

The main elements of our old purpose statement were things we kind of thought we believed; or things we thought others would like us for saying. Words we hoped might attract prospective employees or clients to work with us. But they weren’t tangible. And they certainly weren’t hard wired into our behaviours. On reflection, when we created the words, we were trying to be authentic (honest). But I suspect we were also trying too hard to please.

So we tossed them out and started afresh. Like so many projects, the purpose reborn initiative grew horns, evolving beyond its initial scope. What began as the process of gathering thoughts and feelings from team members and distilling them into an ‘essence’ of Rogerwilco, turned into something much bigger. And much more meaningful.

Amazingly, we buttoned our purpose down pretty quickly - in a nutshell, it’s defined as Be Better and it recognises that we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues, clients, communities and every stakeholder we engage with to constantly evolve and improve who we are and how we do things (there’s an internal manifesto that describes Be Better rather more eloquently than this).?

Feedback from the team was: we got this; we believe it; but let’s go further. So earlier this year we embarked on a B Corp certification journey to provide an external ratification that our purpose was more about action and mindfulness than words alone.?

What happened next was truly remarkable. People saw we were really serious about making it stick.??

Better moments began to crop up everywhere - and it was so natural. So un-forced. The culture of the business changed. Almost overnight. Collaboration and support became instinctive. A living example is the plaque and shelf that appeared on one of the office walls with the legend: Let’s Be Better Humans. It’s a platform for the team to share stories of our lives. Things that we don’t know about each other. Things that make us better. And although the stories swap out fortnightly, it’s booked up for the next few months.

Let me go back to one sentence in that para: ‘the culture of the business changed’. Culture’s one of those things all business leaders crave because we know that organisations with great cultures don’t just outperform, they operate on a whole new level. As Peter Drucker famously said ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

But the more, as leaders, we want culture, the more likely we are to force it … and that creates veneer clad turds.

The big take out for me is that purpose breeds culture. Leaders should not mess with or attempt to influence culture, but they can help an organisation define its purpose. And if they do it authentically, they’ll create a fertile environment in which culture can develop organically.

So let me pivot back to B Corp. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a global movement that recognises companies that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. And it encourages businesses to be profitable, because if they make money, they can have even greater impact.

Sadly, it’s not that well known in South Africa - I think we’re just the 10th SA based company to achieve certification. But I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about B Corp as the international business community is showing a growing desire to embrace its constructs and what happens overseas eventually washes down to our shores.

The assessment is rigorous and takes the average business the best part of a year to navigate. We managed it a little faster than this - partly because our compliance with South Africa’s Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment framework meant many of the processes B Corp evaluates were already documented, partly because we were well guided by the fabulous Tom Fels at Animarem, but mostly because we really wanted it. We’d found a really credible 3rd party certification that aligned with not only our corporate values but with our personal belief structures.

B Corp did not define our purpose and it didn’t catalyse the growth of our culture, but in a world full of masquerade, it’s sure as hell given us reason to believe in ourselves. And I am so damned proud of the team who made it stick.