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EP19: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Shallow Purpose with Brandon Peele of ion Learning

Transcript

Participants:

Michael Young

Brandon Peele, VP People Science at ionLearning

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

Over the past decade, purpose and the business for good ideology has moved beyond TED Talks and Davos salons and cocktail parties to a set of best practices and tools that can be deployed to activate corporate purpose at scale. In fact, understanding that and getting into that is part of why I started this podcast and there are lots of questions that come after an organization sets out to become more purpose driven or purpose led and purpose often means changing almost every aspect of how business is done. And my guest today is Brandon Peele, the vice president of people science at ion Learning and ion Learning provides tools and technology for social learning within an organization, a sort of operating system if you will for organizations on a purpose journey that leads and helps people understand their purpose, the purpose and help them feel more connected and inspired and safe at work and really how to create an inclusive culture within an organization. I got introduced to Brandon through my good friend Carolyn Hodge of Roccam Consulting and it was reading a white paper that Brandon co-authored on the subject of purpose that really closed the deal and made me want to have him on the podcast.

And so, today Brennan and I talk about the purpose journey broadly and the steps and the changes an organization must take toward that journey and how to create a purpose led culture. We talk about where purpose manifests in the organization, how it shows up and not signs and symbols and slogans but in actions and outcomes and we actually spend a fair bit of time and that may be not enough but a good bit of time talking about the risks and watch outs of faux purpose, purpose washing and Brandon elaborates that under three warnings, that of shallow purpose, elitism and lack of commitment and that's later in the podcast. So, it was a very interesting and inspiring conversation and I'm very grateful to Brandon for coming on the podcast. So, without further ado, my conversation with Brandon Peele of ion Learning. Brandon, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah, it's great to be with you here, Michael.

Michael Young:

Thanks so much. So, let's get right into it. I think you all have a point of view on the ROI of purpose. Let's drop into that.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah.

Michael Young:

Go ahead. Yeah.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. Well, first, let me just be clear like what it is we're talking about when we say purpose because as you know, the word is ubiquitous now. People are talking about beer and soap and pop music using that that sacred word purpose that is the way to engage what is really like a deep longing in people's lives to matter and to have meaning. And so, the way that we treat it at ion and amongst my colleagues in the global purpose leaders is we hold it as a transcendent identity that is beyond your personality, beyond your organization. It's something that you can try to express through vision and purpose and values but it really is almost has like an ineffable quality, like a sacred like battle cry of some sort. And so, now how do you measure that? I don't know. But what people are measuring is whether or not, is basically the incremental efforts that people put in terms of innovation and productivity when they feel part of something larger than themselves. So, it's a proxy of what maybe a sacred purpose is.

And so, one of the amazing things that it just happened over the last decade or so is all of these large institutions, Bain, McKinsey, Harvard, Stanford are saying this is actually what matters. There's very little left in terms of optimizing efficiency in the economy other than the human experience. And so, we're looking at how do we innovate, how do we disrupt? And what they've found is that when people have a transcendent identity, when they're connected to something bigger than their own selfish desires, they're 175% more productive, that they're willing to forgo a substantial portion of their lifetime earnings, 23% of their lifetime earnings if they can be a part of something that matters to them. And as you can imagine, this means a reduction in turnover, a reduction in sick days, fewer doctors' visits and basically people showing up as if it matters. And so, they're not phoning it in. They're looking for creative ways to solve problems. They're empowering each other to be more purposeful, to do their best, to go for that next promotion, to do the next training program. And so, it's really a shift from widgets and extraction production to how do we have the most fun at work and achieve our highest potential great?

Michael Young:

Great. And from an employee engagement standpoint, productivity, fulfillment that all makes sense. What you cite the I guess now famous case of Heinz and Unilever as maybe an exemplar of two organizations that were on either side of that discussion. So, just give us that, unpack that for us. Yeah.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. So, basically, Kraft Heinz and Unilever have two radically different approaches to business. Unilever is fundamentally stakeholder-driven, purpose oriented. They do a lot of things that cause traditional Wall Street analysts to scratch their heads but that ends up turning into more sales and more customer loyalty and what they found is that over the last, basically the last five years, the delta in performance has been 90% between Kraft Heinz and Unilever. So, Kraft Heinz has gone down 61% and Unilever has gone up 33%. So, all that human potential, all that productivity, all the innovation was unleashed on behalf of the team because they’re like yes, we are going to make products, like a very famous one Dove, right? that are for all women, that do not shame women into a size two and that inspires us. So, I'm going to be talking to my friends on the weekends, I'm going to be sharing with my partner, I'm going to be doing research, reading related books on this sort of thing and I'm bringing all that back to my team. And so, Unilever consistently outperforms Kraft Heinz because Kraft Heinz is basically a cost-cutting strategy. It's a in a sense like a dinosaur in terms of how it approaches people and profit.

Michael Young:

Excellent. And I was just listening to Paul Pullman, the former head of Unilever on a an FT webinar and podcast and just kind of talking about this same. He's moved on and he's trying to get more and more organizations on the same path.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah.

Michael Young:

So, yeah, he's an incredible voice for this idea. So, give us your theory of change. How do you advise organizations? How do you approach this? What are the steps?

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. So, there's the right way to do it and then there's other ways to do it that have varying levels of efficacy. So, I'm just going to share with you kind of like the Cadillac Mercedes-Benzes version. And this happens when senior executives feel that pinch. They feel like all right, I am working my tail off. I've been working my tail off for 20 years. I could retire. Why am I still here? And part of them says I should retire. I'm done. The other part is like I have got a legacy to leave here. And so, that senior executive and hopefully a cadre of senior executives say let's spend some portion of our time on this question of legacy. And so, they bring in a purpose coach, consultants and they do deep purpose work themselves which is not to say that they don't have a sense of purpose, their lives don't have any meaning. But they reawaken that capacity to intuit, to feel into what's really there for themselves. And then once all of those purposes are in the room, there's another process that reveals your organization's purpose and these processes can range from very mystical to more conversational around our values and how our values show up at work. But what ends up being revealed is a future vision for what that organization could be and all the senior executives feel a connection to it and then from there, we then move in this strategy. We then move into activating the purposeful leadership of all of our team members beginning with the frontline managers because they are the culture stewards, the strategic operators for the entire organization and then the rest of the employees because this can't be something for the special kids. Purpose is a civil right. I believe it's our birthright and when an entire team has the opportunity to bring their whole selves to work, that's when you see that big 30% bump in innovation and a 175 % bump in productivity.

Michael Young:

Got it. And then what happens?

Brandon Peele:

So, basically, everyone has to learn how to be different at work. It's not that metrics no longer matter but now we are cultivating intimacy with each other on a team by team basis. We're being more vulnerable sort of leading differently. We're creating many more one-on-ones. We're having performance always in the context of career development, always in the context of that employee’s purpose so that they can see like if I move to this level of performance, I will then have the ability to express my purpose even more deeply. So, it's a more intimate one-on-one, player/coach relationship than manager/subordinate. And so, once the culture and the leadership begin to evolve to have this purpose orientation whether measuring the health of your teams not just on productivity and achieving goals but on the quality of their relationships, on how much they're learning and how they feel about the work that they're doing. So, it requires some more subjective analytics to capture really how purpose activated a particular team has versus another.

And then it kind of goes without staying but once that happens, there's this kind of domino approach where as people start to bring their purpose to work, they start to see all sorts of ways to do it better and a number of structures end up getting implemented such as a chief purpose officer and that's basically somebody who is in charge of that organization's purpose. A lot of times this follows the CEO. We actually recommend that you have a separate individual who works across the organization and is always truing up business processes and teams with the organization's purpose. And when to change how you measure. And so, we are big fan of B corps and that ethos of looking at the impact of the organization's purpose and their activities on employees, on community, obviously investors and the environment but it's changing how we measure success and that ultimately also brings in an inequity conversation around wow, we're doing great but why is everyone in this room white. So, it bleeds into diversity and inclusion. It bleeds into how the spoils are distributed because if everyone is bringing their purpose to work, they're basically showing up like an owner. So, they probably should be compensated that way. So, how do you tie individual performance and purpose activation to financial performance?

And lastly, I would just say that this whole person orientation requires a different way of working. Obviously, all of this has been thrown into the spotlight now since the pandemic but this focus on wholeness, on wellness, bringing in a number of best practices for human potential and human flourishing like shorter work weeks, more flexibility, paid sick leave, hazard pay, all the things that the leading companies in this movement are doing, they did it because of purpose. Now we're seeing that like we have to do it just to get that person to want to work here.

Michael Young:

Right, right. So, does this work for every company? Because as you were talking, this sounds very Berkeley, Marin County, B Corp. Right? So, can every company get there? I think a lot of the things that you talk about are incredibly aspirational and I think if you asked any organization and any leadership of any organization they would say yes, that's what we want. But those things don't always line up. So, how do counsel, how do you advise companies that maybe are not as progressive?

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. So, the short answer is everybody can get there and we actually never get there. So, it's a process, it's a commitment and it's something you know that will not be complete by the time you die or by the time you retire. So, it begins by taking some steps. So, one of the easiest ways to begin is to work with the executives on their purpose. Now this has to be opt-in. Somebody who is dyed-in-the-wool that just thinks that Milton Friedman, the business to business is business is probably not going to do it. And over time, that person will slowly feel that they probably would be better off in another place or maybe they then feel the call. The easiest place to begin is with executives. Make it available to them and then there are a number of enterprise solutions that are also very easy to do. So, obviously, my company, I am learning that there's hone, there's cross knowledge, there’s imperatives, there’s as a number of folks who have scaleable enterprise wide purpose activation offerings. And what you can do it is begin by weaving them into the onboarding and into the frontline manager leadership development. And so, essentially what this begins to force a function is that the people who are actually creating the value, not just managing the value but creating the value are operating in a far different way. The people at the top are starting to operate in a different way. And then these are two very simple things and it begins to kind of create a polarity from the bottom to the top. Like this is who we are, this is what we want to be and then you can bite off the next piece. It's like okay, our people want this, our executives want this, we need to do an organizational purpose reawakening, a reorienting and then from there, close out the strategy objectives, policy upgrades.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And I think you mentioned something which I want to come back to is, well, you briefly touched on recruitment and I was talking to a couple other folks about this topic that increasingly the generational move away, that there's a generational shift and that Gen Z wants purpose laid out first and foremost. So, it isn’t a nice to have, right? It's absolutely going to drive talent management and acquisition going forward.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah, yeah. I would say that all the generations in the workforce have some orientation towards it. Boomers are thinking about legacy, Gen Xers are hitting midlife crises, the Millennials and Zillennials are asking themselves why am I doing anything right now. It seems like everything's broken. Yeah, a paycheck would be great but at the price of what? And so, they're much better at advocating for their needs. You and I, we were probably more willing to trade a piece of our soul for some security. Younger generations are not so and it has to be more than something stuck to the wall. This has to be embodied in the hiring manager, it has be part of the team ethos and there have to be resources around it. So, you join this firm, you will get an opportunity to activate your purpose, continue to grow career advancement opportunities but it's going to be dictated by what you want to do.

Michael Young:

Yep. All right. So, I want to move into COVID because I think all of the things that you are describing and we're seeing it, that we're seeing the stark relief now between organizations that are purposeful and those that are not. So, what are you seeing right now? How is this playing out through the pandemic?

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. Well, to be perfectly frank, it does take a fair amount of psychic bandwidth to think about purpose and I don't yet think we're out of the phase of panic. Some things are starting to stabilize. Obviously some things are already opening regardless of how well considered that move is. But shortly I would say in the next few weeks, so what is it now? It's almost the end of May. I would say as people start to think about who they are in Q3, they've made some big decisions, maybe some reorgs and layoffs, they started think about that maybe their purpose doesn't actually make a damn bit of difference or their current expressed kind of corporate strategy doesn't really matter to anyone anymore. They're going to start to ask those questions much as people did right after 9/11. There's a wave, a wave of professionals who just said I am not going to be part of something that doesn't make a difference. That might be fighting terrorism. But now people are looking at all the gross equities that this, as you said, like the stark relief is showing us. Like I've got to do something that lifts people up, that creates a working economy, that pays a living wage, that creates opportunities for everybody, that takes an activist stance towards women, people of color, people who identify as a straight or male or female. And so, there's a kind of a latent purpose yearning that is about to spring. But right now we're not seeing it. Like in our business, a lot of people are still on pause. Either they're hiring massively because they provide an essential service or they're just freaking out. So, Q3 I'm guessing there'll probably be a big expansion in the purpose conversation.

Michael Young:

Right. Got it. I want to jump to one of the things that is in your white paper and that really leapt off the page to me which is this notion that this can't be microwaved, it has to be slow-cooked.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah, yeah. And I wish I could take credit for that phrase. I was said by somebody at Freddie Mac who was in the people department. I forget his name but it hit me like a ton of bricks too when I heard it. I was like yes, of course, we all know this. You can have an off-site, you can have a half-day training, you can buy a copy of a purposeful book for the entire company. All that's great but unfortunately, the research on culture change and on pivoting and just overall change management all points to a sustained approach. So, we've got to put anything strategic or cultural oriented or people oriented, we want to do in the slow cooker and on the strategic extent, that just means making improvements every month towards trimming up the organization to its purpose. so, it's a long term commitment. You're never there. There's always going to be a delta between the ideal and where you're at. But the important thing is to make the progress. Now on the culture front, this is the part I think that is least understood, we've seen some really encouraging research on what actually works. Now the old way of doing things is hire trainer, hire consultants, maybe hire your special snowflakes, an executive coach and that's fine for them in those moments. They might have a transcendent experience in the off-site or the half-day. But it actually has proven, it doesn't work. 90% of everything that is learned is forgotten within a week.

And so, that old way of doing things like dropping you into a two-day off-site or three-day off-site, it didn't work in the first place and now, of course, it's increasingly difficult to do. So, the approach that actually works is a bite-sized learning and discussion over time where you pair some transformative content around purpose, around inclusion and around emotional intelligence, whatever the larger culture goal is and you move people through a journey together in small groups of three or four. Now you can do it in one-on-one peer coaching imperative style. I have done that. It's highly effective. There's something that happens that's uncommon at the group size of three to four and that's where you get a diversity of perspective around a particular issue without sacrificing trust and intimacy. So, moving folks through a journey where they're doing an hour of transformational content, taking into action and then telling their experience of doing that so engaging storytelling, engaging empathy, emotional intelligence, that's where the real learning happens. We've got a white paper coming out soon that suggests that the amount of learning that occurs as a result of these conversations is 160% of what it would otherwise be without small groups getting together and sharing about their experiences.

Michael Young:

Excellent. So, last question, last kind of setup here, let's talk about pitfalls of trying to for lack of a better term half-assed. So, how do you think about that? What are the pitfalls? What are the watch outs? And how do organizations need to be thinking about this in order to do it right?

Brandon Peele:

Well, you basically just play this podcast on backwards like a Beatles record. Well, and we've seen this a lot over the last five years especially hiring organizations, talent marketing organizations are seeing that the marketplace is creating purpose. So, they're changing their language, investing in some nifty videos, showing some diverse people doing some community service or something like that and those aren't bad things necessarily. But if that's all it is, it pretty quickly gets realized as shallow purpose. Like during the day, I've got a terrible manager, I have to do things that mean nothing to me, there's no opportunity to discover who I am, to activate my purpose. I'm basically a corporate drone who gets to do volunteering once a month and that shallow purpose is similar to the green washing of the 2000s or whitewashing or wool washing and what we're saying is that it's souring regular people's listening of the word purpose itself. Like oh, yeah, I was once part of a purposeful organization. It was terrible. Like you hear about these things. When you look at a lot of quote-unquote purpose driven organizations and their Glassdoor ratings, a lot of them have burnout cultures. They’re like our mission is enough. We are providing low-income housing. That should be enough and what they find is that people hate working there. They don't make enough money, they have job insecurity, their managers are cracking the whip. So, what we need is deep purpose and that's where the executives do it, the frontline managers, all the employees and then they begin to upgrade the organization. So, that's the first one is that shallow purpose, that whitewashing piece.

And the second is this traditional approach that yes, purpose is important, leaders are more effective and efficient and productive so let's just upgrade our leadership and everything else would take care of itself. That doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. Leaders actually end up leaving. We've seen this time and time again with our clients. Like oh, we just want to invest in this population and we do it and we realize we spent a whole year training people to know who they are and then they leave. So, what we need to do is yes, train those people but train the whole organization to let them know that this is a place where they can live it. And so, it's a much more egalitarian enterprise-wide approach to activating human potential. And then the last is similar, it's the inverse, like I said, of the slow cooker. It's the microwave approach where they say oh, purpose is great, let's bring in Simon Sinek, let's bring in Aaron Hurst, let's bring in Richard Leider to train our leaders and then leaders have this awesome experience, a few behaviors get taken in the weeks after and then everything reverts to the me. So, those are basically the three pitfalls: elitism, lack of commitment and shallow purpose.

Michael Young:

Fantastic. I definitely want to play this podcast backwards to hear those pitfalls. But that was an incredible summary, Brandon. Thank you. And we're going to have to leave it there but thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation.

Brandon Peele:

Yeah. Well, and thank you, Michael. This conversation, not just ours but the conversation you have, this Purpose Inc. podcast is so needed because, like I said, in Q3 people are going to be looking for clarity, for accessibility and you're doing a great service to humanity by doing this podcast. So, thank you.

Michael Young:

All right. We're going to leave it there. Brandon, thanks so much.

Brandon Peele:

Take care.

Michael Young:

Bye.

Michael Young:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.