Moral Purpose in Business and Education

LRN (2019) tracks “the State of Moral Leadership in business.” LRN defines moral leadership as “how leaders touch hearts, not just minds—how they enlist others in a shared and significant endeavor and create the conditions where everyone can contribute their fullest talent and realize their deepest humanity” (p. 3). Here are the main findings:

1. 87% of respondents say that the need for moral leadership is greater than ever.
2. 94% of managers and executives who lead with moral authority, rather than relying on the formal authority of their roles, are considered effective in achieving business goals. Moral leaders are also regarded as more effective at encouraging innovation (90% vs. 11%).
3. Only 7% said their managers consistently exhibit the behaviors of moral leadership; 59% say their managers exhibit few or none of the behaviors of moral leadership.
4. The researchers identified seven practices that employees see moral leaders doing. They start with a cause, see employees as people, foster freedom, demonstrate humility, act with courage, seek the truth, and uphold ethical standards. (Reader: Compare these traits with those of effective leaders that I identify throughout this book and summarize in Chapter 7.)

The survey found that “90% of the people who work for moral leaders say they feel seen, heard, and respected; 89% say they feel like they matter, and 95% say they are inspired to contribute their best efforts when they work for these leaders” (pp. 4–8).

The bottom line is that LRN found that moral leadership is consistently good for business, and is in short supply (only 14% of leaders consistently demonstrate most of the moral leadership behaviors).

LRN authors then identify four pillars of moral leadership: let purpose lead; inspire and elevate others; be animated by values and virtues; and keep building “moral muscle” (not the best phrase in my view, but which means constantly attending to moral purpose).

The obvious conclusion is that moral purpose is good for business and good for life. Put in terms of “leading in a culture of change,” all five components in our model as a set constitute full-blown moral purpose in action.

In education, one would think that moral purpose would fare better than in business. After all, education of the young is a moral undertaking. I would have to say that by the criteria of moral purpose accomplished (i.e., that the majority of students do well at school and as human beings), education falls far short. This is not a blame statement. It is damn tough to serve all students, given the diversity and circumstances of starting points. What we have instead is that the majority of school districts have moral purpose in their vision statements and strategic plans, but the track record of accomplishments is substantially wanting. I titled one of my books Moral Imperative Realized (Fullan, 2011). When one looks closely, you can find examples of success (schools going from low to high performance), but they are decidedly in the minority. In a moment, we will look at one of these exceptions. My point will be that it can be done, but will require the mobilization of the power of our full model and its five components.

As we turn to an example, let us consider the hypothetical question to a large group of teachers: “Can all students learn?” Most of us would predict that teachers would say yes. And they would mean it. However, if some of these teachers were in a school where many students were not in fact learning year after year, I would doubt that deep down they would believe that all students could learn. What could change their minds?

I can tell you two things that won't change their minds. One is “research evidence.” Here is a school just like yours—similar demographics and resources—that is highly successful. A second approach that will not work is what I call “increased moral exhortation.” The leader states the moral imperative in a louder voice and more frequently. The first approach (research evidence) tells you it can be done, while the second (moral exhortation) says it should be done. Neither tells you how it can be accomplished. And the how perspective is also tricky; people don't get it if you tell them the step-by-step means of making a change.

What, then, could be done to successfully challenge the status quo? The type of thing that does work is giving people new experiences in relatively nonthreatening circumstances with help from peers or others that results in giving students opportunity to be successful where they are indeed learning—easy to say, hard to do. In fact, the hard-to-do consists of the orchestration of the five components of the model that guides this books: moral purpose, understanding change, collaboration, deep learning, and coherence making—all with diverse people.

Let's illustrate with a tough example (other cases will be presented in subsequent chapters). In my book Nuance, I report on the case of Benjamin Adlard Primary School—a high-poverty primary school in Lincolnshire, England, that, to say the least, was a toxic mess and had been for at least a decade. At the time, Marie-Claire Bretherton was a successful principal of another high-poverty school in the same broad Lincolnshire area. Her assignment was to turn the school around, removing it from what England calls “special measures”—a status that the school had had for several years.

Benjamin Adlard has about 30 staff with 220 pupils. Nearly 70% of the students are on free school meals. The school population is highly transient, with 33% coming and going in a given year; 30% are in special needs. Marie-Claire sized up the initial situation:

I know what I am doing in my own school that works, but I knew it was not going to translate into Benjamin Adlard. The context was different, the staff was different, and although the mission and the values were the same, the approach needed to be different. I could have taken the outstanding curriculum model in my own school and imposed it, or transferred some great teachers from my school to teach there. But I knew intuitively that this wouldn't work. I knew that as soon as I brought someone in and said here is an expert who is going to come and solve your problems that I would immediately undermine any sense of them owning the improvement journey, and their ability to learn. (interview, June 2018)

Bretherton continued:

I interviewed every single member of staff from cleaner to deputy head, just asking them everything they could tell me about the school and its history. They said to me whatever you think you know it is not going to work here; we've tried everything. These children just aren't capable of succeeding in school; the challenges they face in life are just too big… At my first staff meeting I said you may think I am going to sack you all. That's not what I am going to do. All I ask is that you turn up every day and that you are willing to learn, and that's all I need from you. We'll do it together. That was very countercultural and a big gamble. You know we didn't lose anybody. All of them stayed. (Interview, June 2018)

There are a lot of details in the Adlard case about establishing trust, skilling-up the workforce, managing students, and giving and receiving help that I won't go into here (see Fullan, 2019, pp. 32–42). Instead, let's get inside the thinking of the leader.

When I asked Bretherton what she had learned about leadership, she responded:

I think I have probably underestimated in the past the power of your own sense of vision and hope, and your own mental discipline…Just being able to conjure up in yourself optimism and hope where you are in the face of somebody who tells you that it is not possible. What I learned is about the leadership of humanity.

Later in the interview, Bretherton reflected on why she took the job.

I visited the school. The playground was a wasteland of concrete. The pupils were pale; some looked malnourished and unhappy. The acting headteacher had no hope that things could ever be any better. She had lost faith in the system. The stories of the children included backgrounds of child prostitution, trafficking, domestic abuse, parental drug abuse and alcoholism, child brutality, child pornography. None of these children were older than 9 years of age.

The thing that broke my heart was not just that bad things had happened to these children, but it was that the staff had no aspirations, no vision, and no hope. (Interview 2018)

Two years later, the school was off special measures and won an award for being “School of the year: Making a difference.” The school is now oversubscribed, with students/parents and staff alike wanting to come and be there.

The Pervasive Power of Moral Purpose

As the world gets more complex and as the questions of our planet's mortality loom larger and more evident, the link between the moral purpose of our institutions and our own individual well-being becomes more intertwined. In addressing the situation, we have a leadership problem and an employee problem.

Gallup (Clifton & Harter, 2019) just completed a massive compilation of more than 30 years of studies of workplace tracking. Gallup's main finding was that “the single biggest factor in your organization's long-term success is the quality of managers and team leaders” (p. 12).

The bad news, as we will see in a moment, is the very low level of employee engagement in most companies. The good news is that the fate of organizations, and the fate of employees, are fundamentally connected. Incremental increases in this connection would yield huge dividends for organizations, employees, and their clients. One of the advantages of starting at a low bar is that initial success may be possible, and may have a leverage effect, given its mutual desirability.

We can start with the existing situation. Gallup finds there is a growing awareness and interest on the part of the young in their own and others' human potential. Most millennials (born between 1980 and 1996), and Generation Z (born 1997 and later) are increasingly interested in doing something worthwhile, including having a worthwhile job. These are the six biggest changes in the past 20 years that Gallup found:

1. Millennials and Generation Z don't just work for a paycheck—they want a purpose. They want to work for organizations that have a purpose and mission.
2. Millennials and Generation Z are no longer pursuing job satisfaction [in the narrow sense]; they want development.
3. [They] don't want bosses; they want coaches.
4. [They] don't want annual reviews; they want engaging conversations.
5. [They] don't want managers that fixate on their weaknesses; they want to develop strengths.
6. It's not my job—it's my life. (pp. 17–18)

Gallup then notes a major discrepancy between old-fashioned management and the new set of expectations. The practice of management, Gallup concludes, has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. Gallup found that only 15% of workers are engaged in work (p. 11), and that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.

Gallup proceeds with an analysis of problems and solutions that are essentially congruent with the chapters in Leading in a Culture of Change. Just about every solution looks like developing purposeful partnerships between managers and employees. For new hires, the conversation should be around questions such as:

“What do we believe around here?” “What are my strengths?,” “What is my role?,” “Who are my partners?,” and “What does my future here look like?”

Gallup's list of seven expectations for success—because they are, in essence, built on the notion of a culture of change—end up pretty much what you will see in the pages of this book: build relationships, develop people, lead change, inspire others, think critically, communicate clearly, and create accountability (Clifton & Harter, 2019, p. 63).

If we turn to education, we have a surprisingly similar story. I say surprisingly because education of all fields should have moral purpose handed to them on a plate. What could be higher purpose than educating the next generation of citizens? Yet 30–50% of teachers leave teaching in the first five years (how about the one teacher who said, “I felt like the soldier dropped behind enemy lines with nothing more than orders,” Niver, 2013). Or the drop in teacher satisfaction from 62% who reported feeling “very satisfied” in 2008 to 32% in 2013 (Metropolitan Life Insurance 2013). Even worse, only 33% of teachers reported being “actively engaged,” along with 13% who were “actively disengaged” (they had completely opted out). In all cases, business or education, the majority of employees are not happy or productive.

I am an optimist, and I read the social tea leaves, when I say that the above dismal figures for both business and education are at the end of a very bad period (i.e., there are signs that I will spell out in this book that we are at a critical juncture in the history of humankind that indicate that dramatic changes will occur in the next decade). The factors and dynamics are so powerful that the outcome could go either way. Hence, we need the forces and insights of “leading in a culture of change.”

Questionable developments in education from 1990 to 2010 consisted of what I have called “wrong policy drivers” (drivers are policies; wrong drivers are policies that don't work), I identified four major wrong drivers: negative accountability, individualism, technology, and an overload of ad hoc initiatives (Fullan, 2011). Negative accountability focused on standardized tests and punitive outcomes, and strangely offered very little help to get better. Performance stagnated or worsened. Individualism is more subtle. It involves seeking the solution through investments in human capital. If only we could get better teachers, and better principals. Not a bad idea as part of the solution, but as a standalone strategy—that is, without addressing the role of school cultures—the system will eat up individuals faster than you can produce them. Pretty soon, you have the syndrome that I refer to later as, “How are we going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen the farm?” If the farm looks that bad, people will stop coming to it—in fact, they will leave. At the same time, technology runs rampant. If you don't have a plan, technology has its random way, adding up to no net gain. In fact, the negative consequences seem to be reaching dangerous accelerating levels (see Newport's 2019 Digital Minimalism and Williams (2019 Stand out of our light)). The fourth wrong driver was the proliferation of ad hoc policies that made it increasingly difficult to recognize whether there was any “system” at all at work.

The four wrong policy drivers stagnated development or made matters worse as more and more educators became alienated and gave up. Now, almost a decade after the publication of the wrong drivers, more and more people at all levels of the system seem to be agreeing that there is indeed something wrong with the policies we have been pursuing. I can't say that people saw the light in a flash; it is more likely that a combination of circumstances began to show cracks in the system (one is reminded of the Canadian poet and singer Leonard Cohen's anthem: “There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in”). It almost makes one believe in evolution to consider why and how the Millennials and Generation Z represent changing in directions more congruent with the new approaches that are represented in this book.

No matter; the conditions are becoming more favorable for a new convergence between the values and interests of management and employees, and between educators and students. Two factors account for the change: one has a small impact, and the other has potentially a revolutionary role to play. Relative to the former—the slow boat of more knowledge about better management—has helped. Still, inertia often prevails. To activate the latent positive forces, we need leaders who act and develop in others the traits that are embedded in Figure 1.1.

Since the publication of the first edition of Leading in a Culture of Change (Fullan 2001), we are seeing a growing number of positive examples that support the framework embodied in Figure 1.1. Sisodia, Wolfe, and Sheth (2007) completed an in-depth study of what they called “firms of endearment” (FoE). The authors report that in one large-scale study, only 13.8% of respondents said that their organization had an “enthusiastic workforce.” They then set out to find exceptions. Sisodia et al. began their search for FoEs by identifying companies that met their humanistic performance criterion—firms that paid equal attention to all five stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, partners, society). They proceeded in several steps to verify the list, ending with 28 companies ranging alphabetically from Amazon to Whole Foods (Toyota was on the list, for example).

Sisodia and colleagues then conducted an analysis of the financial success of the companies over a 10-year period (1996–2006) using the S&P performance index. Here is what they found: “The public FOEs returned 1,026 percent for investors…compared to 122 percent for S&Ps 500; that's more than an 8-to-1 ratio!” (Sisodia, Wolfe, & Sheth, 2007, p. iv; italics in original).

In-depth studies by other researchers confirm these findings. Gittell's (2003) study of Southwest Airlines is a clear example. With all the ups and downs in the airline industry—fuel costs, 9/11, competition—Southwest has had multiple decades of profit without ever laying off employees. On all measures—costs per seat mile, aircraft productivity (hours in use), and labor productivity—Southwest consistently outperforms the competition. Gittel concludes the Southwest's “secret ingredient” is “its ability to build and sustain high-performance relationships among managers, employees, unions, and suppliers” (p. xi).

A study of Canada's best-managed companies identified similar themes associated with success (Grank, Hughes, & Hunter, 2006). From Magnatta Winery to Cirque du Soleil, the success of these companies is predicated on attracting and investing in high-performing employees who provide superior service through innovation and commitment to their peers, to customers, and to the companies themselves.

Need more convincing? Not to be outdone by Gallup, Google conducted its own longitudinal study of team performance in what it labeled “Project Aristotle” (in honor of his observation that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”). Massive analysis later, Google found that it was not the quality of individuals that mattered but, rather, the nature of the team. In particular, Google found five interrelated qualities associated with success:

1. Psychological safety. Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.
2. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet Google's high bar for excellence.
3. Structure and clarity. Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
4. Meaning. Work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact. Team members think their work matters and creates change. (Google, 2019, p. 6)

Google's advice for leaders correspondingly follows (Google, 2019):

• Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
• Acknowledge your own fallibility.
• Model curiosity—ask lot of questions.

I hope the reader realizes that these findings are pretty much what I been talking about in this book—they confirm some of the essential content in Leading in a Culture of Change!

I referred to this phenomenon of high-performance companies that seemed to benefit their employees, their workers, and investors as the “slow-boat” route to progress. Here's why. As far as I can tell, the proportion of companies like this does not seem to be on the increase. Second, many—I would say the majority—of the high performers eventually fall from the list. Overall, the rate of departures from the list at best was matched by new additions, not by an increase in overall numbers. Slow boat indeed! We can only conclude two things: that what works is increasingly clear and consistent across studies and practice, and that given the clarity and limited spread of these ideas and practices, sustaining these practices must be very hard to do. That is why we need new leadership at all levels (see Chapter 7).

The Promise of Fast Boats

We have the crystal-clear knowledge of the FoE, and Gallup, and Google. As I noted, the list of effective companies has not grown. Some companies still benefit investors and management more than employees, although their success will likely not last, given our analysis. And technology is disruptive, likely with net negative implications for employees, at least in the short run.

Has anything changed that might reverse the negative trend or state? Hopefully, the knowledge of new modes of organizational learning that I am featuring in this chapter will help. More promising, I think, is that we see in young people in society at large, and in schools, a different and growing breed. They have better values (see the Gallup six core values cited above); they are less likely to accept a bad status quo. They are more ready to do something about it (see Fullan, Quinn & McEachen, 2018; Fullan, Gardner, & Drummy, 2019, and Chapter 5 on “Knowledge Building and Deep Learning”).

The danger of the world not surviving and the increasing moral purpose of young people are heading for a showdown—therein lies the fast boat. The moral purpose and knowledge of successful organizations that I have just reviewed, combined with the moral purpose of employees and students (that we already know spills over into societal concerns in both cases), can be the deep salvation that we need.

The first of my Six Secrets of Change (Fullan, 2008) was “Love your employees.” In effect, I said: “If you want to love your employees, create the conditions in which they can succeed.” In essence, it is part and parcel of the fast boat. One foundation of leading in a culture of change is to secure the moral purpose of your organization or entity as consisting of the integrated efforts of leaders, employee/students, and their interface with society. For the first time ever, I would say the conditions are possible (I dare not say favorable) to transform some of our key institutions—businesses and schools—as part of transforming societies. I wish I could say that governments are just as likely to lead this effort, but nothing in this century indicates that this is likely to happen. It will take sustained pressure from the bottom and the middle. This upward pressure is an essential part of leading in a culture of change, as we will see in subsequent chapters (see, especially, Chapter 6, “Coherence Making”).