2
KNOW YOUR PURPOSE AND LIVE IT
In 2009, while I was serving as the vice president of supply chain management at L3 Communications, the U.S. Armed Forces asked us to accelerate deployment of a new aircraft that would provide tremendous protection to troops overseas. Because this aircraft was being designed and built with the ability to save lives, each day of delay could mean the deaths of our men and women who serve. In the months after receiving that assignment, L3 became the single most focused organization I have ever seen. Everyone, from the CEO down, committed everything he or she could to expedite the process. Company badges, titles, civilian/military distinctions—none of this mattered. Everyone was aligned, engaged, and innovating to deliver the plane.
Under normal circumstances, that standard process would take several years. We completed and deployed that aircraft in eight months. Casualty numbers immediately dropped. In recognition of the quality and speed of our work, Robert Gates, then secretary of defense, visited our site to personally congratulate the team.
We only achieved this accomplishment because we all connected so thoroughly to our purpose, which was to save lives. Even before this specific mission, everyone at L3 already felt connected to our purpose, put in extra effort, and collaborated freely. The new initiative pushed all of that into overdrive. Any internal competitiveness or posturing for promotions that might have existed before disappeared. We all pooled our knowledge into one unified effort to find the best solution.
While not every project deals so explicitly in matters of life and death, you can still create an environment in which employees work with as much focus, determination, and collaboration as I witnessed at L3 during that time. It all comes back to purpose. Every decision we make as individuals, every investment in time, and every career move should be grounded in our purpose. It’s what gives us direction, fulfillment, and, ultimately, joy.
The same is true in business: a company’s purpose will guide the direction in which it needs to grow. It’s also been proven that companies with an authentic connection to a purpose, especially one that makes a positive impact in the world, are more profitable over the long term.† This connection to purpose fortifies brand identity, fosters trust with consumers, and, because everyone wants to work in service of a higher purpose, helps attract and retain top talent.
An impeccable example is the King Arthur Baking Company, previously known as King Arthur Flour. Founded in Boston in 1790 to sell English-milled flour, it identified its purpose to “inspire connections and community by spreading the joy of baking” and used that purpose to create a sustainable advantage in the market. In its effort to develop local communities, in the 1820s, the company transitioned from importing English flour to milling flour from American wheat. In the centuries since, guided by its purpose—and its belief that everyone can bake and that baking and breaking bread brings people together—the company has grown beyond its initial product. It produces cookbooks and instructional videos and offers in-person baking classes. It has built a community of bakers around a commitment to the core values of inclusion, diversity, equity, social impact, and sustainability, and manifests those values in everything the company does. It donates the extra food produced from its cooking lessons to food banks and shelters, provides financial incentives for employees to carpool, and installed solar panels at every work site. In 2004, when owners Frank and Brinna Sands retired, they wanted to ensure that the company maintained its commitment to purpose and community, so they sold it to their workers. The company is 100 percent employee owned and still guided by its core purpose and values. This purpose has become its brand identity, and its impact is clear: it has been recognized by Vermont Business Magazine as one of the Best Places to Work in Vermont every year from 2006 (the year of the award’s inception) through 2020.
Not every company grows as gracefully as King Arthur Flour. The challenge that companies face as they grow is the need to convince a larger and more diverse group of people to believe in and support their purpose. This is especially true if a company wants to implement a frontline leadership strategy, as it requires orienting toward the organization’s purpose—not relying on the organizational chart for direction. Although organizational charts play an essential part in clarifying roles and responsibilities, establishing authority, and supporting compliance requirements, they don’t encourage innovation. If everyone tries to obey the chart—doing only what each job describes—the result will often lead to institutionalizing the status quo. Of course, it’s good to do one’s job according to the description. But, and especially in an organization with frontline leadership, everyone should think beyond the chart, strive for greater impact, and look for ways to better serve the mission. Purpose should act as the compass to drive and guide every action that solves problems for customers and allows the company to compete and grow. It’s the reason your company exists, what you’re uniquely positioned to do, and what the world would miss if you were gone.
If you attempt to implement frontline leadership without a clear sense of purpose that permeates the organization, your newly empowered workforce might go running off in a hundred different directions, killing productivity and undermining corporate health. But if everyone understands the main goal, then all can move toward it together. This, of course, is easier said than done. And, like everything else, the best first step is at the micro level: by getting clarity on how you define your purpose. Once you’ve done that, the next step is to help each employee connect to the company’s purpose.
Step #1: Define Your Personal Purpose
Defining your personal purpose is a gateway to putting your values in action. It’s what gives life meaning. It guides your choices and creates an opportunity to make a personal commitment to a cause, to a lifestyle, to building beneficial habits and routines. But purpose, like values, constantly evolves and changes, as we learn more, understand diverse perspectives, and gain experience by moving through different stages of life. So make a habit of reflecting on your purpose, what matters to you, and how your perspective has changed over time. For example, I have long understood my core values, and they have always played a part in my purpose. But my purpose has changed over time, evolving through out my life and career. During my time as CEO of Aviall, I reached a point of success at which I realized that I needed to focus more on serving others, on paying forward all of the resources that other people had invested in me. The next time I sat down to reflect on my purpose and goals, it became immediately clear that I wanted to make a positive impact for more people by creating opportunities for those who don’t have the same access to resources and support that I do. This was in alignment with several of my core values—optimism, serving others, hard work—and it became a new objective, a new iteration of my purpose, that arose in that moment. I followed that impulse, and eventually, founded SUMMi7.
Perfect clarity is impossible to achieve, but doesn’t need to stop you from moving forward. More reflection can uncover deeper layers of meaning, motivation, and nuance to your values and worldview, which is why it is so important to continue learning. It can help you identify what matters most, the change you most want to see in the world, enabling you to build a career around that. You can find a company that aligns with what you care about and a vocation that lets you make an impact by leveraging your strengths. Then you’re on the path to a rewarding, meaningful life.
Step #2: Connect Employees to the Company’s Purpose
Purpose, as defined by William Damon, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, is “a long-term, forward-looking intention to accomplish aims that are both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.” For a company, that means that purpose must have some significance beyond profit. Your company needs to have a concrete improvement that it wants to make in the world. Then you can connect each individual employee’s role to that purpose, and give employees the space to fulfill their responsibilities in a way that feels authentic to them. The result will be a more inclusive and unified organization. A higher purpose unites people and helps them connect despite cultural differences. It encourages people to work across cultural barriers and recognize that people with different perspectives can make a unique and valuable contribution.
In the twenty-first century, this orientation toward inclusivity is more important than ever before. Business is increasingly global, with more multinational corporations, customers, and problems to solve than at any prior point in history. Whether a company acknowledges it or not, we are now part of a global ecosystem, and through the news and social media, employees can see the impact that events in faraway places have on their lives, whether at the gas pump or in the technology they use. Companies have to respond to this global environment, and to do that effectively, they need to bring in diverse perspectives, to encourage employees from different backgrounds to come into work authentically and leverage their unique points of view to find new solutions. That starts with a powerful, unifying narrative about a higher mission that everyone connects to and strives toward.
Connecting employees to the company’s purpose starts when employees first join an organization. During my years leading Aviall, I made sure that each employee understood the impact he or she made from day one. We were the world’s largest aerospace parts distributor. We had more than 20,000 customers and 40 locations, and shipped up to 15,000 line items a day. An operation of this scale and complexity requires a great deal of administrative labor—to plan, buy, receive, stock, pick, and ship all of the parts. It’s exactly the type of environment where employees might easily lose sight of the company’s purpose. Boxing a part, printing paperwork, and staging on a dock for shipment hundreds of times each day can seem mundane. But as leaders of the company, we knew that some of those parts may help repair a medivac helicopter that saves lives, support a wheel repair for a C-17 on a humanitarian mission, or allow airlines to maintain their schedules and bring people to their loved ones.
To enrich our new employees’ understanding of our narrative, one of my fellow leaders or I would attend every new hire orientation. We would introduce ourselves in a transparent, authentic way, explaining our personal motivators and the way we connected to the company. Then we would invite the new hires to share, to talk about who they are and what they care about. After starting to build a personal connection, you can begin to discuss how your purpose interacts with the company’s purpose. You cannot invert this process—if you don’t take the time to get to know people, then the new employees might ignore you when you start talking about the company’s vision. Because we had established a dialogue of listening and getting to know each other, whenever we started talking about the company’s purpose, the new employees were more likely to participate. Often, they would ask insightful questions from an external point of view, which helped me gain new clarity on the company’s vision as well as my own.
We would also invite new employees to stand up and share more about their new jobs. For example, one introduced herself, saying, “Hi, I’m Jolene and I’m working in a warehouse in Australia. Just started last week; happy to be here.”
That gave me a chance to connect her role directly with something she could see, so I said, “Welcome, Jolene. Well, let me tell you, Australia is a $50 million business for us. It’s the biggest general aviation market outside of the United States. When you look out your window, every plane that flies by has a part on it that comes from us.”
In doing this, I’m hoping to help her understand how her position fits into our broader mission as a company and, ultimately, makes a difference in the world. When she starts to work, and when the daily repetition of the job sets in, her connection to the company purpose will be stronger, and she’ll be able to find purpose in her daily actions knowing that she plays a role in supporting all the aircraft flying overhead. Of course, maintaining strong connection between people and purpose requires continuous effort. There are other key elements of leadership, such as transparency and removing complexity, which I’ll discuss later, that will help maintain that connection.
In these meetings and in my other responsibilities as CEO, I always worked to instill an optimistic outlook among our employees. Optimism operates as a powerful tool for connecting to purpose. To feel inspired to work toward a higher goal, people need not only to believe that the goal is worth pursuing but that it is possible. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell once said, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” I’ve seen this throughout my entire life and career, starting with my mother, who woke up each morning with an optimistic view of our future. Optimism isn’t a utopian, unrealistic view. Rather, optimism is the belief that the future you envision can be achieved. That belief will power you through the obstacles and failures you’ll inevitably face. To instill optimism as a leader of a company, focus on the upside of what is possible, and then believe in and support your leaders to achieve that upside.
There’s one other strategy that I’ve used with great success to keep people connected to purpose. Almost every company changes its official purpose statement from time to time. Companies do this because their purpose has shifted or they want to try to find a more powerful way to express the same core idea. The latter is why we decided to revamp our purpose statement at Aviall. We wanted it to encapsulate all of the forms of flight that we supported. So we organized a contest: any employee at Aviall could submit a purpose statement describing why we exist. The contest encouraged employees to reflect on what they were doing at work. Those hours of reflection boosted every employee’s connection to and understanding of our purpose, regardless of whether we chose their statement. Eventually, three third-shift warehouse team members landed on a sentence that perfectly encapsulated our purpose: “Proudly keeping the world in flight.”
This became our north star. It allowed us to talk to all the important missions of our industry and feel proud of the support we provided. After adopting this new purpose statement, we worked to build our culture around serving customers and supporting their vital missions. We launched the Customer Connect program, which brought employees out to see our customers at work and brought customers in to talk at employee meetings. We also shared customer spotlights in our weekly and monthly communications. This supported a brand pillar of our company: the ability to provide flexible and innovative solutions to our customers because we understand them, live their problems, share their purpose, and align everything we do to support them.
This contest also proved that our company led from the front lines. In a multibillion-dollar, complicated, 85-year-old organization, our purpose statement came from the people who were out there getting it done everyday: three warehouse workers—not an external firm, not the executive team. That indicated that our leadership was purpose-driven. It meant we had a clear view of the customer and the impact we created at all levels of the organization, and that we incorporated enough transparency into our operations that every employee understood our organization and how each employee fit in it.
Purpose Lost, Purpose Regained
Sometimes a company can lose track of its purpose. I’ve seen this happen most often in the context of three challenges:
1. Organizational growth, which requires a larger group of people to connect to the purpose
2. Stagnation, slow erosion of clarity and focus over time
3. New strategies, expansion into adjacent products or markets that don’t align with the company’s original purpose
In each case, you must work quickly to reorient to your purpose and organize your systems around it, before irreparable damage is done. Let’s look at each cause and ways to address it.
Challenge #1: Organizational Growth
Almost every successful company starts with a founder or a group of founders who all want to serve customers in a specific way. Often, the founders feel a more powerful connection to the company’s purpose than most subsequent employees do because the company is born of the founders’ personal purpose. If the founders succeed in positioning their company within the market, they will need to hire teams. But if a company isn’t careful, each new hire and each new layer of management between the founders and the front lines might pull the company out of alignment with its purpose. In most top-down leadership systems, it doesn’t take long before new employees feel like they’re joining a large, complex organization where it’s difficult to see how their work and ideas fit in, or how their contributions impact the customer, never mind the world. In those scenarios, even the most enthusiastically engaged employees’ connection to purpose will wane. The result is that people start to go through the motions, which allows legacy processes to become entrenched and causes the company to lose its competitive advantage, often indicated by eroding profit margins.
However, although new employees may not have the same connection to a company’s purpose as the founders, you can still create inspiration by pulling them into your vision. A company can achieve this by creating an inclusive environment, where each person is encouraged to bring his or her unique ideas and perspectives to the table. Those unique ideas expand the impact beyond what the founder alone could achieve. That expanded impact will, in turn, create new avenues through which employees can see a vision that they are now a part of. King Arthur Baking Company is instructive here. As that company grew and brought on new generations of employees, it expanded its impact, transforming from a flour importer, to a miller of American wheat, and finally into a baking institution. Now, new employees might feel the most motivated by the communities King Arthur creates through their cooking classes. After two full centuries of change, the connection to purpose is just as strong as when the company was founded, arguably stronger. The chapters that follow in this book will help identify and remove the obstacles that prevent employees from connecting with purpose as a company grows.
Challenge #2: Stagnation
The other factor in the erosion of connection to purpose is time. This is especially common within the most successful companies, the behemoths that have become the bedrocks of their industries and seen many tides of leadership that have come and gone. When a company becomes entrenched—when it is so large and so well known that it seems almost invulnerable or when it operates the same way no matter who worked there—is when a company’s connection to its purpose is most fragile. Not only will most new hires never meet the founder, the founder might not even still be alive. And it’s not just new hires, but everyone, including top-level executives, who run the risk of forgetting why the company exists.
For example, Aviall was founded in 1932. When I was CEO, we’d already had more than 80 years of history, during which Aviall saw countless transformations, including being acquired by Boeing. The tendency, one that we needed to fight against, was to simply think of Aviall as an airplane parts distribution company, one aspect of the larger Boeing supply chain. Aviall’s true purpose is “Proudly keeping the world in flight.” It’s about connecting the world, allowing the modern miracle of air travel to change people’s lives every single day. I needed to keep the true purpose in mind at all times and to help employees understand it as well. Without that constant vigilance, it would have been easy to let the question “How can we best deliver airplane parts?” guide our decision-making, instead of “How can we proudly keep the world in flight?” The first question might help us find ways to ship parts faster, but to answer the second question required us to better understand other problems we could help customers solve beyond just delivering a part. It led us to integrate our systems and processes with customers’ maintenance systems to share data, kit parts, preposition material, offer lower cost alternatives, and provide streamlined paperwork to improve the handling and traceability of components. This distinction might seem trivial, but at the end of the day, what you use as a guiding principle will have a dramatic effect on how your organization operates. If you don’t stay true to your purpose and that of the company, you’ll quickly get pulled in a direction that you probably did not intend to go.
For instance, one of my early consulting clients left her corporate Human Resources job to start her own recruitment firm. She built her company into quite a successful entity, but she felt that there was something holding her employees back from taking the next step, which is why she came to us. We talked about purpose, and early in the conversation, she said that her purpose was making sure she found the right talent for the company. To me, this sounded a little too much like describing Aviall’s purpose as “Delivering airplane parts.” So I asked her, “Why did you leave your secure, high-paying job at that big company in the first place? What motivated you to take that risk?”
She replied, “I wanted to help companies build stronger, diverse teams.”
That’s her real purpose, and it’s much bigger than merely recruiting. If your goal is to find what traditional thinking mistakenly considers the “best talent,” then you’re going to be bringing in a lot of Ivy League grads and trying to hire from other companies and networks that are familiar to you. But if your goal is to help diverse teams work together and create an inclusive environment that leverages diversity to devise solutions to the complicated challenges of the twenty-first century, then you’ll expand your search beyond these traditional and limiting sources for top talent. Doing so will enable you to discover people who really are the best, even if they didn’t come from the most prestigious institutions.
You’ll also begin to work in partnership with the clients, first to understand how their current team and culture operate, and then to determine the talent that would best complement the existing infrastructure. The basic company mechanism stays the same, the primary service (i.e., recruiting) stays the same, but the operation, the goal, and the target shift. It becomes more specific, with greater differentiation from competitors, and allows you to offer more creative solutions.
After that discussion, the already successful founder went back to her office, shared that revelation with her team, and later called me to say that everyone left the meeting feeling invigorated. Increasing effectiveness among diverse teams is a goal that inspires people, much more so than just “finding the right talent.” This newfound specificity of purpose will help her business in a myriad of other ways. As a firm that will work with companies to develop diverse teams, which, studies have shown, improves innovation and outcomes while simultaneously promoting cohesion, she’ll be able to differentiate herself from all of the other recruitment firms that headhunt at top schools.‡ This differentiation will help her to identify and seek out her ideal customers, as well as help her ideal customers find her.
My client didn’t have to reach too far back into the past to rediscover her purpose—only a few years into her personal history. At Aviall, I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, for our eighty-fifth anniversary, we commissioned a team to put together a report on our founding. They revived the story of founder Edward “Doc” Booth, a retired army aviator who, after completing his service, decided that he wanted to help future generations of pilots, so he created the company that later became Aviall. It was born of camaraderie, a commitment to service—both to the nation and to the community—and, importantly, the need to maintain safety. The team wrote all of this up and compiled it in a book, and we gave a copy to each of the employees at the anniversary celebration. We also invited Doc Booth’s granddaughter to join us for that special occasion, which strengthened our connection to our purpose even further.
By tapping into the original inspiration for Aviall and reintroducing that story into the hearts and minds of our employees, we reignited the fire of our culture.
Challenge #3: New Strategies
Sometimes, a growing company will experience a shift in its purpose due to opportunities that pull it out of alignment from its original purpose. This doesn’t need to become a problem, but if the leadership isn’t aware of the shift or doesn’t know how to realign the company, it can result in painful misalignment. Take, for instance, another one of my consulting clients who runs a successful financial advising company that manages portfolios for a range of businesses and individuals.
She’d reached a point where her original goal—financial independence for herself and others—no longer felt as fulfilling, so she decided to expand the scope of her operations. She began to offer training to teach people how to manage their finances. This new possibility created a degree of uncertainty. It also required her to reevaluate her purpose, so that she could ensure that her expanded offerings were aligned with it. Our conversation went something like this:
“What are you really trying to do?”
“I want to create financial stability for women and especially women in transition.”
“Why?”
“I want to help women advance into leadership positions, so they can create a positive influence for others.”
“Tell me more.”
“I want to create opportunities to position more women on boards because I think that’ll create stronger, more inclusive companies.”
That was her purpose. When she was able to articulate it, the connection for her was so strong that it became emotional for both of us. What she wants to do is help women move into the next phase of their careers. Most of her clients are female executives, and the next step for them after financial independence is to get a seat at the table in the boardrooms of different companies and organizations. That’s where they can influence broad and lasting change. My client realized that she wants to help women achieve that because, as studies have shown, companies with female board members not only increase their profits but also tend to operate with a broader view of shareholder value to include the good of society.§ She realized that this is how she can make a global impact within her same organization.
She left our meeting with a renewed focus on the few key strategies she should prioritize to most effectively achieve her expanded purpose. It also helped her to reevaluate the entire company. Now, instead of just managing her clients’ portfolios, she’s entering into a deeper partnership, coaching them through the process of becoming financially independent, and later becoming an influential member of a board.
She reevaluated the expectations for each role of every one of her team members, and started to question how she could better lead her employees. Then, she studied the services they offered to see where they needed to expand to achieve their new purpose. She began working on the business, instead of just in the business. But she could only do that once she saw her new purpose and aligned her business to match it. We both grew out of that short engagement and left recommitted to purpose and energized by the potential to make a greater impact on the world.
Purpose and Partnership
Purpose alone will not ensure a company’s success. You also need a robust community of support, drawn from both within and outside the company. Without this community, without strong partnership, you’ll inevitably run into challenges that are difficult to overcome on your own. You’ll know where you want to go, but get stuck in the attempt to get there. On the flip side, if you have powerful partnerships, but no purpose, you won’t make meaningful strides either, as you’ll have no clear destination.
The good news is that partnership and purpose feed one another. You can use a common purpose as a rallying call to bring together a diverse group of people, and partnership fuels the drive toward a common goal. To create a culture where frontline leadership is possible, you need both.
If you’re able to foster partnership with purpose, then when your company inevitably hits a bump in the road, your people will be inclined to attack the problems and work on them as a team. They’ll do this because they each know their purpose, they feel connected to it, and they’re in a community of people who truly care about one another. With strong relationships, purpose, and trust, even major problems can bring people together.
In turn, partnership helps a common purpose evolve. For instance, one of the newer challenges facing aviation is aircraft recycling. Aviation grew and evolved rapidly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating a large number of aircraft that phase out of use each year that we need to dispose of in a sustainable, responsible way. As in other relatively youthful industries, such as electronics and automobiles, for many years, aviation lacked a standardized procedure for disassembling aircraft.
To remedy this, 11 major aviation companies created the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association. With members in Africa, Europe, and North America, this group focuses on bringing together aviation companies at every point in the supply chain (manufacturers, distributors, airlines, etc.) to promote environmental best practices, regulatory excellence, and sustainable developments in aircraft disassembly, salvaging, and recycling. From this partnership has come an inspired new commitment to a specific purpose—environmental sustainability—throughout the industry.
These sorts of partnerships develop purpose and allow companies to solve bigger and more complicated problems than they could on their own. For best results, companies should consider creating partnerships with six key stakeholder groups:
• Shareholders
• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Community partners
• Industry affiliates
Shareholders
Shareholders are the owners of a company who invest their capital to receive an expected return or outcome. The board of directors is the committee that provides governance over how the company is managed in accordance with shareholder expectations and governing documents such as bylaws. Historically, these expectations have been purely financial, managing how capital is deployed in alignment with risk and return scenarios.
In the late 2010s, many well-respected journals, both in the business world and the mainstream, published articles arguing against the expansion of shareholder influence on companies. The argument was that most firms prioritize short-term profits and returns for shareholders, often at the expense of worker and consumer safety, environmental sustainability, and the greater good of society. Fortune 500 companies took note. In 2019, the Business Roundtable, an organization founded in 1978 that includes the CEOs of leading US companies such as 3M, Amazon, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, P&G, Starbucks, and Walmart, updated their official statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. Whereas in each previous statement the Roundtable endorsed shareholder primacy, the 2019 statement declared the Purpose of a Corporation is to serve not only traditional shareholders but also the interests of employees, suppliers, customers, and the community equally. In doing so, more than 180 CEOs of the largest corporations committed to a purpose beyond financial returns, addressing issues such as climate change, racial equity and justice, and education in support of an “economy that serves us all.”¶
This is an important first step, which acknowledges the unsustainability of the practices of the twentieth century. But all of these companies need to show their continued commitment to these ideals, which will require years of effort and vigilance. They should break down old barriers to participation, encourage inclusion, and grow in alignment with this commitment. The concepts in this book provide an outline for exactly how to do that.
An important way to follow through on that commitment is to improve how companies partner with shareholders. Shareholders will always exist for publicly traded firms, which means that companies need to enlist their shareholders in their commitment to responsible and sustainable growth.
Although we have yet to see the long-term impact the statement will have, it’s provided an opportunity for large, established organizations to expand their purpose to include economic, environmental, and social good in alignment with their values and core capabilities. At Aviall, this included the social causes that we supported in alignment with our values, such as investing in education and veterans’ outreach, along with supporting nonprofits such as the North Texas Food Bank, which runs a large distribution operation that can benefit from our operating best practices. Similar to Microsoft donating technical support and equipment to schools, LinkedIn providing specialized support to veterans to advance their careers, and Unilever setting targets and helping their suppliers meet environmental sustainability in the communities in which they operate, companies can apply their know-how to help others. In doing so, they will connect their purpose with a broad set of stakeholders far beyond the financial statements.
Another indicator of progress is the large investment firms that are also looking to put more money into businesses that embrace purpose as a vehicle for social good. BlackRock, currently the worlds largest asset manager, now only invests in companies with a strong sustainability plan.** As we continue to discover just how interconnected the world is and how our actions on the corporate level can support or hinder the well-being of billions of people, investors are trying to allocate funds in a more conscious way. They recognize that if a company behaves irresponsibly, then the community gets hurt, and the community is its customers.
If you are a founder or leader in a relatively young organization looking to scale, then you have the opportunity to build purpose into your strategy, operating goals, and culture right from the start. Early on in your company’s development, as you’re looking for investors, research the firms/individuals that you are pitching to ahead of time and be transparent about your aspirations beyond profits. If you believe that most people want to contribute something beyond themselves and most companies underutilize their potential to do so, then you can see how setting goals for broader impact—such as any combination of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals††—will create a higher purpose that lasts beyond business cycles.
Employees
Partnering with your employees begins with listening to them, and then following up on what you hear. At Aviall, we did this through regular roundtables with employees, to get the pulse of the organization. At one of them, an employee said, “Hey, I get it. We do something important here, but a lot of us are really inspired by what we’re doing in our community, such as supporting local schools and developing the next generation of leaders.”
In response to this comment, we added the following to our objectives: to help our employees find their own purpose and to support them in engaging with their communities in their areas of passion. Shortly after, we found out that one of our employees was the father of a child with juvenile diabetes. Every year he participated in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation walk to raise money and awareness. That year, when he went to walk, about 50 coworkers from Aviall accompanied him. His purpose became our purpose, and we partnered with him to make a difference on an issue that mattered to him. These efforts have grown into dozens of events each year led by employees, creating a positive impact in the communities in which we live and work. Our support helps lift communities, makes employees even more engaged and willing to work hard for the company, and enables us to lead with our values. A few years ago, we conducted an employment engagement survey. In 80 pages of comments, the most-used word was “family.” That’s partnership.
Customers
This is one of the most important aspects of this book, so much so that I’ve dedicated half of a forthcoming chapter to it. To be a successful company, one that truly leads from the front lines, you cannot simply view your customers as people to whom you sell. Rather, you must view your customers as partners that you work with to solve problems they have. This mindset shift opens a whole new range of possibilities for how your business operates, including empowering your employees to respond to new issues that your customers have.
To partner with your customers, you need to start with understanding them. What is their purpose? What are their competitors doing? What does the regulatory framework of their industry look like? What are their quarterly goals? Annual? What are the biggest challenges they are working to overcome? Once you know all of this, you can adjust your products and services in ways that best align with their priorities and the issues keeping them up at night. Maintain close contact with them, and align your product road map to grow in a way that is true to your purpose and theirs.
Suppliers
Just as you need to partner with your customers to be truly effective, you also need to partner with your suppliers. In the same way that you ask for feedback from your customers and try to understand their industries and their needs so you can innovate better solutions for them, you need to share your own needs and challenges with your suppliers. If your conversations with suppliers remain focused on contractual terms and standard performance expectations, then you’re missing the opportunity to benefit from their knowledge and lessons learned. Seek to understand their purpose, mission, and values as well as their product and technology road maps (the planned improvements to products and technology within the organization). Check to see where they align with yours. See how they engage in developing their employees. How do they support their local community? See if you can find ways to combine efforts by cohosting shared events. Also, help them understand your end customer, so they can deliver innovative ideas and new solutions from their experience and collective knowledge, in the same way you would tap the brain trust of your teams.
If you don’t find connections in any of those areas, then you may choose to continue working with that supplier based on strong quality or delivery performance. But you may do well to shop around and see if you can find a better partner that would provide greater opportunities to leverage outside resources to continuously innovate and remain competitive. In most large organizations, you get to evaluate and select new suppliers every week. Look at your sourcing processes, the request for proposal (RFP) forms, and how your organization identifies and considers new suppliers. Then build into those processes a few questions about suppliers’ purpose and values, their long-term goals, and how they promote innovation, diversity, and inclusion. Choosing suppliers who align with your company’s values in these areas will add a powerful new source of innovation and growth.
Another great way to embed shared purpose and innovation into the infrastructure of your company is to apply for certification with an external monitoring board, like the B Impact Assessment. This assessment, which more than 50,000 businesses have used, evaluates your company on its environmental impact, quality of governance (e.g., corporate transparency and accountability), community impact, and worker treatment. The process helps you examine each part of your company, including your supply chain, and identifies opportunities to build the governance processes, infrastructure, and decision-making framework to serve your purpose beyond just profits.
As we completed the survey for SUMMi7, it revealed we could improve how we fulfill our commitment to social and environmental responsibility, how we invest in our employees, and how we can better leverage and support local suppliers. As a result, we were able to incorporate repeatable processes that can help us be transparent about our purpose, measure our success living up to our commitments, and engage our employees, customers, and suppliers around common values and initiatives on which we can align our efforts to do better collectively. It also identified areas where we could select better partners to work with, so we not only walk the walk with our values but also find others who can bring diverse perspectives and innovative thinking to bear for our business.
Community Partners
Community partners are organizations, including state and local governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other businesses, that may or may not be directly related to your industry and purpose, yet share your commitment to make an impact in the community. These partnerships tend to be less focused on the bottom line and are more about giving back to the community. Successful community partnerships are an invaluable way to help your company thrive while supporting the community at large. With community partners, you can demonstrate a genuine commitment to social good and open avenues to share expertise, all in service to solving more complicated problems than you could on your own.
This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately pour money and labor hours into companies and NGOs. A partnership will only succeed when you can identify a shared interest between your group and the partners you seek. For example, as an aerospace company with our headquarters in Irving, Texas, Aviall partnered with the Irving Independent School District to support STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and aviation educational programs for teenagers. In doing so, we were able to connect one of our values (supporting education) with our company’s need to develop talent for a future workforce, while we helped the school district better prepare students for careers in STEM.
Another basis upon which to form an effective partnership can be organizational values. Be aware that unless you cultivate an authentic connection between your company and another organization, your initiative might appear opportunistic. This can undermine trust between your organization and the community as well as breed resentment. Therefore, it’s vital that both groups have a genuine shared interest in the partnership and strive to demonstrate a track record of dedication and commitment to the cause. At Aviall, we often formed partnerships with organizations that shared our dedication to service and our commitment to supporting veterans, which was a key part of our founder Edward Booth’s motivation. To that end, we worked with many partners, such as the Adaptive Training Foundation, an organization that provides access and inclusion to disabled veterans to support wellness and create a community after their military service.
Industry Affiliates
This group is a bit broader and a bit more difficult to define. Generally speaking, industry affiliates are organizations or individuals that you partner with who help you achieve a specific business aim. They aren’t necessarily suppliers or customers, or even organizations that primarily operate in the same industry as you do. Another way to think about this would be as a new network that can help you expand your perspective. The traditional view of networking is that you get to know people in the industry, and as you make connections, each new connection adds value to every other person already in the network. Today, when inter-industry collaboration is both more common and more necessary than ever, this same model applies, but multiplied to the nth degree. These are the people in your industry and adjacent to it that you invite to your platform, provided that you share a common thread and at least believe in their purpose.
Partnering with industry affiliates is a core part of our SUMMi7 strategy. Our purpose is to address social and economic inequalities, and we have collaborated with other companies and organizations that can help us expand our impact. Our partnerships fall into three main categories. The first is channel partners, which help us connect with the communities we serve. These partners include the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, a large network that provides support to and advocates for women-owned businesses, as well as several coworking spaces that rent to local businesses, local Chambers of Commerce, and other economic development organizations. We share elements of a common mission with each of these groups. They want to help their members succeed, and so do we, though our approaches may differ.
Second, we have resource partners, which include financial and professional services companies that provide resources to businesses, such as HR, IT, or legal support, or even entities that provide access to capital at fair rates. Through these partnerships, we can help the businesses going through our programs access whatever resources and guidance they need to scale successfully and with purpose.
Third, we cultivate a pool of what we call impact investors—large enterprises, either for-profit or NGOs, that share our mission and seek to promote economic development through direct, nonloan financial support. With these partners, we’ve developed a scholarship fund that allows underfunded or overstressed companies to invest in our programs.
These partnerships act as an impact multiplier for our organization. Not only do they help us provide a better service, they also allow us to reach new communities and to offer access to our service to people who otherwise would not have it.
The Next Level of Partnership: Building Global Coalitions
Coalition-building takes purpose and partnership and applies it at a the global level. As globalization accelerates, we increasingly face problems of existential significance. It’s clear that the way we’ve been operating is unsustainable, and if we want life to continue on this planet in the long run, we need to create an unprecedented shift in the way that we lead every single aspect of our lives. Preserving our environment, combating climate change, reducing global poverty, fighting epidemics and pandemics—these sorts of problems require coalitions unified around a common purpose.
This level of leadership is both relatively new and vitally necessary in the modern age. To address these problems will require people from radically diverse backgrounds to work together, and stakeholders from hundreds of different countries and companies to truly see, listen to, understand, and empathize with one another. We will have to become comfortable navigating the difference in the values of how a company from India shows up versus a company from Germany. If we can’t bridge those gaps in a respectful way—where everyone’s voice is amplified in the process—then we won’t be successful at building coalitions on this scale.
Ensuring that your company has strong, purpose-driven relationships with each of the six types of partners will provide the foundation for building these coalitions. Draw on your experience to create solutions that work for your company and all stakeholders; then apply that level of creative thinking to a global scale. Invite all of your partners to join you and to partner with and join each other. It’s difficult, it may even seem impossible, but, to me, it’s the ultimate goal of leadership.
† Jenn Lim, “A Study Says Your Company’s ‘Purpose’ Can Increase Returns By 400 Percent. Here’s How to Create One That Works,” INc.com, December 20, 2018, https://www.inc.com/jenn-lim/a-study-says-your-companys-purpose-can-increase-returns-by-400-percent-heres-how-to-create-one-that-works.html.
‡ Stuart R. Levine, “Diversity Confirmed to Boost Innovation and Financial Results,” Forbes, May 18, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diversity-confirmed-to-boost-innovation-and-financial-results/?sh=3695ffaec4a.
§ Jie Chen, Woon Sau Leung, Wei Song, and Marc Goergen, “Research: When Women Are on Boards, Male CEOs Are Less Overconfident,” Harvard Business Review, September 12, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/09/research-when-women-are-on-boards-male-ceos-are-less-overconfident
¶ Business Roundtable, “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans’,” Business Roundtable, August 19, 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines
-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans.
** Blackrock, “Our approach to sustainability,” July 2020, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/publication/our-commitment-to-sustainability-full-report.pdf.
†† United Nations Foundation, “Sustainable Development Goals,” https://unfoundation
.org/what-we-do/issues/sustainable-development-goals/.