CHAPTER 3
PRACTICE 1: LEAD WITH PURPOSE
IN MUMBAI, INDIA, A CITY of seventeen million people, fast food has a unique meaning.
Every day, about five thousand “dabbawalas,” or “lunchbox people,” deliver nearly a quarter-million home-cooked lunches around this vast, tumultuous city—at high speed and without error!
Because people who work in the city enjoy a home-cooked lunch, thousands of white-capped dabbawalas pick up the lunches in characteristic stacked lunchboxes, called “dabbas,” from nearly a quarter of a million homes in the suburbs between nine and ten in the morning. The mission: to get this specific lunch by lunchtime to a specific person downtown who is hungry for a hot meal. And it arrives every day—at exactly 12:30 p.m.
As Sarah Sturtevant writes in her Marketing Masala blog, “The mission of the dabbawalas is not couched in flowery words like so many other corporate mission statements. Their simple goal is to serve their customers accurately and on time, every time.”1 They also have a unique value proposition: Unlike fast food chains, they bring a fresh, home-cooked lunch right to you, no matter where you are.
People with a simple, unique, powerful mission are the most engaged people. “To the moon,” said John F. Kennedy. “Insanely great,” said Steve Jobs. “There is a place in God’s sun for the youth farthest down,” said Mary McLeod Bethune, and her mission was to help them reach that place.
Yet the whole notion of “mission” has produced a lot of cynicism. There are two reasons for that: (1) Too many mission statements are meaningless platitudes, and (2) people in the organization don’t live up to the mission.
FIND AND ARTICULATE THE
VOICE OF THE ORGANIZATION
There’s a huge paradox here. A mission statement is supposed to express the passion of the people who are on the mission. Yet contests are held online for the “worst mission statement.” People roll their eyes when anyone refers to the company’s mission statement. The bronze “mission statement” plaque becomes a target for pigeons. According to Gallup, 70 percent of US workers are disengaged—unimpressed and uninterested in their company’s mission.2
Why are most mission statements just back room jokes? Because of the tremendous irony in trying to engage people’s passions and talents in a mission they have no passion for and no involvement in.
At the same time, there is nothing more powerful than the passions that drive people. Tap into those, and you create an unstoppable force. If you get people talking about their passions, they go so far overboard you can’t get them to stop. But then management boils out all the passion to reduce it to a mediocre mission statement, and that’s where cynicism comes from.
Without an engaging mission, the organization has no reason for existing. People in the organization struggle with an existential problem—they don’t know what it all means, so they don’t much care. There is nothing for them to engage with.
Shawn says, “I was working with a group of leaders from an organization once, and where I noticed that on the wall of their boardroom was a beautifully framed copy of their mission statement. I read it. The words were nice and the sentiment meaningful. With this group of leaders all sitting around the large boardroom table and the framed mission statement just a few feet away, I said, ‘On the wall is your beautifully framed mission statement. Don’t look at it. Who can tell me what it says?’ Crickets. ‘Who can tell me the gist of what it says?’ Again, crickets. What followed was an interesting discussion on what a mission statement really is and how individuals and organizations bring them to life.”
Seth Godin says, “It’s so easy to string together a bunch of platitudes and call them a mission statement. But what happens if you actually have a specific mission?”3
Your true mission is discovered, not created—and it takes considerable effort to discover it. It is not a weekend’s work. There’s a universal quality in a great mission statement—you sense that it really matters to people—yet there’s nothing more distinctive, unique, or peculiar. It’s generally applicable and unbelievably specific at the same time.
While your true mission will be unique, in broad strokes they all sound something like this:
We are going where no other people can go because no other people are like us. No one else has the unique combination of talent, passion, and conscience that drives us. No one else can make the contribution we can make.
The dabbawalas are like that. They are intensely proud of the service they have given for more than a century, a service no one can duplicate. Other great companies are like that, too. Passion for the mission governs everything they do. According to Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” The company therefore draws people who have the energy for that mission.
A great mission is expressed in negatives: “No one else goes there … no one else can go there … no one else is like us … no one else can contribute this…” There is absolutely no whisper of “me, too.” As Warren Buffett says, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” When you say no to unimportant things, it allows you to say yes to the truly important things—those that are in alignment with your mission. In fact, the only way to gain time is to work on the critical few.
So call it what you want. If people are allergic to the term “mission statement,” call it a mantra or a manifesto or a purpose statement or a passion statement or “the voice of the organization.” Whatever you call it, you need it badly. The old paradigm of management is to put a mission statement on the wall and forget about it; the new paradigm of leadership is to help people find their voice—both individually and collectively. If you are not currently in position to take on the mission statement of your entire organization, we strongly recommend that you master identifying the job to be done by your team. As a leader, you’re responsible for aligning the job your team does with the greater purpose of the organization.
DESIGNING AN ENGAGING MISSION
How do you design a mission or a sense of purpose that will engage everyone?
The mission should be the collective voice of the people in your organization, not just the leader’s voice. Of course, as a leader you are not just an opinion pollster—you do your own rigorous thinking and analysis about the mission. But you are not a dictator, either. Everyone should be involved in creating it. The principle of “no involvement, no commitment” clearly applies to the creation of a mission statement. Leaders might “go off to the mountain” to create a vision, but that vision only becomes an organizational mission when people sign up to make it real. If you want everyone to own the mission, to lead with it, they’ve got to have a say in it. It has to reflect their thinking, it has to express their potential, and it has to appeal to their souls.
As Stephen R. Covey taught, “The voice of the human spirit—full of hope and intelligence, resilient by nature, boundless in its potential to serve the common good—encompasses the soul of organizations that will survive, thrive, and profoundly impact the future of the world.”4
How do you find this “voice of the organization”?
Covey explains, “Voice lies at the nexus of talent [what we do well], passion [what we love to do], conscience [what we ought to do], and need [what the world will pay us to do].”5
There is a deep, innate, and almost inexpressible yearning within each one of us to find our voice in life. It’s wrapped up in our identity and self-respect. It’s not just the talent or passion that surges to the fore without external incentives, nor is it just the urgings of conscience—although these are essential to the voice. It’s also knowing that we are needed, that the world values the uniqueness in us.
In other words, an engaging organizational voice or mission must appeal to people’s passionate interests, leverage their distinctive talents, satisfy the conscience, and meet a compelling market need. It’s not easy to fulfill all of these criteria at the same time, but the leader’s job is to combine all those elements of the organization’s “voice.” Leaders who do so tap into a miraculous power source.
Begin now to evaluate the mission of your team or organization:
- Talent. Are you leveraging the irreplaceable talents of team members? Do you even know what they are?
- Passion. Is everyone passionate about their job? Do they come at it with energy and determination, or do they just go through the motions?
- Conscience. Are you meeting the demands of conscience? Is your organization doing what it should do? Are you tapping into people’s innate desire to be socially responsible?
- Need. What is the specific job your internal and external customers are hiring you to do? Have you really answered that question? The job you are being hired to do is very different from a job description. It requires careful stakeholder analysis: What are they trying to achieve through your contribution? What are they willing to pay for? Are you in sync with the needs of an ever-evolving market? Are you staying on top of market hot spots, or are they moving away from you?
What you are really doing when you map out your mission statement is telling your team story. What anecdotes do you tell about your own successes? Your failures? What is exciting about the job you do? How could you raise the bar on excitement and involvement? Imagine your mission statement as a lead story in the news—what would be the headline? What would make the story viral? It is the job of a leader to engage all stakeholders through a compelling strategic narrative on mission or a team’s purpose. In today’s world, a leader has a moral imperative to connect the “why” behind the “what” to meaningfully engage their talent. This is most powerfully accomplished by thoughtful and deliberate design.
One organization that has clearly found its voice—and has benefited hugely from doing so—is SAS Institute, the analytics-software giant with nearly forty years of record earnings. SAS has been named repeatedly as America’s best place to work; the recognition is now global, as the Great Place to Work Institute has named SAS as the world’s best multinational workplace.6
“Every aspect of life on the large, leafy SAS campus in Cary, North Carolina, is designed to bring the best out of employees by treating them well,” says The Economist. The firm provides free health care, sports facilities with an aquatic center, and subsidized child care and restaurants where families eat together. The walls are adorned with a magnificent art collection. But it’s not just the benefits that delight SAS people—“it’s the challenge of the work.”7 The mission of SAS is to help clients turn the huge volumes of data they now collect into usable intelligence; in other words, SAS people get to find answers to fascinating questions posed by banks, retailers, pharma companies … anyone with “Big Data” and a lot of problems to solve.
“If there is a heaven on earth on the job, it is at SAS Institute,” says 60 Minutes. SAS cofounder Jim Goodnight believes that the talent, passion, and conscience of his people make up his ultimate competitive advantage; as a result, engagement levels are high and turnover is extremely low. “Ninety-five percent of my assets drive out the front gate every evening,” Goodnight told 60 Minutes. “It’s my job to bring them back.”8
You can see that the mission of SAS is far more engaging than what you’ll find in the vast majority of “corporate mission statements.”
SAS engages the talents and passions of its people by valuing those talents and passions above all else. It goes far beyond “M&M Wednesdays” and “Free Breakfast Fridays.” Clients want innovative business intelligence, so SAS needs the best and most creative people from many fields. The unusual thing they share is that SAS thinks their ideas are actually important! “What makes our organization work are the new ideas that come out of our employees’ brains,” says Goodnight. As one twenty-eight-year employee observes, “When people are treated as if they’re important and truly make a difference, their loyalty and engagement soar.”9
SAS engages the conscience of its people with a strong commitment to social responsibility. A Corporate Social Responsibility Task Force at SAS integrates efforts across the firm, annually overseeing more than 22,000 hours of employee volunteer work and nearly $20 million in contributions to schools and charities. Senior managers sit on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund. Each year, the company generates from solar sources more than 3,900 megawatt-hours—the equivalent of the electricity used by 54,000 homes for one hour!10
Again, what about your mission? Are you truly engaging the talent, passion, and conscience of people by meeting needs that matter?
GET ALIGNED TO THE MISSION
What’s the second reason people are cynical about the company mission statement? The company is so often misaligned with it. The grand pronouncements on the bronze plaque don’t line up with the things people are asked to do every day. In short, managers and leaders don’t walk the talk. It doesn’t matter how fervid the language; if the mission statement is about “valuing customers above all” while management obsesses over everything but the customers, people simply disengage from the mission. “If it doesn’t matter to the C-suite, why should it matter to me?”
Assuming you really want people to engage with the mission, everything you do needs to align with it. This means carefully examining and (if necessary) redesigning the core processes of the organization—everything from strategy to marketing to R&D to sales to compensation. Are any of these processes undermining the mission?
Every core process needs to support the mission in a simple, visible, and consistent way.
Think of the core process in the dabbawala organization. After collecting the lunchboxes between nine and ten in the morning, the dabbawalas pack them onto trolleys and push them to the railway station. The boxes go by train to a central station for unloading. Each box is color-coded so that those going to similar destinations end up on the same trolley. A given lunchbox might pass through the hands of four different dabbawalas before it arrives at its destination by 12:30 p.m. At the receiving station, the dabbawalas load the boxes onto their trademark silver bicycles. They have only their bicycles, the coded boxes, and the city train system as resources to navigate through one of the largest, most crowded, and most complicated cities in the world.
In the afternoon they reverse the process, picking up the empty boxes and returning them to the residents. That’s more than 400,000 nearly mistake-free transactions every single day—for more than a century.
Because the dabbawalas’ system of “carrying the curry” is virtually perfect, it has attracted the attention of the Harvard Business School, The Economist, the ISO 9000 authority of Australia, and even the Prince of Wales.11 Scholars and students of supply chain management are amazed. After studying the dabbawalas’ system, Forbes Magazine writers compared it to a Six Sigma process, which means the lunchbox men make only one error in every sixteen million transactions! How do they do it? As Forbes asked, “How can a system based on barefoot men, public trains, and simple, reusable containers” be one of the top core processes in the world?12
According to the professionals who evaluated it, the dabbawalas’ process works so well because it is simple, visible, and consistent.
Everyone, from the youngest dabbawala to the chairman of the association, can describe the simple process. The dabbawalas know exactly where they are going 100 percent of the time.
The system is visible. The lunchbox code contains the entire work process, from start to finish. A few symbols on each lid indicate exactly where the lunchbox came from and where it is going. For example, a box picked up at Vile Parle railway station routes through Churchgate Station—we know this from the symbol of a cross on the lid. Then it moves on to a particular building indicated by blue lettering. The numbers “1–2” communicate the endpoint: the second office on the first floor.
And consistency is, of course, the hallmark of the dabbawalas’ service. You can count on them without question. The dabbawalas take pride in their consistent quality of service. They wear distinctive white caps and tunics, and their silver bicycles are recognized everywhere. There is no overreliance on technology, but a lot of reliance on a winning team.
The passion of the dabbawalas means they never let down a customer. When a disastrous monsoon struck Mumbai in 2005, many thousands of people drowned or were lost. The city’s massive network of trains, which the dabbawalas depend on, stopped completely. So the dabbawalas left the trains and made their way several kilometers to their checkpoints on foot, carrying the dabbas through the torrential rains and floods. Few if any customers were missed. Uninterrupted service is that important to the dabbawalas.
Of course, as the world changes, the dabbawalas change, too. That’s why they are now taking orders by text and expanding their services. For example, their clockwork precision and custom delivery makes them an attractive distribution outlet for everything from time-sensitive software advertisements to investment brochures. As one dabbawala says, “There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours—but they don’t deliver lunch.”13 Through it all, the core process stays simple, transparent, and utterly reliable. Every single day, battling the vast crowds of Mumbai, unbelievable heat, or monsoon floods, the dabbawalas serve their customers with calm consistency.
Organizational psychologist Paul S. Goodman of Carnegie Mellon University observed, “Most of our modern business education is about analytic models, technology, and efficient business practices. The dabbawalas, by contrast, focus more on human and social ingenuity.”14 They focus on the people, on the pride of being unique, and on the strength of commitment to the mission.
What about your core processes? Are they …
- Simple?
- Visible?
- Consistent?
What could you do to simplify your processes? Make them more visible? Make them more consistent with the mission of the organization, and consistent in execution?
In the end, people will never engage with a “mission” that is not a mission, that is meaningless corporate-speak. And if they’re not asked to live by it, the mission doesn’t matter anyway.
But if you want to engage the full power of your people, involve them in finding your organization’s voice. Then let that voice govern everything you do.
LEADING WITH PURPOSE:
INSTRUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOADING
Here are key steps to lead your team or organization with purpose. Involve your team in discussing these questions. The outcomes should be (1) an engaging mission statement and (2) core processes that clearly support that mission.