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Mission, Vision, and Purpose: Fuel for Change
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
—Socrates
Effective personal change begins with a vision, mission, and purpose that are personal, meaningful, and absolutely real. When these elements are intact, translating vision into reality is one of the most transformative of all human experiences. The journey you must take to get there elevates lives, both your own and those of the people around you, and orchestrates your growth along the way. Without a clearly defined personal mission, vision, and purpose, we operate in a state of relative aimlessness and barrenness. We begin to wither, and the resulting trance perpetuates the notion that a fulfilled vision is simply out of our reach. The added frenzy supports the idea that we don’t even have time to look at what we want out of our lives. It’s a self-reinforcing trap, and we lose the skills of self-inquiry that can lead to meaningful insights, personal change, and staying competitive.
We must understand that defining and connecting to all that are precious and meaningful to us raises our motivation to an entirely new level. Establishing purpose brings clarity to our day-to-day living. Though the value of developing a strong organizational mission, vision, and purpose is drummed into business leaders throughout their professional lives, far less emphasis is placed on the need for personalized mission, vision, and purpose, if at all. Instead, much lip service is given to the idea of employees needing to get behind the mission, vision, and purpose of our organizations. Yet we are not as conditioned to ask our employees what they want out of life, what they wish to accomplish, and what is precious and meaningful to them. This isn’t done maliciously, but mindlessly. Despite the fact that business leaders such as Stephen Covey promoted personal vision, the behavior of most organizations demonstrate that a person’s personal vision, mission, and purpose doesn’t matter. And this is how we’ve lived for more than 300 years.
In the game of employee engagement, how far has this pursuit taken us? Nowhere. The minute we ask employees to adopt and support the company vision without even inquiring about their personal vision, we step back into the old miserable paradigm that implies a “do it or else” mandate. With decades of moving employees around like numbers, what kind of cynicism and contempt can you imagine comes up when we ask people to buy into a vision that in many cases is only about raising shareholder value?
Maya Angelou’s missive, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,”1 is relevant in your own organization. When we dismiss someone’s vision, they will likely give up on it. George Washington Carver was born into slavery but became our country’s most influential botanist and inventor. In 1941, Time magazine placed Mr. Carver on the cover and referred to him as “America’s Black Leonardo DaVinci.”2 Carver said, “When there is no vision, there is no hope.”3 By ignoring the deepest seeds of meaning and purpose in our employees, we actually contribute to setting the stage for barrenness in their lives.
Great leaders recognize that stakeholders become engaged when we help them access what they most want out of their work, their lives, and their careers. Well, it is the same for our employees. And as we develop the skills of self-inquiry, the process becomes both lighter and enlightening. Time and time again, we find that a large portion—if not the majority—of America’s talent at some point settled for what they got over what they wanted. We have become so busy that the purpose that would drive us forward, that would inspire us to be our very best, only sits quietly until the self-inquiry begins.
A fully engaged workforce can only be attained when we nourish dual vision. In a transparent environment, it is perfectly okay for individual vision to be defined, expressed, and fulfilled, even if it ultimately leads to someone’s departure. We are then able to support each other in pursuing the lives we want, lives that are as personalized and as clearly defined as a fingerprint. We are also better able to discuss our fears of falling out of step with change. These discussions will lead to solutions. When we develop this kind of clarity in working with one another, we become more willing to experience the discomfort associated with reinvention and change.
Organizational vision, mission, and purpose are critical to building a strong brand. However, strong engagement requires that we take this a step further by giving just as much energy to helping our employees realize their vision and encouraging them to fulfill their dreams. Starbucks has done a better job than most. The company’s mission is “[t]o inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”4 The company has taken interest in its employees’ personal mission, vision, and purpose by offering one of the most comprehensive educational assistance programs in the world. Not surprisingly, Starbucks has also become a home for some of our most engaged and talented workers. People can go there to, in part, fulfill their ambition to be educated. They even go so far as to provide counselors that can give academic guidance.
For most organizations, one of the first steps that can be taken towards building a vital and effective culture is to give equal importance to the mission, vision, and purpose of their employees. They can do this by establishing environments that not only listen but also actively encourage colleagues to clearly articulate what they want to do—for example, “I want to become such a strong graphic artist that I can become a creative director, either here or someplace else.” The overall approach can be as simple as shifting from statements like “Get to work” to “What do you want to get out of working here?” The latter actually establishes an inner thought process that leads to good outcomes for both parties and gives the boss information that, when properly managed, can motivate and inspire more from the employee.
I’ve watched participants in my programs define the lives they want to have and then commit to removing anything that is in their way. I’ve watched unhappy parents redefine their lives and become role models to their children. I’ve observed workers who were causing everyone around them to be miserable make amends and finally deal with the wounds of their past. And I’ve watched narcissistic executives become inclusive leaders. None of these transformations took place by adopting someone else’s vision. It happened when they looked within themselves and defined who they wanted to be in their relationships with work, life, and the world around them.
Developing work environments that included robust self-inquiry would have been completely out of place in the Industrial Revolution. Many leaders even today will respond with contempt to the idea of developing self-inquiry with all of their workers. They have no frame of reference or context for it. But times and contexts have changed dramatically. How will we motivate workers to change and engage if we are not developing environments with shared vision? In order to develop this capability, the more intelligent organizations will be the ones in which its leaders explore three questions with all employees:
1. What is your vision?
2. What is our vision?
3. How can we weave the two together?
Perhaps it would be valuable to tell you where my self-inquiry began. I have sought personal and spiritual growth my entire adult life. Many of the programs and quests that I experienced were exciting and wonderful at the time. But the impact wore off because we were engaged in rituals and experiences that were based on someone else’s truth and methodology. For example, if someone’s idea of joy and excitement is camping, they may think everyone ought to love camping, right? But bring the topic up to me and I will head for the doors. Many of our most hallowed expectations have been based on someone’s idea that a certain philosophy and set of values would improve everyone’s life. But when one point of view is pushed on others, there’s bound to be contention between its values and that of the individual. Far-reaching and deep-seated questions, however, can lead us to our individual truth and our individual path.
I discovered the Socratic approach through Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott, MCC, the author of If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules: 10 Rules for Being Human and the founder of MMS Institute, a coach training organization founded in 1974. For more than four decades, Cherie and her sister Lynn have conducted Inner Negotiation Workshops that pose questions to participants. When I experienced their work, I realized that asking people the right questions and encouraging them to answer the questions is perhaps the single most effective way to produce sustainable change. This is because the answers are based on the individual’s personal truth. It is also the most respectful approach because it recognizes that we are the experts of our own lives. In Socratic work, every outcome is unique because everyone’s truth is highly individual.
One of the biggest turning points in my life came not long after experiencing the Socratic process. A well-known producer who was launching a new record label contacted me; he wanted me to become the first artist on his new label. I had worked towards that moment for 12 years. The day that I joined the staffing industry was also the day that I made a commitment to work on my career as a musician. I didn’t want to struggle in road bands or play in bars. All that I wanted was a recording deal, session work, and concert tours. I worked towards this goal diligently, playing original music in small clubs and slowly working up to greater venues. With that one phone call, I felt that my ship had come in.
A few weeks after we started the project, however, I received another call. My producer had just dropped dead of a heart attack. In that one moment, given the dramatic example this represented for me, I realized that I had devoted much of my adult life to being happy sometime in the future. This opened the door to the sobering reality that I knew little of value about being happy in the moment and in the present. When I began exploring how to redesign my life to experience happiness on a day-to-day basis, it hit me that I would also have to reinvent the way I related to my work life. In fact, it became clear that for most of us, work is the biggest relationship that we have. It is, after all, where we spend most of our waking adult hours, and if we have a mediocre relationship with out work, we probably have a mediocre overall experience of life by default. Not that everything is mediocre, but that this one very important part of life can have an overall and cumulative effect on one’s whole life experience.
I had brief indications before of what my ideal life’s work could be. A few years prior, I was in a four-day intensive workshop with about 100 other participants. Right in the middle of it, I realized I could design a far more effective program with better results in half the time, but I didn’t entertain the thought much. In fact, I took a momentary look at it and put it as far out of my head as humanly possible. Changing other people’s lives, after all, was not on my righteous agenda. In fact, I had a spiritual leader approach me and tell me that I ought to be helping other people find the lives they are meant to have. I didn’t respond kindly or with any sense of receptivity.
I recount this story because some people will initially run from their true mission, vision, and purpose. I discounted what I was born to do. My insistence on music and what my life was supposed to look like shielded me from my own truth. In the years since then I have witnessed this same process happening in thousands of people who have attended my workshops. What I learned is that we often live in blind spots because we are conditioned to believe in one set of ideals and these ideals are often not our own.
The next turning point for me began one morning when I was sitting on the beach and pondering the unhappiness I was experiencing with my career. I had planned on leaving the staffing industry for a record contract. Because I had spent so much time looking to the future for happiness, I was distracting myself from the fact that I didn’t really like my work. I didn’t like the aggressive nature of the environment I managed on the owner’s behalf. I didn’t like moving people from one job to the next without any significant consideration for the impact on their lives outside of making a bit more money and getting a little more praise from my boss. I didn’t see the meaning and purpose of it all except for the fact that I made a lot of money. It dawned on me that most of my friends and colleagues were in the same boat. Ironically, many people considered me to be an expert about work!
That morning, I dug my toes into the sand and thought about the legacy of a life’s work. It hit me that the Industrial Revolution gave us a series of standards and behaviors that we had used for almost 300 years. That meant that approximately 10 generations had passed those principles down to the present time. Being the good recruiter that I was, I asked myself, “So, what was the promise? What did we offer to people that inspired them to join the cubicles and workstations and to spend hours, days, months, and years there?” It was predictability and survival. It’s no wonder that so many of us have a mediocre experience of work. If predictability and survival are what we bought as the purpose of work, what happens to meaning, purpose, joy, contribution, wild success, and making a difference? These characteristics would be irrelevant in that worldview. So I wondered what kind of world existed beyond these two relatively mediocre standards. A two-word phrase came up in my mind: “irrevocable happiness.”
Irrevocable means “can’t be taken away.” What would our lives look like if we were, in essence, sentenced to happiness? We would be living on our own terms with our own standards and our own definition of purpose. Every person’s definition would be unique. I asked myself what my own irrevocable happiness was. As I wrote down my answers to this question, I realized that some of my standards had always been there but had never been examined. Some of my words completely surprised me. I wrote, “I would only work with brilliant and loving people.” I had absolutely no evidence this was possible, but it was what I wanted. I wanted brilliant. I wanted individuals who would push me to grow in ways I could never anticipate. I wanted people that had such good hearts and souls that I loved them and they would freely love me. This is how I live today. These are the people who work with me and surround me. That one sentence became a standard that changed my life.
I also wrote, “I would change people’s lives in lasting and meaningful ways.” This was a surprising disclosure. That day on the beach was the point where I realized that I threw away that moment in the seminar because I could actually see how to get people to transform their work, elegantly and eloquently.
I had observed many people stand up and make grandiose announcements because of the standards imposed on them by the curriculum, such as “Make a difference.” None of them offered sound principles for how to implement making a difference. It hit me on that day that most of us need far more effective means of insight and support to define work based on our own unique definition of spiritual, emotional, and practical DNA.
In the years since, thousands of our participants have written out their own definition of irrevocable happiness. Every interpretation is different and unique. Consider for a moment that our overreliance on assessments plays to the notion that we don’t know who we are. Therefore, many of our employees continue to buy into the idea that self-knowledge is elusive and mysterious. This position weakens us and diminishes our personal power. A solid Socratic process dispels this because we are helping people—some for the first time ever—to access their innate truth and, in many cases, organize it into a new and personal mission.
The Irrevocable Happiness Exercise is quite practical in getting people to become very specific about the role, lifestyle, work, personal life, and platform that will support their highest fulfillment and joy. The exercise casts a wide net, and it can also be returned to over and over to update and refine the definitions over time.
Similarly, when we do organizational Socratic work, we ask the most open-ended questions possible and facilitate the broadest exercises in order to get our clients to become fully creative with their answers. For example, rather than limiting question, a broad question such as “How do you feel about your culture?” gives the recipient the signal to tell us anything on their mind. Wide open questions inspire conversation. They open up new and unexpected doors. If we want a more narrow focus, we can always tailor our questions. For example, we could ask, “What are some of the specific challenges with your culture?” We use less open-ended questions to define issues such as skill deficits, support requirements, performance improvements, and getting the best use out of our time. But the only reason to use closed questions, of the yes or no variety, is to stop the conversation. In fact, the only good use of a close-ended question is to politely regain control of a conversation.
One of the great strengths we can build into any organization is the ability to ask effective questions, the ones that inspire stakeholders to tell us what they want and need, the questions that get our customers to freely disclose what fulfilled expectations mean to them, and the questions that can inspire our colleagues to become receptive to our support. Here are a few examples:
• What would you like to accomplish in our meeting today?
• What is it about my leadership style that could be improved?
• How do you want to grow at our company? What kinds of skills do you need in order to do that?
• Imagine we are having lunch two years from now and you are telling me that today’s discussion represented a turning point in your career. What happened?
In addition, skilled questioning improves sales, peer-to-peer innovation, leadership development, career development, customer retention, and productivity. Great questioning skills facilitate getting to the truth. And today, succeeding in the midst of rapid change requires that we get to the truth more quickly than ever before.
When an intact team comes through our program, we don’t want to just sustain engagement; we want to deepen it significantly. Answering a few questions for even five minutes can not only support the development of long-term engagement, but can help employees get the most out of their day today. Here are some examples:
• What do you most want to accomplish today?
• In order to do it, what help do you need?
• What is today’s ideal blend of tactical and strategic work?
• Which stakeholder(s) need your attention?
• How can you further your mission, vision, and purpose today?
• How can you best take care of yourself today?
• What would represent a big win for you today?
• Who most deserves your praise today?
Five minutes—this is all that it takes to become more centered, productive, mindful, and clear thinking. However, caution is also in order. As with all forms of communication, questions can be skewed to manipulate people and create disconnectedness. Here are some examples:
• Do you want a million dollars?
• Do you want to be more successful?
• Do you want your coworkers to like you?
Salespeople and managers who ask questions with one-answer responses possess a kind of cynicism that humans can be hypnotized into saying yes when it is time to sell their product or service. Great Socratic questions, on the other hand, capture a person’s mind, critical thinking, emotional makeup, and above all, their truth. Their truth brings them back to mission, vision, and purpose. The value of investing in these great questions is that in doing so, we can galvanize our people around infinite causes. We can help them envision where they are headed, what they need to learn to stay competitive, how to better connect with colleagues, and how to “move mountains” that are important to them.
Teaching everyone the value of active listening skills is also essential to strong engagement. Why? When we ask someone an open-ended question that pertains to the circumstances at hand, the interaction compels them to listen, to think, to respond, and to open up. It helps them to better understand their colleagues. This is why we want to teach everyone these consultative sales skills. When our employees learn how to ask great questions, they become more connected to their stakeholders and also to each other. When we can connect with others’ individual visions, we can then move more easily into building a shared vision. The strategic use of mentors will also play a crucial role in helping employees build a meaningful and compelling vision within their own lives as well as the shared vision within intact teams and organizations. It all works together.
Many will need to be led into this work from different beliefs they currently hold. Some, for example, will have long since given up on the idea of a personal vision. Some will have forgotten what it feels like to dream of their best life. Others will have been conditioned to run from any form of vision that leads to the need for personal change, especially because the need to change often carries a negative connotation. And yet many will respond immediately, grateful to be given the time, space, voice, and process to define what is important to them in their professional lives. Many will immediately translate this into all they want to contribute within your organization. This is a classic win-win.
I unknowingly began my love affair with Socratic work in my 20s through the sales profession. As some of you will recall, in the 1980s, many of us at the time used copiers. But, we didn’t say, “Make me a copy.” We said, “Make me a Xerox.” The Xerox Corporation had a monopoly on photocopying until our country relaxed trade tariffs. Then, suddenly, businesses were inundated with photocopy machines from all over the world. Many offered new features and others were shockingly less expensive. The change represented the single biggest crisis in the history of Xerox. In response, the company built a sales institute to study the psychology of selling and invented a new form of business development.
Eventually Xerox opened new sales training to outsiders, and my company at the time sent me to learn and evaluate these new sales techniques for our industry. The psychologists that Xerox hired came up with a statement that drove all of my sales philosophy from that date forward. They said, “Human beings are capable of thinking of something other than themselves for a maximum of fifteen seconds.” This one insight turned my outlook on sales completely on its head. It effectively rendered our standard pitch selling completely irrelevant. People don’t care about your resume. They don’t care about the chemical makeup of your cleaning supplies. They care about one thing and that is their own fulfilled expectations.
When I came back from the training, I immediately started teaching our sales people how to develop expertise in finding the unfulfilled needs and expectations of everyone in our market. Prior to that, we had more than 200 competitors, with sales people pouring into the streets of Los Angeles every single day. They made pitches. They overcame objections. They built relationships through sheer persistence and having a “winning personality.” It was dreadfully stressful work. It also lacked soul. It was a means to an end, period.
After this discovery of a whole new approach, we sent our sales professionals into the field armed with Socratic sales questions. We asked questions that helped our prospects define for themselves how to do a better job. Our business soared. As importantly, we became more likeable. One of my clients told me, “You have the most charismatic sales people in the world.” I responded, “Isn’t it because they pay better attention to you than most anyone else?” She indicated that this was exactly the reason.
For many years Tom Drucker, one of the country’s foremost management consultants, led Xerox Learning. We have become good friends during the past 10 years and regularly visit to trade stories and share trends. I treasure Tom for his well-developed wisdom. He lives on the beach just 6 miles south of my beach. His wife, Marcia, is an equally successful theatrical producer. I visited with Tom to discuss Socratic thought as a cultural foundation for work engagement and productivity.
David: For me, what happened at Xerox represented a watershed change in how we sell products and services. Socratic-driven conversation became a far more sustainable way to influence the world. How would you describe your own learning process after Xerox?
Tom: Shortly after leaving, I met Peter Senge at Esalen. We became fast friends. Peter had not yet written The 5th Discipline. The notion of a learning organization—in other words, an organization that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself—was very exciting to me. One of my responsibilities had been running the Xerox Learning Center, where we taught people how to ask questions and lead dialogue. In building a learning organization, this type of Socratic inquiry, connected to a collective...produces some of our most significant culture changes.
David: It sounds as if you blew Socratic inquiry wide open.
Tom: Absolutely. In addition to Peter, I was heavily influenced by Marilyn Ferguson, the author of The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research (Taplinger). Her studies brought science and research into human development where learning and behavioral change actually rewires our brains. Now, we could tie the benefits of our work to science.
David: You also became heavily involved with the Word Café, the international organization devoted to question-driven learning forums. How did that impact your outlook?
Tom: The purpose of a question-driven dialogue at Xerox was the sale or getting to know the customer. Here, there was no purpose to the dialogue except what emerged from the dialogue; we weren’t managing or pre-ordaining what we would find. This kind of interaction provides a lot more freedom for everyone else in how they responded. That freedom revealed unexpected insights into what we didn’t know.
In the Word Café, we ask questions and apply no controls over the answers. We often move from one participant to the next so that everyone has the opportunity to engage in the conversation and the questions at hand.
David: How can this technique apply to engagement?
Tom: The wisdom emerges from the collective; you dig into topics. The learning is in the foreground. The process? People love it. You can extract such fabulous outcomes. I always timed these events so that feedback could be returned immediately. There is nothing more disrespectful than to ask people to participate in a communications process and then exclude them from the feedback. Here, they see the information from others and they also see their contributions are appreciated as well. The power of this type of process is you can invite customers, employees, leaders, vendors, all type of participants into the learning process. It is a great tool for overcoming isolation.
David: Many business authors and leading management consultants have talked about the need for personalized mission, vision, and purpose, but in practice it rarely happens.
Tom: It is critical for strong culture development and it is a matter of respect. No matter the environment, we need to find ways for every stakeholder to define what it is that they want out of their work, beyond the money. I was working with one organization where the ethos was all about the money and it was filled with young financial wizards. I asked them to go home and write out what they wanted beyond the income. What did they want to do with that income? What kind of lives did they want to lead? Many wanted the ability to marry and raise children. They began talking about a richness of life that was more connected to their spiritual and emotional well-being. Their answers changed the culture. We were able to introduce a 401K and use that as a platform for discussing their future.
David: I know that you are working with several organizations that have large Millennial populations. It seems we have built a new consulting industry around generational differences, and it is complicating the conversation. Baby Boomers put down the Millennials as self-involved and irresponsible. In the end, it is simply about fighting for turf. Rather than talking about differences, what does everyone want and need?
Tom: I am so in accord with this. First, everyone wants to be treated as we want others to treat us.
There are studies that show Millennials are job hoppers. They are not. They want to be appreciated. They don’t need “atta boy” or “atta girl.” They want to be appreciated for their thoughts and ideas. The reason they leave jobs is their superiors often don’t see them as collaborative and fully formed adults. They treat them as children, as fungible units. They don’t take them into confidences.
People need to be mentored. They need to be included. If they don’t live up to standards, they need to be taught how to behave. They want to be successful. They don’t want to come all this way and fail. They want adult bonds. They want an adult-to-adult relationship. When they feel that, they blossom. People thrive when they are connected. This is all about emotional intelligence and rather than complicating the narrative with differences; it is so important that we always remember the Golden (or even “platinum”) Rule.
David: You are working on an ambitious project to transform the culture, customer service, and talent strategies for VCA, the country’s largest veterinarian group.
Tom: They are devoted to building the finest customer and pet care experience in the industry, and with 25,000 employees, it is a very large project.
David: Where did you begin?
Tom: We begin with emotional intelligence. Yes, many of the customer-care and back-room areas are populated with young people who join the business because of their love for animals. The longer-term employees have found ways to take care of themselves through the extremes. The environment includes people coming in to let go of their companions with all the heartbreak that implies, and others coming in with the joyful rituals from having new pets. Their day includes difficult customers rattled with their dog’s health issues. We have the shock of critical injuries.
We cannot expect employees to be their best if we don’t create the kinds of rituals and care that emotionally nourishes them. For example, we have a daily ritual that everyone uses called “the huddle.” One takes place in the front office, another in the back, and one with the vets. We gather together and check in with each member of the team with questions like, “How are you doing? You had the flu last week. How are you holding up?” “Jennifer, you sat with that lady early this morning who was too distraught to get up. You were so kind to her. How can we support you?” “Paul, what you did with that irate customer was awesome! How did you come up with that?”
These ritualized bonds and conversations help nourish people to be their best. We can provide all of the techniques in the world but without watching each other’s back, being appreciative and kind, we will not get their best.
David: If you are meeting with a CEO with significant cynicism and contempt around talent development and employer branding, how do you work with them?
Tom: Well, first you acknowledge them for taking the meeting and even being willing to explore the questions. Usually, I suggest that we start with a small project or pilot program, an opportunity for “proof of concept.” The results will speak for themselves. In reality, CEOs and business owners who understand the truth about talent and the Golden Rule are not the norm. I had the great privilege of working for David Kearns at Xerox. He was one of those rare individuals who always did the right thing. Very much like your friend at the U.S. Marines, he led the company with values, he paid attention to the employees, and he treated everyone with dignity. He expected others to do the same. Other large companies were pouring poison into the river or cheating communities out of water. Many treated their employees like numbers. It feels so right but after moving on, I realized just how unusual it is to have a CEO who embraces those standards all of the time.
Where do we now take the power of the Socratic process? It’s very simple. Start using the questions. Teach everyone to start using questions to access truth whether it is in a sales setting, personal career development journaling, connecting with stakeholders, or leading an organization through difficult change. There is a series of sample questions at the conclusion of The Workplace Engagement Solution. Better yet, develop a Socratic Question Library within your own organization and encourage employees to send in their best questions and the memorable breakthroughs they have had in helping each other live in the truth. The truth, after all, is what we need most in a world of rapidly accelerating change. Perhaps it is what we needed all along. Instead of living with a “barrenness of life,” we can develop richly flourishing lives filled with the kind of meaning and purpose that promotes enthusiasm and energy.