Leading with purpose
Maybe they don’t really need to be skilled managers right now. Perhaps they should be good goal-finders. Bill Hulseman
Bill Hulseman, an independent consultant, designs rituals, facilitates dialog, and supports educators in developing school culture. This was his October presentation at the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Consortium.
Every [Consortium]Conversation seems to revolve around purpose and mindset. The stumbling block seems to be a lack of clarity about each organization’s purpose. [We need]Organizations need chief purpose-finders. Someone must take charge of clearly articulating the direction the organization is heading.
This article is the final in a six-part series on the importance of individuality. It explains how to spot where it is suppressed, how we can change our leadership style, how to avoid becoming obsolete leaders, and how to improve our organizational culture. These articles include insights from people across industries (doctors to professors, executives to deans, and many more), who shared their stories at recent conferences. Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit.
It seems appropriate to conclude this series on the topic of leading with purpose. Leaders today tell me:
- Everything has changed, people feel scared and are losing hope.
- Employees are the most important sector need (attracting, retaining, engaging and activating).
- Talent is the key: people can go anywhere they want. We have to re-recruit them.
- Older leaders are less motivated than younger leaders to change. Younger leaders want change but need a roadmap.
There is a way for leaders to co-design this roadmap by partnering and empowering younger leaders.
Leaders at all levels are aware of this need, but they don’t always know the best ways to meet it. It all starts with purpose, individual purpose, and organizational purpose.
Teri Fontenot is the CEO emeritus at Womans Hospital and a member of several private and public boards of directors. Last year, they made a significant philosophical shift when they declared that public companies should not consider shareholder returns as their top priority. They now believe that corporations should be focusing on their wider societal impact and accountability.
This is a trend to prioritize impact related to environmental and social governance, also known as ESG.
ESG is a priority for boards. According to the Center for Audit Quality, the Center for Audit Quality analyzed the most recent publicly available ESG data for S&P500 companies and determined that they were a priority for boards. 95% of S&P 500 companies made detailed ESG information public.
CEOs must make ESG a priority. 2022 EY US CEO surveyChief executives keep their growth strategy in mind while pivoting to ESG or sustainability.
But let’s ask a question: Is ESG just the new CSR? Here’s a warning: This opinion piece was published in The Regulatory ReviewESG initiatives won’t have much social value if companies don’t improve the conditions that caused CSR to fail. According to many estimates, CSRin which businesses IntegrateThrough stakeholder engagement, businesses have yet to integrate social concerns into business strategy and operations. TransformCompanies can innovate. If firms don’t fix the harms that drive CSR initiatives, should ESG expect better?
This is where purpose-driven leadership comes into play.
ESG priorities and ESG activities will only be genuine and effective if they are shaped and driven with purpose by people who lead with purpose.
Know your Organization’s Original Purpose
Lets look at higher education. Universities can be judged for being too slow to adapt and rigid with their standards, which is perhaps understandable. Wendy York, dean of Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business, reminds us of its original purpose.
We must understand why higher education is structured the way it does. It can sometimes lead towards stifling, but also to great things. The monasteries of the high Middle Ages were the inspiration for the organizational structure. The monasteries had a specific way of doing business, which was very insular. This was the guardrail that kept the clerical religious missions separated from the heathen, where there were Kings who took over religions.
It is important to understand why systems work the way that they do. This helps us in our efforts to make those systems more suitable for the purpose for which we have committed.
York herself is an example of one such evolution.
She has stated in the past that she is not an academic traditionalist, so I am blissfully immune from institutionalized thinking. Despite not having a Ph.D., she was highly recruited to her position as academic dean.
I asked her when higher education will begin to hire people like her. She has a solid business background. She has held senior-level executive positions in both non-profit, and for-profit organizations. She co-managed a venture capital funds for over five years and started and/or managed four early-stage internet and technology companies.
She stated that metrics can get in the path of the larger purpose of bringing relevant expertise to classrooms.
She said that we need to look at the metrics of success in a business college. Ratings [related to accreditation]We will be penalized if we have too many people who have real-world business experience in classroom teaching. They consider the ratio of teaching hours provided by Ph.Ds.
Reimagine the original purpose of your organization
Nancy Hubbard, professor and dean of the University of Lynchburg College of Business adds an additional layer to our understanding, comparing the U.S. university systems to those in Europe.
Hubbard said that universities in Europe are very different. Except for a few exceptions, almost all universities are owned and operated by the state. They are either free or charge a small fee. This comes at a cost. The price is that higher education in Europe is viewed as a utilitarian endeavor. It is a simple idea that if a country needs X amount of doctors, then universities will have X number people learning to be doctors. We will have a lottery system that allows qualified people to win a chance at getting into medical school. We need a certain amount of kindergarten teachers. We’re going have this many kindergarten teachers.
What are you doing to help your community?
Raritan Valley Community College president is Mike McDonough. He believes that the name is the most important part of the purpose.
We have community colleges in our area. I am a leader. I will only be able to sustain the college through aggressive public/private partnerships. The funding perspective of the community college has been abandoned by federal governments and counties. Our business model is bankrupt. It cannot continue. It cannot continue. It won’t. We have a partnership with an American medical diagnostic testing service. They have a huge need for medical lab technologists. This credential is not a four-year degree. They will pay us half a million dollars to design and create that program.
Now I need to do this 20 times over the next year. And it will be all right. There is still a great need for community colleges. My last data point is that more than 50% of Americans who earn a baccalaureate degree in this country started at a community college.
How can we find our purpose as leaders?
You might think you know your purpose. If you work or lead an institution of higher learning, you might think that you are already working towards a purpose of teaching and contributing to the body knowledge. However, we can dilute the purpose of our work by serving one audience at a time.
Fairfield University student Peter Baron. He said that he doesn’t feel the university has a purpose other than to serve him.
Baron said that students are not the university’s customers. Baron stated that students’ future employers and students are the customers. Higher education institutions have a good understanding of their customer base. They focus on improving student job placement and retention rates after six month. Colleges aim to make students great potential employees.
Baron stated that education was content in the age of standardization. It was about imparting knowledge to students. We’ll give you the skills you need to become an accountant if you are an accounting major. Because standard education aims to produce employees who fit the standard model. This must change. Instead, we must start educating for the sole purpose if creating educated individuals. We will find that this way of educating students will help them to discover their true self and create better employees than the old one.
Baron stated that he heard an academic leader suggest last year that education should be guided through a question and not a major. Baron said that he began to think about his question. I am interested in sociology and philosophy, as well as rhetoric, politics, and history. My question was, “Are socioeconomic inequalities inevitable?” Are they avoidable? Now, I have an individual-designed major that is centered around that question. Because I lead with a question, and not just a discipline instead, I think about my question in every course I take and how it fits with what I want.
That’s a powerful method to find your personal purpose. Let’s now return to our corporations.
Gustavo Canton assists us in understanding how to harness individual purpose for the good of the company. He is an analytics leader and expert on data science, most recently at Starbucks.
Data science has the potential to help people and organizations achieve their goals. People analytics is not just about the HR function. It’s about learning how you can take care of your customers, your partners, and your communities.
He stated that many organizations rely on external data sources to hire employees (such as LinkedIn), even though they have their own internal data sources. The problem with company internal data sources is that it may not be accurate in some cases or it may be incomplete. This doesn’t make sense to me. You don’t even know your employees. The first step for me was to find out who my coworkers are. [when Im helping someone figure out what data would be useful to them]Listening is to try to understand the environment and the situation. Who are the stakeholders What is their true purpose? From there, you can identify where to invest data to better understand your population and to help you reach your purpose.
Create a system that supports leading with purpose
That is what the commitment to ESG aims to accomplish. We want actions and initiatives that make our purpose a reality. If we don’t focus on teaching people to get to know one another, that is where we fail.
This requires the ability to use tools and skills to spread purpose across our organizations.
- Training to help people get to know each other and how to help them know themselves
- Time and resources needed to find our leadership identity.
- Training on how to create experiences that inspire people to put their purpose into action
This series began with a quote Deborah LovichBoston Consulting Group (BCG), managing director and senior partner: The battle for talent is over. Talent won.
She believes it is time for leaders and managers to rethink their relationships with their employees.
It is possible to lead with purpose. Only when we learn to support each other’s dignity and activate our full potential, can we lead with purpose. This is how we unleash our individuality.
Buy my new book Unleashing Individuality: The leadership skill that unlocks all other leaders.
