Deconstructing perspectives on Organizations and Management

Imagine you are a CEO making the difficult decision to furlough frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the decision weighs heavily on you, you know that furloughs are preferable to layoffs. Yet when you make the announcement, you face a withering, deeply personal Twitterstorm: customers and even employees ridicule you with your own interview quotes about the “importance of community,” and how “our people are our purpose.”
Under pressure, you reverse the decision, but the damage to your reputation proves irreparable.

Or let’s say you are a new regional division head, an “outsider” who’s trying to decide how to approach an important meeting with your key reports. Do you choose the status quo or do you take a risk and describe the outlines of a bold vision that you have to redefine a key product offering around the company’s purpose? You take a deep breath and choose risk—and quickly find that your team is far more enthusiastic about the idea than you had anticipated.

Finally, imagine you are a senior executive in a company that has successfully challenged—and raised—its purpose ambitions. Now, just as the enthusiasm is peaking, a member of your team spots a profitable business opportunity—but it goes against the company’s newly galvanizing purpose. Do you seize the opportunity or do you say no? And what do you tell your teammate, not to mention the CEO?

These examples—composites drawn from real cases—highlight the unique, intensely personal nature of organizational purpose for top executives. As a CEO in particular, your company’s ambitions around purpose should start with your unique aspiration for what you expect for the organization—beginning with what it stands for. You will also take the heat for any stumbles, should either you or the company fail to live up to your purposeful aspirations.

And yet even though you’re best placed to be the catalyst in the kind of energizing organizational chain reaction that happens when purpose takes hold and is activated in a company, you’re still one person in a large company
and your time and priorities are spread thin. No one, not even the CEO, can make purpose happen by themselves—or make it happen for other people. And yet when it does happen—when companies find the sweet spot where the “we” overlaps with the “me”—the benefits to employees, the company, and even society are powerful.