Strategy and organizational growth expert Ranjay Gulati explains how meaningful engagement can unlock your potential for high performance.

1. How can organizations embody the idea of purpose in a way that everyone gets it and acts on it?  

People get stuck on the idea that a purpose is a mission statement. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, the mission statement is the starting point, not the end point of this purpose journey. The hard part is to turn that purpose statement once you have it, into making purpose personal. One of the starting points for it, of course, is to articulate and communicate your purpose.

How the message is communicated in an emotionally resonant way is important. You then have to connect it to your KPIs and look for correlates of purpose, such as how do we create value and who do we create value for? So, we start measuring different dimensions of value we create. Beyond the measurement, structure and purpose, the hardest step is making it personal: how do you get people to connect with it in a meaningful way? In some companies, they took a radical step where they would say, we need to get employees to think about their own personal life purpose, because if they haven't thought about their life purpose, how are they going to connect to some company's purpose? Unilever had 60,000 employees go through personal life purpose training. BlackRock did that for all their employees.  

2. How does culture intersect with purpose? 

Culture and purpose provide a form of guardrails for action. In the crazy turbulent times we're in right now, where things are changing so fast, you need some constants around which you can build and grow your business. Culture provides behavioral mileposts. Purpose provides the North Star and existential milepost. Both of these together work in support of each other. If you're going to shape your purpose, you're going to also work on your culture. As Lego and Etsy tried to transform their businesses, they reflected on their purpose and tried to recraft their purpose, but they also reflected on that culture. While they were doing this, they were also working on their strategy and their organizational systems.  

3. How do you figure out when an organization is doing purpose washing? 

Purpose washing is an unfortunate consequence of what we see in the world today. Theranos had a purpose statement, as did Enron and Purdue Pharmaceuticals. All this makes people cynical. The cynical view is one where actions don't connect to what your purported statements are. In a transparent world like we're in today, customers can sniff this out, employees will leak you out. Other stakeholders will smell you out. It's a fool's errand to think that you're going to come up with some purpose statement and expect others to somehow buy into it. If anything, it does a huge disservice to the organization. It's a demotivator. You'd be better off not having a purpose statement than have one that is completely duplicitous or misleading. Organizations once they embark on this can unlock tremendous potential with their purpose, but they can also do themselves tremendous damage if they're engaged in purpose washing. Some organizations haven’t understood that purpose unlocks economic value and social value, employee productivity, supplier partnerships, employee morale, connection to your community and so forth. Purpose is good for business.