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Why People — and Companies — Need Purpose
Nicholas Pearce, clinical associate professor at Kellogg School of Management, says too many companies and individuals go about their daily business without a strong sense of...
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Nicholas Pearce, clinical associate professor at Kellogg School of Management, says too many companies and individuals go about their daily business without a strong sense of purpose. He argues that companies that are not simply profit-driven are more likely to succeed and that the same goes for people. He says individuals who align their daily job with their life’s work will be happier and more productive. Pearce is also a pastor, an executive coach, and the author of the book The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work.
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
Nicholas Pearce didn’t always know the path that he was meant for.
He grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He was good at chemistry and math. He graduated near the top of his high school class.
He studied chemical engineering at MIT. But along the way, he realized that wasn’t what he was passionate about.
He really cared about people.
He began to focus on engineering something else: leadership and organizational success.
Pearce is now a professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He’s also a pastor at a big Chicago church and an executive coach.
He has three jobs – but one vocation, as he describes it. All those roles add up to a fulfilling life. And he says that too many of us are looking for jobs without thinking about purpose. And he says companies as well should be as purpose-driven as they are profit-driven.
His new book is The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work.
Nicholas, thanks for coming on the show.
NICHOLAS PEARCE: Thanks for having me, Curt.
CURT NICKISCH: If you take maybe as a given that the most successful companies are purpose driven or have a clear mission, do the people who work them also have that too?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: The best companies are ones that not only have a purpose for themselves but also attract and hire people whose individual senses of purpose align with the company’s purpose.
Purpose is simply the reason why someone or something exists. So, purpose ought to motivate what companies do every day because the “why” should drive the “what”. And similarly, we can say the same for individuals. Their “why” should also drive their “what” in terms of what they’re doing every day.
CURT NICKISCH: I just wonder when you survey kind of the landscape of companies out there, how many do you feel like the “why” really drives the “what”?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: For a lot of companies, they have been focused on profit maximization. And unfortunately, that is not a compelling purpose, that’s not a compelling “why.” Certainly, making profit is an important outcome, but it not the reason why an organization exists.
An organization’s purpose should distinguish it from other organizations. It’s like the thumbprint or someone’s DNA, it is what distinguishes it from someone else. So, every company on the Fortune 500 is going to say “We’re here hoping to make money.” This is not a public charity.
Yet what distinguishes one from another should be their “why.” So, there’s an increasing importance on purpose because there are a lot of people, particularly Millennials, who are making employment decisions not based on profit potential, or even salary potential, and earnings potential, but on purpose alignment. So, it may not be a lot of companies right now that are focusing on purpose, but that number is certainly increasing sharply.
CURT NICKISCH: What else makes you say that?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I had the opportunity to talk to 50 of the top 100 leaders in a major global company. And I asked them: “What is the purpose of your company? What is the reason why you all exist?
And you could hear a pin drop. They looked around at each other perplexed, confused, and speechless. Finally, someone said, “Well, we want to remain in existence.” And so I said to them, “You mean to tell me the reason why you exist is to keep on existing?” That is not going to motivate me to wake up and go to work. It’s not going to motivate me to come early, or to stay late, or to give my best ideas or to be an ambassador for the brand.
“Can you do better?” And after about 15 minutes we really got into an understanding of the situation they were in as an organization and how they found themselves trying to not only transform their industry but also transform the quality of life of people around the world.
And so by getting them to think about their bigger picture purpose, their reason for existing, and perhaps stated differently, what would happen or who would care if you ceased to exist? They were able to rally around a deeper sense of purpose that they were then able to cascade throughout the organization and really revitalize people’s morale and reason for being there.
CURT NICKISCH: Do you think people, individuals, have this easier or harder than companies do?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: Individuals and organizations have it equally as difficult. Organizations are not special, they’re simply comprised of human beings. And so, if human beings are not thinking about their own purposes, then organizations are not going to be thinking about purpose.
Individuals in many cases are on auto-pilot, just going through life just one day after another with an endless string of activities, never really asking why they’re doing what they’re doing. The benefit that individuals have is centuries of philosophical and theological thought. Some philosophers have written that we’re here for our own pleasure and happiness. Some think that we’re here just to propagate the species from a genetic perspective. Others think that we don’t have any real purpose at all
I’m reminded of Nobel Laureate James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, who said we’re not for anything, we’re just products of evolution. But then, others have recognized that there is a big picture more transcendent, spiritual, and eternal dimension to our lives that – regardless of one’s faith tradition – there’s more to life than just what can be seen or experienced with our senses.
And so, for individuals when we recognize that we’ve been made for more, then it encourages us, and inspires us, and challenges us, to listen for the voice of the one who has created us to give us our life’s assignment, which evolves and grows with time. Beyond career, beyond job, what is my life’s work, and how can I pursue it?
CURT NICKISCH: You’re a Christian, right? You’re a pastor. And so you have deep convictions about people having individual purpose, something that really makes them unique. For that reason they have their own individual purpose path and a vocation that they can go after that, that means more than a job. It’s a, you know, something closer to a calling.
NICHOLAS PEARCE: That’s right. And there are a lot of people who may not subscribe to a particular faith tradition, who can at least acknowledge the fact that there is something more to this life than what we can see in the here and now. Which is what drives a lot of people to be concerned with questions of legacy and questions of meaning. Those folks have the capacity, and even the hunger and thirst, to ask these questions regardless of whether they anchor or tether them to a particular faith tradition.
CURT NICKISCH: What if you don’t know what your life’s work is? Like how, how do you find that personal mission statement because, you know, finding the right job or choosing a career is a lot of work in itself.
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I believe that our life’s work is deeply connected with who we are and why we’re on the planet. So, we have to start asking the deep questions of purpose and identity in order to get to life’s work. The idea of life’s work requires a degree of human authenticity.
But this idea of authentic life’s work is not only letting our best and highest values guide how we do our work and how we behave at work but letting those values guide what work we do in the first place. It’s about the work and the impact we feel most called to make at any given point in our lives. It’s the work that we cannot not do. And so, when we’re given the gift of letting our souls shine through the work we do, it’s authentically ours.
It is engaging in the radical act of connecting our souls with our roles. Now, what’s authentic for one person may be completely inauthentic for someone else. This is not just a push or ploy to get people to engage in non-profit work, or low paying work, or some explicit social impact work. It’s just the work that you are uniquely called to do in this moment and season in your life.
CURT NICKISCH: When you ask these questions, how do you know if you’re in the wrong job in terms of feeling like you have a purpose?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: In terms of trying to figure out whether you’re in the wrong job, or maybe it’s time to shift gears, there are a few things that come to mind. Certainly, some of the more tactical reasons why one might be ready to leave are if they have stopped learning and growing. Or if they are in a toxic culture that is adversely impacting their well-being and their quality of life.
Or, perhaps, if they feel that going to work every day is an act of inauthenticity, if the work they’re doing is disconnected from their purpose, and the outcomes that they’re working to accomplish feel meaningless or aren’t aligned with who they are and what they stand for, it may be time to consider walking away.
And I say that will all due respect for those who are just working jobs to try and put food on the table, and keep a roof over their family’s heads. I recognize that some people may not feel that they have the luxury of this kind of a conversation right now, but even in jobs that may not have a glamorous career trajectory to them, we all owe it to ourselves, given that we only have one life to live, to spend our days doing what we feel is best suited for what we should do with our lives.
CURT NICKISCH: Do you find that it’s harder for people to find that now that the gig economy is here and, and the working world is more complex than it used to be?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I think it’s not only easier to do now, but much more necessary to do now. Because of the way that companies are treating people. There used to be a social contract between an employer and their employees that said “we will take care of you as long as you do the right things, we will look out for you, and when you retire we will throw you a party, give you a watch, and a pension. We will take care of you for life.”
Because people were the greatest asset that an organization had. But now, what we’re seeing is that many companies are treated talent as though people are a commodity, and money is the asset that they prize and cherish. So, if you’re working in an organization that treats you like employee number 742,017, you are probably a lot more personally incentivized to figure out: what am I doing with my life?
Because obviously, this company doesn’t think a whole lot of my life. This company thinks that I am an interchangeable cog in a wheel. And as artificial intelligence has continued to proliferate, and machines replace more and more people, it’s going to push us as human beings to really clarify what does it mean for us to be uniquely human.
If it’s not physical effort, and it’s not even cognitive capacity that makes us unique as human beings, what do we have left? And what we have left is the soul. What we have left is deep and abiding self-awareness. What we have is the capacity to experience the transcendent.
And as organizational leaders, it is incumbent to not ask our people to leave that part of themselves in the parking lot, but rather to bring that part of themselves into the company, into our daily work. Not so much to try to convert people to a particular faith tradition, but rather to be their authentic, fully present selves.
CURT NICKISCH: How do you learn that? Because that’s, I mean, you teach at Kellogg, I got a degree at Questrom, I don’t remember ever being told how to do this.
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I believe strongly that our educational system is complicit in the problem you just described. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and went to elite public schools in Chicago, and then graduated from some top tier universities, and currently teach at one. But as I reflect on my own life, everything was geared toward matching interest and passion with career track.
So, as I’ve spent more time with students in the classroom, including some school leaders and executives in the public and private sectors, I’ve recognized that the very people who are responsible for the education of our young people are wrestling with these very same questions themselves. So, they may not be well-positioned to lead young people to a place where they have not themselves gone.
It is a radical act to reframe the purpose of education as being for the advancement of industry and the selection of career path, to reframe that and say your education is to give you the skills, the tools, the exposure that you need, to be able to accomplish your life’s work, whatever it may be.
Some think that the purpose of education is lighting someone on fire, not filling an empty pail with facts and knowledge. I believe it is in our best interest, not only as individual human beings but as a society to route people in the direction that they are uniquely designed to burn brightly.
And it is not suggesting that everyone necessarily needs to have a white-collar job in order to have meaning and purpose. I don’t think that meaning and purpose are correlated with one’s title or prestige or salary. There are some people at Northwestern who clean the whiteboards after I teach, who have a lot clearer sense of their life’s why then some of my faculty colleagues who are doing quite well financially. So, this is not a class conversation. This is a deep, intrinsic, transcendent soul conversation.
CURT NICKISCH: What does all of this mean for companies and managers? If you work somewhere, chances are, you know, that a number of people that you work with may feel that they are not in line with what they feel like they should be doing. And so, as a manager or as a leader, as a co-worker, maybe you feel like you’re doing the right, what you want to do, but can you help the people you work with?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I believe that as leaders one of our biggest responsibilities is to provide people with a sense of meaning and purpose in their work. I believe for leaders, it is a critical, critical conversation, because in many cases we are complicit in the devaluation of our people. What I mean by that is sometimes, and I’ve seen this at my own work, sometimes you have a leader that has a really A+ performer, a rock star on their team.
The problem is not that this person underperforms, but that the leader can tell in their bones that this person is not where they belong. This person is not connecting their soul with their role. This person is on auto-pilot doing great work, meaningful, valuable work for the company, but it’s not valuable for themselves.
Not from a financial perspective, but from a much more meaningful and deep sense of purpose perspective. And sometimes that leader or that manager has the temptation to hold onto that person because you don’t want to lose a good person. But from a human perspective, you owe it to that person to not hold them hostage and to release them or to free them.
I don’t mean fire them. But I do mean coach them, and then be willing to put our social capital on the line to help them land in a place that will allow them to merge their daily work with their life’s work. Perhaps that’s at another organization, or perhaps it means that we need to find them a different seat within our current organization.
But as leaders, we have a significant role not in making purpose for people, but facilitating the realization of the purpose that our people are coming to us with. As leaders, we are stewards of people, and how we take care of people to help them be their highest and best, is a critical dimension of how I measure the effectiveness of leadership.
CURT NICKISCH: Are there things that you can do without shaking it up horribly? Like, can you turn your organization into one that, you know, does more community service and volunteer work together, builds in and incorporates some things that give people more of a sense of purpose, yeah, without really mixing it up or shaking it up?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: A lot of companies are trying to put corporate/social responsibility patches on purposelessness. And ultimately that does not really help. Just because we get a bus or two or three full of colleagues from the workplace, and get t-shirts that match, and go into a community that may be socioeconomically disadvantaged, and do some good deeds for a couple of hours, and take pictures, but at the end of the day we actually spent more money on the buses and the t-shirts then we spent impacting the peoples’ lives in the communities that we went to, we’ve actually not done a whole lot.
And people in organizations are seeing through that. This is not about creating a community service activity or creating some type of committee to be able to put on the website that we are committed to doing good things. This is a much deeper and abiding sense of why we even exist as a company that animates everything we do.
Whether it is in the community or in the civic space, or in terms of the decisions we make with our customers and clients, or the decisions we make in terms of how we form and nurture a healthy workplace environment and culture. And how we treat each other as colleagues. This is a matter of purpose, not just practice. And when companies try to tinker with practices that look good on the surface, but when you drill deeper they’re devoid of any meaning, people can see through that a mile away.
CURT NICKISCH: What are things that you like to hear or recognize when you visit companies or talk to leaders? What are kind of the tip-offs that you know that you’re dealing with or working with a company that, that is in tune with purposeful principles?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: One thing that matters deeply in terms of being able to tell whether a company cares about purpose is to be able to ask people how what they’re doing right now helps the company to achieve its purpose, not its profitability, but its purpose. And if people look back at me with a puzzled look as though they’ve never been asked that question or never considered it, it tells me that the purpose is just a statement on the website. It is not the very lifeblood that animates everything happening in the organization.
When I go into an organization that is doing things on purpose, one that I think about is Mary Kay. Some of the people who I have met at Mary Kay’s corporate headquarters treat Mary Kay as though it’s almost a religion. They feel such a sense of pride talking about Mary Kay, not only Mary Kay Ash the founder but talking about the impact that Mary Kay is making in the lives of women everywhere.
They believe that in their bones this is not something that they are faking. They are not faking the funk on this. They believe that with their souls that the work they’re doing every day is not just for economic profit, but it is for social impact empowering and unleashing the innate power of 50 percent of the global population, which is women.
When I can see that, it’s unavoidable, it’s contagious. And they almost made me want to work at Mary Kay, Curt, and I have no interest in doing the work that they do. But there’s a contagion that spread because the excitement and commitment they have to their purpose make you want to join the team because you know that they’re doing something that’s worthwhile and meaningful.
CURT NICKISCH: What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about purpose that you want to clear up?
NICHOLAS PEARCE: I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about purpose is that it a consolation prize when you can’t be profitable. A lot of people think that purpose is the plan B that a company should default to when it can’t make money. So, since we don’t have money, at least we have purpose.
I would argue instead that purpose is a driver of profit. Whether you’re thinking about profit from an economic perspective, from a human perspective, or from a social perspective, profit is enhanced by purpose. And purpose is foundational to any organization, not just to those that are explicitly out to create social good.
CURT NICKISCH: Nicholas, thanks for coming on the show and talking about this.
NICHOLAS PEARCE: Curt, thank you so much for having me.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Nicholas Pearce. He’s a clinical associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He’s also a pastor, an executive coach, and the author of the new book The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.