According to Anne Chow, the former CEO of AT&T Business, you should go beyond focus What your company makes it to scratch on the top Why does—and how the way your company does it makes it unique and better than the competition.
In this excerpt from her best-selling book, Drive bigger, Foodsenior fellow and assistant professor of executive education at the Kellogg School, describes how an inspiring and functional purpose statement can help a company thrive.
Okay, sure. It helps to have a purpose and a purpose that matters to your stakeholders. But how exactly do you define it?
Let’s say you’re leading a team where the why just isn’t clear. No Girl Scouts. No worries about life or death. Maybe you sell chairs. How you surface Why? What is the purpose that will sustain you and your people through a bad weather move or after your baby kept you up half the night?
Here’s how IKEA linked the business of “selling furniture and homewares” to its purpose statement: “To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible can afford them .” By building a purposeful statement of purpose, IKEA highlights its contribution to society and responds to it through its choices. Sure, it might give you a pain in the back when you imagine “as many people as possible” sitting on the floors of their homes, cramming flat-pack furniture together with tiny Allen keys. But surely you agree that IKEA is affordable and functional, serving the purpose of clean, neat design for the masses. Students, families and startup founders can access aesthetically pleasing furniture at affordable prices, filling a real societal need.
To access this deeper meaning, I have found it helpful to move beyond focus What you do Ask yourself and each other: Why? Why you? What it does to you how the optimal choice and different from current or future market competitors?
No matter the size of your team or the work you do, you are on a mission to reach a destination, realize your vision and achieve the desired results. If you’re still struggling to articulate what you do differently, ask yourself: What if we didn’t exist? Who would care? And why?
In my early roles, before I took on team leadership responsibilities, I learned to really value bosses who explained the context for our work, the larger why of the company. I tried to emulate them by creating local purpose statements for my teams that would “rise” to the company’s vision. My first boss at AT&T was one of my best, and he set the foundation for that larger he meant I was an engineer focused on AT&T’s network billing architecture. He showed us how our work was used, took us on tours of service centers that benefited from our projects, and constantly talked to us about the positive impact of our contributions on customers. Her approach was people-centered—from us as her employees, to our colleagues we helped, to the customers we served. I became what I would call an “environment woman” in this first role, constantly seeking to connect with the what, who, how and why.
When I led a product management team, I would highlight our customers’ pain to highlight our company’s purpose: that we needed to constantly innovate. I then correlated this with the company’s quantitative growth in revenue, profit margins, and market share. Our ability to develop and launch new products could serve existing customers and win new ones—and that was the focus of the business’s growth. And our focus was not just on the products themselves but on how our customers would experience them.
Great leaders are merchants of hope, and a primary goal I always had when speaking with my team was to affirm to them how important their roles were to the greater good—to show them that they really mattered and give them a sense of how their efforts have contributed to the current and future growth of our company.
To truly inspire people, you must choose your words intentionally when expressing purpose. While your statements should be aspirational and aspirational, you also want them to be achievable and actionable. Reliability is key. Often companies choose words that feel too lofty, abstract, broad or noisy, and the result is like an astrological horoscope that is generally applicable but says nothing.
After all, it doesn’t matter what words you choose if your stakeholders can’t visualize what you’re trying to create. Certainly, Steve Jobs’ brain was burning with futuristic notions of how technology would change our lives. But he kept Apple’s mission simple so that we mere mortals could follow along: “To contribute to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humanity.” Note the reference to “tools for the mind” – he was careful not to limit it to “computers” – even though the rest of us had never seen an iPod or an app store.
Let’s review some examples of companies that have made a clear effort to be larger and more inclusive in their approach to their cause:
Nike’s vision is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world,” with an asterisk that says “*if you’ve got a body, you’re an athlete.” This is a final include statement and leads to a larger one: Everyone is or may be an athlete. As a sports apparel and equipment company, they could reasonably have stated that their purpose was to “create breakthrough sports innovation,” but they weren’t just focused on their customers. They included the many stakeholders impacted by their business: “to create ground-breaking sports innovations, make our products sustainable, build a creative and diverse global team and make a positive impact on the communities in which we live and work.” Branding is big here, claiming who they are, what they want to stand for and who they serve. Do they need to say both “breakthroughs” and “innovations”? Is it perhaps redundant? We can bite. But overall, the statement lays the groundwork for customers and employees to strengthen their connection to the brand.
Let’s look at an unexpected business-to-business (B2B) example, Old Dominion Freight Line. You might expect a trucking and logistics company to settle for something like “We deliver on time, every time,” and while that would be enough, it would miss the power of purpose statements to compel stakeholders to buy into them. I love the slogan they have written on their trucks: “Helping people keep promises.” As you discover what they do and more fully understand how and why, you can appreciate their focus on reliability and the power of promises. They chose words that create a meaningful connection and a visceral emotional bond not only with their partners or businesses, but also with the end customer. In just five words, Old Dominion captured the heart of why.
The point is that you should try to be aware of the power behind your purpose statement, choosing language that embodies the work and the people you want to feel included in it. Your commitment should directly inform your choices about people, products, processes and platforms.
