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The Rediscovery of Purpose

This chapter will help you understand the key role of purpose in today’s work. As we’ll see later, meaningful purposes are a foundation for worker engagement and self-management.

To begin, let’s take a moment to consider the nature of work itself.

What Is Work, Anyway?

I invite you to take a moment to examine your own assumptions about work. Work is made up of tasks. What words or phrases come to mind when you try to define what a task is? If that is too general of a question, then pick a specific task your work team performs and think about how you would describe it to a new team member.

I’ve learned that there are two very different ways of answering that question. The first way reflects the traditional, activity-centered notion of work. It says that tasks are made up of activities (behaviors) that a worker needs to perform. So if you were explaining flight attendants’ jobs, for example, you would mention activities such as giving safety instructions, serving meals and beverages, and distributing pillows. This is the way most of us were trained to think about workers’ jobs. It is a notion of work that fit the compliance era very well, since compliance is about following behavioral directions.

The other way of answering the question involves a more purpose-centered view of work. It says that tasks are most fundamentally defined by the purposes they serve. If you were explaining flight attendants’ jobs in a purpose-centered way, for example, you might say they are there to keep passengers safe, comfortable, and satisfied. Or you might mention the purposes as a way of explaining the task activities: giving safety demonstrations and enforcing FAA rules to promote safety, providing food and bedding for passenger comfort, and generally trying to keep passengers satisfied.

These purpose-centered answers reflect a fundamental insight about work tasks. Tasks are made up of more than the activities people perform. After all, those task activities only exist because someone chose them as a way of accomplishing a purpose. Tasks, then, are sets of activities directed toward a purpose. Betty Velthouse and I offered that insight in an article nineteen years ago, and I am still amazed at its importance.

Rediscovering the role of purpose in work is key to understanding the new work and the motivation of today’s workers. Without a clear notion of purpose, workers cannot make intelligent choices about work activities, and they are also deprived of a sense of the meaningfulness of their work. So, if you and others in your organization are still thinking about work in an activity-centered way, you’ll have some rethinking to do.

Two Important Facts About Purposes

To help you understand the role of work purposes in engagement, you should know two basic points about purposes. First, work purposes generally involve events that are external to workers’ jobs. That is, most work purposes involve outcomes that occur not to the worker, but to some customers (internal or external) in the worker’s environment. There are some exceptions involving secondary tasks. For example, my task of cleaning off my desk is aimed at allowing me to better accomplish my main work purposes. But those main purposes involve meeting the needs of book publishers, readers, students, and research sponsors. Environmental needs like this create jobs in the first place. Importantly, meeting those needs—and having a positive impact on one’s environment—is what gives the job its significance or meaningfulness.

The second point is that achieving work purposes is not totally under a worker’s control and involves inevitable uncertainties. Because they are external to workers’ jobs, task purposes depend not only upon workers’ activities, but on outside events as well. For example, flight attendants’ purpose of keeping passengers satisfied depends on passengers’ moods, flight delays, turbulence, and the behavior of other passengers. Likewise, a forest ranger’s success in keeping wildlife healthy depends on factors such as naturally occurring diseases, lightning-started forest fires, and the behavior of campers and hunters. The fact of these uncertainties provides much of the challenge and suspense involved in accomplishing work purposes— and produces much of the satisfaction in their accomplishment.

How Purpose Got Removed from Work

I’m going to give you some history and background here—to explain why purpose got removed from jobs for a long time, why it has suddenly and dramatically reemerged, and how purpose-centered leadership has become critical. This material helps leaders to reexamine some half-truths that were taught in management training in the not-too-distant past. (But if you are in a hurry, just jump ahead to the section called “Not All Purposes Are Equally Engaging” toward the end of this chapter.)

If purposes are fundamental parts of tasks, how did they get separated from traditional notions of work? The answer goes back to the early twentieth century when the industrial era was blooming. It was then that so-called scientific approaches to management began to develop, largely to meet the demands of the new phenomenon of mass production. The environment of the early twentieth century was considerably more stable and predictable than today’s. That is, its uncertainties were more manageable for organizations. This meant that organizations could largely coordinate their tasks using two simple devices: centralized, hierarchical control and detailed rules and procedures.

Let’s start with centralized, hierarchical control. Because uncertainties were relatively manageable, managers could take on the responsibility for handling them. In effect, they walled workers off from the environment and its uncertainties. For decades, it was considered sound management to “buffer” workers from potentially disruptive environmental events and to “absorb” uncertainty on their behalf, and this language was reflected in the classic works on management. Notice how paternalistic this language sounds today. Managers essentially took over the decision making involved in handling uncertainties in order to achieve the task purpose. They became the “keepers of the purpose.” Knowing about task purposes and their accomplishment became unnecessary for workers.

Without a knowledge of purpose, of course, workers could not make intelligent decisions about which task activities to perform or how to perform them. So management had to provide directions on what activities to perform and how to perform them—in the form of detailed rules and procedures. Worker judgment itself was seen as a source of uncertainty that needed to be controlled so these rules and procedures were also used to systematically eliminate choice from jobs. Industrial engineers determined the optimal sequence of activities needed in a worker’s job and the optimal way of performing those activities—often down to individual arm movements. Frederick Winslow Taylor championed this “Scientific Management” approach to job design, which was also referred to as “time and motion” or “efficiency” work. In short, work tasks came to be defined solely in terms of behavioral activities, and those activities were prescribed through detailed rules and procedures. Managers enforced compliance with those rules and procedures through close supervision and extrinsic rewards and punishments.

This treatment of workers seemed like the natural order of things during the industrial era. Machinery was celebrated as the great enabler of efficiency and productivity. Engineers became influential voices in organizations, and organizations themselves came to be viewed as machines. Managers tried to run their organizations like machines—rationally, predictably, impersonally, and efficiently. Their emphasis on centralized control and elaborate rules came to be called “machine bureaucracy.” It was easy, by extension, to think of workers as imperfect pieces, or cogs, within the organizational machinery. The classic Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times provides a memorable caricature of this assumption.

Why Purpose Is Back at Work

Bureaucratic principles about management were so ingrained that it took a great deal of research in the second half of the twentieth century to show that there were significant exceptions. Organizations facing uncertain technologies and environments required less bureaucratic forms of organization. But now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, these “exceptions” have become the rule. The environment that was so stable a hundred years ago is now fast paced and unpredictable—what Professor Peter Vaill aptly called “permanent whitewater.” The world is smaller, and organizations must respond online to developments in a truly global economy. Technological innovation continues to accelerate, as does the rate of development of new products.

Meanwhile, our economy has also become overwhelmingly based on services rather than manufacturing. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of jobs in the United States, while service industries account for approximately 80 percent. Even IBM, once dominant in the manufacture of computers, is now primarily in the business of providing business solutions. Service organizations face relatively high levels of uncertainty because their clients’ needs and circumstances differ, so these organizations and their employees require considerable flexibility to customize their services to customer requirements.

The upshot is that the number and complexity of the uncertainties facing organizations have overwhelmed the capacity of bureaucratic management. The hierarchy can no longer absorb most of these uncertainties or buffer workers from them, so the wall between workers and the organization’s environment has come crashing down. Organizations need workers to take active responsibility for handling more and more of the uncertainties involved in the accomplishment of their purposes. So organizations have been forced to flatten their hierarchies and push decision making down to workers. Workers are called on to adapt to customers’ needs, simplify and improve organizational processes, coordinate with other workers and teams, and initiate ideas for new products and services. In short, organizations now depend on workers to use their own judgment and to make many of the decisions formerly made by managers alone.

As decision making has become less centralized, rules and procedures have been dramatically reduced. After all, much of their rationale was to reduce and control worker choice, and organizations now need to give workers the space to make intelligent choices. Consider the old refrain that countless customers heard when encountering bureaucratic requirements that made no sense in their case: “Sorry, I’m just following the rules.” That line is no longer acceptable in today’s business climate and is being replaced by “Let’s see what I can do to help.” Flight attendants are generally free now to hand out drinks or snacks during long on-ground delays, for example, instead of sticking to a strict schedule. Likewise, hotel receptionists are increasingly given the leeway to reduce charges to make up for service deficiencies reported by customers. In this new environment, then, it is widely recognized that employee empowerment requires a pushing down of choice and authority to workers to allow them to make intelligent decisions.

The point that I want to emphasize here is that all these changes also require that a strong sense of purpose gets put back into workers’ jobs. Workers simply cannot make intelligent choices without having clear task purposes. Workers must also be committed to those purposes. For, as mentioned earlier, the greater judgment of the new work requires a deeper personal commitment than did the old compliance work. For these and other reasons, career counselor Richard Leider has suggested calling the new era the “age of purpose.”

The Human Need for Purpose

Fortunately, organizations’ needs for committed, purposeful work fit an intense human need for purpose. It is the purpose aspect of the new work that most engages our commitment and stirs our passions. Our workdays may be structured by our work activities, but those activities are given meaning and significance by the purposes they serve. Much of the color in our lives comes from the drama, challenge, struggle—and it is to be hoped the triumph—of handling the uncertainties involved in accomplishing those purposes.

There is a great deal of evidence that people are hardwired to care about purposes. We seem to need to see ourselves as going somewhere—as being on a journey in pursuit of a significant purpose. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the late Joseph Campbell reported that virtually all cultures have parallel myths about heroic journeys. These journeys involve dramatic difficulties, dangers, periods of despair, and eventual success—always in the service of a worthy purpose. These myths, then, seem to capture an essential part of the human experience.

There is also much evidence that people suffer when they lack purpose. Clinical studies show that people deteriorate in various ways if they are without purpose. This insight first showed up in the survival of concentration camp internees but also seems to be a factor in the survival and well-being of military prisoners of war, people in nursing homes, and even retirees. In the 1960s, the French existentialist movement also drew attention to the psychological emptiness that comes from a lack of purpose. Philosophers like Sartre and Camus pointed out that, without purpose, life becomes meaningless and people experience a sense of alienation and angst. Camus captured this sense of meaninglessness vividly in The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a king in Greek mythology who had so offended the gods that he was condemned to roll a large stone up a steep hill in Hades only to watch it roll down again and endlessly repeat this cycle. This Greek version of hell was essentially a demanding but meaningless activity with no purpose.

The lack of purpose in the compliance era, then, had significant psychological costs for workers. But generations of workers came to accept this as the nature of work. In his book Working, Studs Terkel used the memorable phrase “a Monday through Friday sort of dying” to refer to these costs at their worst. Compliance-era work was a bit like Sisyphus’s toil, except that you could go home in the evening and take the weekend off. Workers came to think of this sort of work as a kind of necessary evil (or devil’s bargain)— forty to sixty hours a week of meaningless labor in exchange for economic survival. Work was considered an economic cost that left you depleted. It was something to survive rather than enjoy—something to withdraw from emotionally, to numb out from and get through.

In contrast, today’s workers—and especially knowledge workers—tend to expect their work to be at least somewhat meaningful and rewarding. They are more educated than workers of the preceding era, have a higher standard of living, and see more opportunities for meaning in the new work. Researchers on generational differences note that younger workers (Generation Xers and millenials) are especially likely to demand meaningful work—and to leave if they do not find the work meaningful. These younger workers also want more freedom to work in their own style, finding their own ways of accomplishing a task purpose.

So today’s workforce and the new work combine to produce a growing demand for meaningful work. This demand is becoming a powerful force in the new job market. A number of recent books are aimed at workers who want to change jobs to find work that better serves the purposes they care about. Organizations now find themselves competing to attract and retain workers on the basis of the meaningfulness of their work. I live close enough to Silicon Valley to hear the radio ads stressing the opportunity to move to an organization that offers “exciting projects” that “make a difference.”

Purpose-Centered Leadership

As the work environment and worker expectations have changed, our understanding of leadership has gone through a dramatic paradigm shift. Compliance-era models of leadership were based largely on studies of first-line supervisors at a time when managers buffered workers from environmental uncertainties. Likewise, the motivational assumptions behind those models involved exchanges or transactions of extrinsic rewards for performing those activities. These models are now called “transactional” leadership.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, it was clear that these models were no longer adequate. They didn’t work for higher-level leadership, and they didn’t work when workers had to adapt and change in response to environmental uncertainties. What was missing, of course, was any mention of an overriding and meaningful task purpose.

In the late 1970s, the political scientist James McGregor Burns published an influential study of U.S. presidents who had inspired national change. He found that these presidents had held out a worthy purpose around which the nation could rally. These presidents were also able to articulate a compelling vision of what the future would be like if that purpose were met. The purpose and vision, then, provided a target that could align the efforts of different people to solve problems and cooperate. At the same time, the compelling vision was a strong motivational force that inspired people. Burns emphasized that these meaningful purposes appealed to people’s higher nature, rather than to their “lower” needs for self-interest and extrinsic rewards. He called this form of leadership “transformational.”

Burns’s purpose-centered approach to leadership was soon adapted by management researchers and practitioners. Since the 1980s, a wealth of books on transformational, inspirational, or visionary leadership have been published. The new purpose-centered models of leadership now apply not only to top managers but to team leaders at all organizational levels. Purpose-centered leadership gives workers the information they need to make intelligent decisions and also provides an intrinsically rewarding sense of meaningfulness for their work. Even the rather hierarchical U.S. military has shifted leadership practices to emphasize purpose-centered leadership. Written orders now begin with a “commander’s intent” that spells out the purpose behind an order. Knowing the purpose makes the activities more meaningful and also allows individuals to improvise in order to better accomplish the purpose when they encounter unexpected circumstances. (Purpose-centered leadership will be discussed in more detail in part 4 of this book.)

Not All Purposes Are Equally Engaging

Organizational statements of vision followed from purpose-centered leadership and are now very common. Again, they serve both to guide decision making and to gain commitment to a common purpose. Because they are aimed at gaining commitment rather than compliance, these vision statements can’t be enacted by fiat and simply pushed down through the organization. You can’t delegate commitment, after all—you have to find a purpose that inspires it.

As Burns had learned with U.S. presidents, corporate executives found that not all purposes are equal. Some evoke deeper passions than others. In particular, workers are seldom inspired by economic purposes involving profit—unless the company’s welfare is threatened. Rather, inspiration generally comes from deeper values and higher purposes. A good vision statement forces management to dig into the fundamental values that underlie the organization’s culture—to understand what the organization stands for. Common themes here are service to customers, a commitment to quality, and a drive for innovation—worthy purposes that people in the organization can take pride in. The organization’s vision, then, is a statement of an exciting future that would be meaningful and worthy as judged by those values.

In this way, purpose-centered leadership and workers’ needs for meaning have become a force for redefining organizational goals. Although profits and market share remain important, the trend is no longer to see them as paramount. Studies of organizations that have been highly successful over a long period found that these organizations have core ideologies that emphasize “more than profits.” One of those researchers used the following analogy to describe the status of economic goals: “[Organizations] need profits in the same way as any living being needs oxygen. It is a necessity to stay alive, but it is not the purpose of life.” Peter Block argued that purposes such as customer service and quality are not only more meaningful for workers but are also what put organizations closer to the marketplace to begin with and are therefore what take care of financial issues. Recently, the term “balanced scorecard” has become popular to discuss this broadening of organizational goals to include service to customers and other stakeholders.

For an example of a purpose-driven management philosophy that emphasizes service to multiple stakeholders, see “Purpose-Driven Management: The New West Institute.”

Shared Purposes Transform Relationships

One of the benefits of a shared, compelling purpose is that it acts as a “superordinate goal” that promotes collaborative relationships among organizational members—so that people approach issues with the goal of finding a solution that best serves the common purpose. Within a work group, then, a compelling shared purpose transforms the relationships between team members—including the relationship between you, as the leader, and the rest of the team.

In the compliance era, leaders were often forced to act like parents—knowing what was best, making the decisions, and enforcing the rules. The status difference between bosses and subordinates was substantial, decision making was often autocratic, and deference toward bosses and their opinions was expected. In today’s work, on the other hand, shared purposes and the need for worker judgment allow workers to be treated more like adults and relationships between you and your team members to be more collaborative and egalitarian. When a common purpose becomes paramount, then, you will want to seek out helpful information from team members, and they will want to help you avoid mistakes.

In summary, it’s clear that purposes are powerful parts of the new work. The next chapter looks at what is involved in achieving those purposes—the process of self-management.