A Culture of Purpose

How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You

Christoph Lueneburger

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118814567
• eBook ISBN: 9781118896044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

How innovative leaders create meaningful cultures that attract and retain top talent

Building a culture of purpose is one of the greatest challenges facing modern leaders, as today's best minds are looking for meaning, not just jobs. More than any other single factor, cultures of purpose power winning organizations, attracting the smartest, most creative, most passionate talent.

For leaders building cultures of purpose, the commercial pursuit of sustainability provides the most reliable blueprint. While sustainability has been commonly misconstrued as a description of a set of problems, Christoph Lueneburger shows that it is really a solution to problems, capable of inspiring people and forging cultures.Sharing his exclusive, in-depth dialogues with chief sustainability officers, CEOs, and board chairmen, Lueneburger reveals how sustainability works at places where it works best, including Chrysler, Unilever, TNT, Walmart, and Bloomberg. Featuring a clear three-phase process that helps leaders assess the talent needed to develop organizations characterized by energy, resilience, and openness, A Culture of Purpose offers leaders the right questions to ask in order to:

• Tap and Nurture Your Current Corporate Strengths: Learn how to recognize, cultivate, and leverage the competencies of your current talent to develop your leadership team.
• Hire the Right Team: Ask the right questions to identify the innate personality traits in potential new hires, regardless of level and function, to bring on board those most likely to succeed in and shape your organization.
• Craft Your Culture: Create an environment that unleashes these competencies and traits and pushes them to the fore. Shape how people relate to one another and collectively go for what would be out of reach to them individually.

Many books have described the "what" and the "how" of sustainability, but this is the first to reveal the "who." Lueneburger changes dated preconceptions to show that sustainability is not an ideological mindset but a cultural trait of a resilient business. For leaders ready to build and strengthen a winning business, A Culture of Purpose is an education, a revelation, and an invitation to the next generation of success.

Part 1

Placing Leaders with a Purpose at the Core

Culture and sustainability are products of leadership. And the impact of leaders is bounded by their competencies and the competencies of others they put in charge. In this part of the book, I will identify the competencies—or acquired skills—at the core of a culture of purpose.

The competencies discussed in the following chapters differentiate leaders who have successfully commercialized sustainability from other leaders of similar seniority and influence. Therefore, I do not here devote time to other competencies, such as team leadership, that—although important—occur equally strongly in both groups.

Competencies can be developed over time, whether through apprenticeship or sheer will. You can learn about somebody's competencies by asking how she did something and keeping at it until you find what she herself did, exactly, and what might have been done by others around her. In the case of the ability to influence, somebody might say, “I found out that Jack is not very focused on his economic gain, but he cares a great deal about thought leadership. So I won him over with the sheer amount of patents he was likely to generate if he were to join my project.” Interesting! How did you find out about Jack—did you go out of your way to understand his modus operandi, or did somebody just happen to tell you? And how did you sell him on the trove of patents—did you have data, or did you lead with an emotive story?

You get the point: by asking behavioral “how” questions, you can find out, accurately, how well developed a particular competency is.

Chapter 1
The Boost of Change Leadership

When Captain David Marquet took command of a Navy submarine for the first time in 1999, it was both a dream come true and a leadership nightmare. David had always wanted to be a submarine captain. He graduated near the top of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. He trained for a year to take the helm at the USS Olympia. But at the very last moment, he was instead assigned to take the command of the USS Santa Fe, a much newer and faster ship, but also a ship with the worst performance track record in the Navy. In his first stint as a submarine captain, David found himself leading a vessel about which he knew nothing.

Taking his command, he discovered another problem: he noticed that people blindly followed directions from above and blamed “them” if the result fell short of the objective. This problem hit home one day when David gave a command (“two-thirds ahead”) that—unlike on the Olympia—was technically impossible to execute on the Santa Fe. The command was relayed forward by David's senior officer, but stalled when the helmsman sheepishly informed his captain that there was no “two-thirds” on the Santa Fe. When David asked his senior officer if he was aware of this fact, the response was, “Yes, but you gave the order.”

It was high time for a change.

That evening, David gathered his officers and told them, “Unless you start announcing your intent rather than blindly repeating orders, this submarine is simply going to drive in a straight line.” David added, “In fact, I am not going to give orders.” He also abolished the word “they,” asking his people to instead say “we.”

What changed? Everything. David's team of 135 sailors began—first with skepticism and then with commitment—to assume ownership, think about what they were doing, and strive for excellence rather than the mere avoidance of mistakes. Within a year, the crew went from the worst performing in the U.S. submarine fleet to the best, winning awards for performance and effectiveness while drastically increasing retention. Indeed, David had such lasting influence that the ship continued to win awards long after he moved on to new assignments. “The trick is not to think yourself into a different way of acting,” David told me, “but to act yourself into a different way of thinking.”¹

David was unambiguously in charge of his ship, and he saw a need for change. He drove the change with purpose, and built a fundamentally different culture in doing so: one of performance and accountability. What he learned along the way was that everybody—literally everybody—can take ownership of his or her area of expertise. And when he or she is allowed to do so, “the goodness is no longer tied to you as a person; it is tied to people and what they do.” The goodness, in other words, is tied to the culture. This is change leadership at work.

Change Leadership

Change leadership is about transforming and aligning an organization through its people to drive for improvement in a new and challenging direction. This competency creates a wave of change that allows any one person to have impact beyond his or her individual remit. Change leadership is not just about identifying necessary changes personally. It is possible, in fact, for someone to be a reasonably effective change leader without being a strategist. This competency is about driving change through the organization, getting others to want to change, and encouraging them to innovate themselves. What's more, it is not about forcing change on people but rather getting them on board and cultivating their willingness to accept, drive, and lead change. A critical element is the ability to engage people so that they want to change. And as we'll see in Chapter 6, engaging people means making them feel different about the need for change. It means finding something they truly care about.

An individual with a low level of the change leadership competency is someone who tends to think of the status quo as effective. This person may fail to see the need for change, but could still accept it if pressed. Others with low levels of this competency may accept that change is normal and think well of it in general terms—but not be eager or proactive around the topic. An individual with midlevel competency in change leadership is one who begins to actively challenge the status quo, pointing out what needs to change—though not how—and tries to help people who are struggling with this concept. This person may also define a positive direction for change and make a case others can buy into, using logic to persuade people.

Those who have a highly developed change leadership competency actively promote change with an array of approaches to start mobilizing individuals to change. They build coalitions, foster diversity of thought, coordinate the change effort across multiple individuals, and take a more long-term, sophisticated approach to introducing change. They create champions who will mobilize others to change, ultimately creating organization-wide momentum around change. Those at the highest level of this competency cultivate this quality of change across highly complex organizations, or create a culture capable of constant change for improved results.

Change leadership is a critical competency at the early stage of sustainability transformation because it is so vital in building the momentum needed to get going. Owens Corning and its chief sustainability officer, Frank O'Brien-Bernini, provide a rich case study of this competency in action.

How Frank Rejuvenated Owens Corning

Frank O'Brien-Bernini remembers the moment he began his evolution in becoming a change leader. Standing in the office of his CEO, talking to the boss about the general need to embrace sustainability issues, something in the air shifted.

In fact, Frank recalls, there may not have been any pronouncements made. “It was very short and sweet, led by the CEO's body language at that meeting. It was: OK, I've got it. I don't understand it, but I hear what you are saying and I trust that this is important.” It was unspoken but understood. Frank knew he had his marching orders.

With that, Frank both headed the company's R&D function and became its chief sustainability officer, even though no one had really clarified what that second title entailed. At the time, Owens Corning was operating under bankruptcy protection, so sustainability meant more than the traditional “green” efforts. The very sustainability of the organization itself was on the line. Would Owens Corning emerge a viable business concern? Would it be a healthy, thriving organization in the future? Could it be, in this very stark business sense, sustainable? Frank believed that the “green” sustainability and the business sustainability goals were necessarily and uniquely intertwined. One would open the door to the other.

Frank decided that to drive change, he needed muscle. From all corners of the company, he tapped individuals to serve on the company's first Sustainability Council. The members came from different divisions, critical functions, and different places on the hierarchy; notably, they did not share any one vision for the definition of sustainability. What they did share was organizational respect and influence: they were people who could get things done. This was a key decision by Frank. He didn't want a council full of tree-huggers. Instead, he wanted a diversity of opinion as to how sustainability should play out in a manufacturing environment. It was a challenging collection of individuals, not all of whom were willing. Frank recalls, “I had one person come to me and ask, ‘Why am I here? I don't need to be here.’” But if the council was to fulfill its role as part of the change process, that person did need to be there. The initial council was made up of a select cross-functional subset of the organization's most influential business leaders—typical of the lean structure of the best newly minted sustainability teams.

Frank's first task was to help the council understand its mandate. There was plenty of debate around the table during those early meetings, he recalled. “When we would get together, it was a learning thing. Few knew what it was all about.” Many had questions like, “What is sustainability? Why does it matter? What is our role? Do our customers, employees, investors care? And the ultimate and potentially disempowering question: is our top leadership really committed to this?”

This kind of debate is not an uncommon or even undesirable part of a company's transformation process. In fact, it's essential as any organization moves along the sustainability continuum in pursuit of a culture of purpose. But it is also a bit of a danger zone because too often, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword by Daniel Goleman
• Introduction
• Part 1: Placing Leaders with a Purpose at the Core
• Part 2: Hiring Talent with a Purpose at the Frontier
• Part 3: Building a Culture of Purpose
• Part 4: Taking Action
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement