By Steve Fuller on Feb 19, 2015 Communicating the reason your company is in business - other than to turn a profit - can transform the fortunes of your brand;  While the rest of retail banking world has been struggling, Triodos Bank has seen the number of its customer accounts grow 144% in the last four years. The success of the Dutch bank is based on convincing disaffected customers that Triodos offers a real alternative to the mainstream banks: a clear and credible commitment to making a positive impact in the world. When your story is as appealing as the one Triodos can tell, it’s pretty obvious that communicating it is going to be good for business. But the same holds true even for brands with less obvious ethical credentials. Lifebuoy soap is not just another commonplace, fast-moving-consumer-goods brand in the Unilever portfolio. Instead, it has a purpose beyond that: it’s a product that improves hygiene, reduces the spread of disease and, ultimately, can save lives.That’s the message communicated in its Help a Child Reach 5 initiative, which has taught healthy hand-washing habits to 130 million people in the developing world and helped the brand achieve new levels of global awareness while registering impressive sales growth. The power of purpose; Corporate purpose is the reason you are in business other than to make money. It’s a statement about the company’s contribution to society - not what it makes, but what it makes happen. It certainly isn’t a nod to some bolt-on philanthropic efforts or to the environmental management system it operates. Instead, it’s about how the company’s core business benefits people and the planet. And it’s an idea whose time has come. Widespread mistrust of big business has created an opportunity for those that trade ethically and sustainably. Seminal books such as Jim Stengel’s Grow and Beer et al’s Higher Ambition spell out how progressive companies of all sizes are growing by figuring out - and then conveying - how they can create economic and social value. The subsequent success they enjoy allows them to do even more to pursue their purpose - the classic virtuous circle. Knowing your purpose brings manifold benefits. It breeds confidence internally and attracts external investment, according to Deloitte’s 2014 Culture of Purpose survey. It can also be a catalyst for product and service innovations. And it underpins strong cultures. A whopping 94% of the Triodos staff, for example, say they are proud to work for the bank. All in all, the future belongs to companies with a purpose. Know your business purpose; Before a company can start communicating its purpose, it needs to know what it is. That’s not always a given. The UK local business directory thebestof demonstrates how discovering a purpose can transform business fortunes. We helped the company and its franchisee network recognise and communicate their role as champions of locally recommended businesses. This was the catalyst for turning an under-performing web directory selling advertising space into the market leader. Sometimes, as an organisation matures, it loses sight of its original raison d’être. In this case, identifying a purpose is often a matter of re-discovering the DNA of the business. This is something that happened in our work with gardening brand Sankey. Over time, they had come to see themselves as a "plastics manufacturer," not a gardening company, and had reached a point where products were developed primarily to suit the machines and transport system rather than the gardening community. We helped the top team remember what their brand was all about - in part by blowing the dust off some of their archived advertising materials from a time when they had a Royal Warrant of Appointment for their garden pots. This reignited a passion for gardening inside the business, and Sankey remodelled everything from product development through to marketing to meet the needs of UK gardeners. Experiment with storytelling techniques Once purpose is defined, the real gains come from communicating it effectively to customers, investors, employees and all other stakeholders. So, how to go about it? There’s a danger that purpose can be seen by some as dull and worthy. It has to be brought to life inside the organisation and then beyond. The best way to do this is to tell a compelling story. Dig into the relatively small set of narrative structures that have underpinned mankind’s stories over the aeons. The best ofs cautionary tale ‘The boy who cried "best"’, for example helped franchisees and employees understand what the organisation was all about. Whatever story you end up with, you’ll need a range of tools for telling it. Influenced no doubt by the early career success we enjoyed helping build major drinks and lifestyle brands, we often advocate film. Lifebuoy’s Help a Child Reach 5 video, for instance, captures hearts and minds. In under two years, it has chalked up 20 million YouTube views. Engage for success Lifebuoy’s communication of its purpose extends well beyond being a conventional ad campaign. Instead, it has become a genuine movement with all kinds of offshoot projects. In seeking to communicate purpose, there’s much we can learn from third-sector movements such as Comic Relief and Children in Need. Not content with just asking for donations through mass-media appeals to people’s generosity, they get thousands engaged in fundraising activities. Another major purpose-driven corporate movement includes Innocent’s Big Knit, which has seen 4 million woolly hats knitted across the UK and more than £1.5m raised for Age UK. The secret is to make everything positively infectious, and then the sharing comes naturally. Purpose is feel good - employees, suppliers and customers want to be associated with work that is rewarding and uplifting.   Work from the inside out Remember that purpose is not something you do to people. Whatever methods you develop, co-author with the team. Don’t slap it up on the wall; instead, create it and live it. Get members of the team from top to bottom to tell the rest of the business what it means to work for a purposeful company. Develop ambassadors at every level to carry the story to shopfloor, social media, even the pub. Social landlord Curo is a good example. They have rebranded their whole operation - from offices to van fleet - to convey their purpose. Every Curo employee has had training on the organisation’s purpose and their role in making it happen. Of course, none of this is risk-free. Identifying and then stating your purpose is a brave move - it means you are there to be shot at. But it also makes it possible to transform an organisation through a clear direction, focused leadership and a vibrant, positive culture. Ultimately, it paves the way for sustainable success. Steve Fuller is the creative head of UK-based brand agency The House. He helps companies discover a purpose that is good for society and then put it into action to achieve sustainable growth. Read more about it at www.thehouse.co.uk or follow @thehouse_bath.   The post Built on purpose: Telling your company’s story appeared first on The Performance Solution.

Rewire Your Baby Boomers shares research from The Learning Café on the issue of Boomer motivation, what engages — and turns off — Boomers at work. We offer ten practical tips to respect and motivate the generation that continues to bring value and expertise to our workplace. Why Focus on Boomers? Who are the Boomers? Fact and Fiction Boomer Drivers of Engagement Boomer Demotivators 10 Tips to Rewire Boomers Click here to download the PDF.

When coaching leaders, I often found that they felt a little dislocated, out of place in this fast moving world. The first task of my coaching work, focused on locating them, helping them re-discover their place, to feel more grounded and located in their networks. After which they were better positioned to take up leadership more authentically, and with more insight and dynamism. When working in any reflective practitioner role e.g. a coach, a leader or writing as an author, it is important to ‘locate ourselves’ i.e. to be reflective about ‘what authored us’ i.e. what experiences shaped our assumptions, our normative thinking, our preferences and our discomforts. Usually people confine this to thinking about family or cultural backgrounds however, we are also shaped by our work contexts and this short biographical narrative tries to make some of the links between work experience and the self. ‘What authored the author’ is taken from the Introduction to Leadership a critical text 2nd ed Sage 2012, citation below. I left school with few qualifications, a very poor education, and began work at the age of 17 as an office boy in a factory, witnessing ‘scientific management’ techniques on production lines. Unionized labour, clocking in and out, women spending all day  packing paper bags which tumbled off loud clattering machines, men labouring to keep the machines going 24hrs a day feeding them with heavy rolls of paper and ink, this mundane work (now exported to Asia) was brutalizing. I remember tough men and women, with a fierce humour to cope. Factory work was manual labour, the employer bought the labourer’s time and body. Emotions and thinking were to be left at home. Encouraged by a nursing friend, I left the factory age of 18 to train as a general nurse.  Nurses work intimately with the physical body. Touching and cleaning, injecting, lifting and turning, administering drugs, dressing wounds, evacuating bowels, the nurse works with the inside and outside, and the living and dead body. Working with the injured, sick and dying made me acutely aware of the existential issues of mortality, and how important our emotions, thinking and identities are embodied. Later in my work in offices and universities, I reflected on how the body is largely ignored and marginalized. I worked long nursing shifts experiencing the primitive human emotions of fear and anxiety when facing mortal threats. The leadership context was a rigid matriarchal nursing system that had echoes of the military, a commander in chief (the matron) with uniforms denoting rank, strict authority, no first names on the ward. The hospital-organization was structured as a social defence against facing the emotional pain of working with illness and death (Menzies Lyth, 1960). Nurses didn’t talk about their feelings, and many patients were cared for physically but not emotionally. No counseling occurred after having worked with a traumatic death, just an early coffee break and gallows humour in the bar after work. I loved the work, made great friends, learnt huge amounts about life and myself but struggled in this constraining institutional culture. Nursing leadership was predominantly female, from ward sister to hospital matron in opposition to the medical leadership that was predominantly male. This dual leadership created a symbolic structure replicating a ‘hetero-normative’ parental structure—father leading with technical expertise, mother being the carer. This raised my awareness of gender issues, of power, responsibility and of pay disparity. I was a male on the female team and often in life have found myself in the position of experiencing ‘otherness’ from a very close proximity. Within this archetypal parental leadership model, Daddy Doctor and Mummy Nurse, the patients were symbolically childlike in their dependency. When a patient facing major surgery or death, the contemporary rhetoric of individual choice, and the omnipotence of our desire to be in control, is confronted by Freud’s ‘reality principle’. For some patients the dependency culture was wholly appropriate, enabling them to give up their autonomy to enable the surgeon’s knife to be wielded, and to be bed-bathed, toileted and cared for like an infant. For others in rehabilitation, the dependency culture was completely wrong and hindered patients attempts to regain autonomy. Dependency cultures have a place in some organizations; in education for example, learning requires us to enter a state of ‘not-knowing’ (if we know already we cannot learn something new) and therefore a level of dependency is required in order to learn (Western, 2005; Obholzer and Roberts, 1994). In the hospital dependency culture unfortunately affected the staff as well as patients, and became very damaging, undermining innovation and autonomous decision-making. Since this time I have been alerted to issues of too much dependency and a lack of autonomy in the workplace. During this period I was a skilled rugby player and captained my local club, experiencing leadership at an early age. Rugby provided me with the opportunity to learn motivational skills, team-work, and it was probably the most honest and egalitarian community I ever participated in. Our club consisted of lawyers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, the unemployed, ex-convicts, and all were treated with respect. Anybody pulling ego or rank over another was teased mercilessly, it was a leveling experience. Team-work, having the courage to have a go, and being able to laugh at myself were lessons I took from leading the rugby club. Whilst general nursing I became fascinated by the human condition and after running a geriatric ward I left to train as a psychiatric nurse. I found freedom in a more relaxed uniform-free setting, and became totally engaged in the human psychology, discovering a life-long passion for psychotherapy and the ‘talking cure’. I worked with the severely mentally ill; obsessive, neurotic, depressed, schizophrenic and psychotic patients in Victorian built asylums, which Goffman (1961) describes as Total Institutions. I witnessed electro-convulsive therapy and worked on some wards where 70 men slept in long dorms without curtains or any privacy. The system of ‘token economy’, a behaviour treatment, was used with the institutionalized patients. Patients received tokens which were exchanged for cigarettes to reinforce good behaviours e.g for getting out of bed, and they had tokens taken away for ‘bad  behaviour’. Institutionalization had an impact on both staff and patients (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference), and the concept of asylum and the totalizing institution has stayed with me. The asylum had two aspects, while firstly it provided ‘asylum’ i.e. a container, a safe and caring space, a refuge from the terrors of the world, on the hand it was an oppressive and totalizing space. When working in corporations and large public sector organizations I am often reminded of the asylum seeing the token economy and the institutional culture control that I witnessed but in a more benign, hidden form. When HR teams, managers and trainers using transactional leadership, ‘carrot and stick’ to change behaviour, I wonder about the humanity of their methods. When transformational leaders draw on culture control, and I see conformist employees, in their dark suited uniforms, sat in rows upon rows in an open office, institutionally eating in the canteen together, I see a modern day asylum. I will never forget this formative experience that alerts me to ethics, and the power of institutionalization. Humanising organizations is a passion and I ask myself at work, ‘does this leadership stance enhance or diminish humanity?’ Other important lessons were discovering how thin and blurred the line is between madness and sanity, and this has helped me work with some of the undiagnosed pathology that occurs in workplace. I also learnt counselling skills, group facilitation skills and most importantly how to manage my own and others anxiety, when facing dangerous disturbance and distress. At the age of 23 I became a Charge Nurse role, leading a regional residential unit, for emotionally disturbed adolescents. This was run as a therapeutic community with the philosophy to devolve leadership to the young people themselves, empowering them to find their voices and to learn how to take responsibility for themselves and others, through experimenting in a safe environment. I was given a huge amount of responsibility at very young age, working with young people who had serious problems such as anorexia, who were suicidal and who were abused. Working closely with the boss we radicalized the unit to make it fully self-catering, and the medical input was marginalized, removing the dependency culture and the stigma of  being given a medical diagnosis and treated as a patient. This was the most therapeutic environment I have experienced and I learnt two key lessons here: 1) My idealism that if you remove leadership, power will be removed and pure democracy will flourish was crushed. Actually chaos and fear flourish. 2) Devolving power and decision-making responsibly, and enabling dispersed leadership within safe boundaries works wonderfully. Our so called ‘disturbed’ young people, were able to run the unit, making important decisions together and work on their emotional selves at the same time. They helped us to interview and appoint new staff, took control over their own destinies and supported their peers with great skill and empathy. This experimental community, set in the NHS, marginalized the medical model and gave power back to the client group. I am indebted to this intense learning experience, and to Mike Broughton who was an excellent leader, and the first to help me realize my own leadership potential. The core of this work was family therapy, group and drama therapy. In my mid 20’s, I spent three years as a single parent on welfare, and again found myself challenging gender stereotypes, wandering into mother and toddler groups and struggling with the responses I received. Sometimes I was mothered (which I rejected) and at other times I considered a threat to the group norm, an external male body to be ejected. However, I loved the freedom of being a home-parent, each day being thrown back to my own resources to make ends meet and creating each day with my beautiful and delightful son Fynn. Living in the margins in terms of money, and without the identity/respect work gives you, I was nevertheless immensely happy as a father, making fires, stories and pancakes— this was a time of adventures! On return to work I spent ten years training and working as a Family Therapist and psychotherapist with the urban underclass, in a deprived northern city. I was a Clinical Manager of a community based, multi-professional healthcare team. I loved Family Therapy, and took the opportunity to be immensely creative in therapy sessions. In family therapy you quickly discover that a) power is not where you (or the family) think it is b) how systems impact on individuals c) how patterns of communication completely entrap us, even if we really want to change. This learning has hugely influenced my leadership work since. In my 30s I decided to get educated and studied for a Masters in Counselling at Keele University, and felt exposed and overwhelmed by the academic language, rituals and culture which made me feel inadequate and an imposter (not having A-levels or Bachelors Degree). I adjusted and found great joy in learning and excelled in my studies. Later I studied for another Masters degree in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Organisational Consultancy at the internationally renowned Tavistock Centre. My interest was to understand why change was so resisted and to promote collaborative working across health, education and social services in order to better serve families. Developing an understanding of the unconscious processes that underpin organisational culture was a huge learning experience for me, which I have applied in my work ever since. I finally left the NHS, feeling ‘burnt out’ from the pressure of working with disturbed families and suicidal teenagers in an under-resourced provision. I was frustrated by a leadership dominated by the hegemony of medical power, which allowed little room for constructive dissent and change, particularly if it came from a nurse. The medical model provided the wrong leadership, wrong culture and wrong treatment for this client group. In the most part my clients were not ill but suffered from the emotional, social strains of living in poverty and unemployment. They required therapeutic and emotional support, more resources and structural-political change rather than medical diagnosis, labels and medicines. My attempts to make changes were partly successful, and more collaborative work now takes place. However the NHS has an institutional leadership culture that allows little room for innovation or creativity, and it was time for me to break out of this institution. In the past decade I also worked with real-estate, working closely with the building trade observing how the leadership is transient, moving between trades on the same building job. The building trade is interesting as it is both highly competitive with a harsh culture and wholly dependent on collaboration. Designing and altering physical spaces is a passion of mine, which I apply to my consultancy work, helping leaders think like organizational architects. Another experience, which has informed my understanding of leadership and organisational culture, is my religious affiliation. I have been a Quaker (Religious Society for Friends) for fifteen years, which has an unusual organisational structure without a formal leadership. It does not appoint church ministers but believes in a ‘priesthood of all believers’ abolishing not the idea of priests but abolishing the laity. The business meetings are run (and have been for 350 years) by spiritual consensus, which can mean up to 1,000 Quakers at a yearly meeting deciding on Quaker ‘policy’ (http://www.quaker.org.uk). Quaker meetings are structured around the idea of equality. Sitting in a circle, in silence, anyone moved to speak can ‘minister’ to those present. The Quaker history was an important part of my PhD research, leading me to examine how their informal leadership and organisation has changed over the centuries to accommodate social change, while still holding onto the central experience and structures. My experience of leadership has been further informed by engaging with social movements; trade unions, feminist, anarchist and green activist movements. Frustrated by being a nurse, clinical manager in the NHS, and a little burnt out by the intense therapeutic work, I decided to seek pastures new and wanted to experience corporate life and the private sector. I entered a university business school to study for a PhD in leadership and quickly found employment working in leadership development and executive education. Academia I found is underpinned by a dependency culture that replicates educational models of teacher-student dynamics, and tends towards a bureaucratic managerialism. However, it also has an adolescent rebellious nature, maybe due to very bright individuals, expert in their own fields, resisting external control, and maybe because it employ’s adults many of whom just never left school! At Lancaster University management school I suddenly found myself working with very senior corporate leaders internationally designing and offering coaching and experiential learning. The cultural difference and the language of the corporate world was a huge learning curve for me. A big adjustment took place from working with the poor, disempowered and disturbed, to working with the rich, successful and powerful. My saving grace was the capacity I had developed to ‘think in the face of anxiety’ and draw on my past experience to work in depth with these executives. I was later appointed Director of Coaching at Lancaster Management School, where I established a critical approach to coaching drawing heavily on psychoanalytic and systems thinking. I designed and ran a new post-graduate coaching course (see Coaching and Mentoring a critical text sage 2012). After ten years of executive education, I left to work as an organizational consultant and direct a Masters Degree in Organizational Consultancy at the Tavistock Clinic, and later chose to work independently setting up a new coaching and consulting company specializing in leadership. As a practitioner-scholar, I continue to write and deliver training and keynotes at universities and conferences, coaching and consulting a delightfully interesting and diverse client group. I deliver Eco-leadership interventions, and coach chief executives and senior leadership teams from global banks and top business schools. I also work with hospitals, hospices and small companies. Running a small business is interesting, extremely liberating and I love the autonomy. I spend a lot of time developing my writing, and publishing. My journey highlights a movement from working with the body (in the factory and as a nurse) to the mind (as a psychiatric nurse and therapist) to the individual and small group (as a family psychotherapist) and then with organizational systems (as an organizational consultant) and finally with the social through engaging with academia, taking political and philosophical positions. Leadership crosses all of these dimensions, body, mind, individual, team, organization and social, and this book emanates from the culmination of my lived experience. To cite this work: Western, Simon Leadership: A critical text . Sage, 2013. Pgs xv-xx Contact simonwestern@me.com www.analyticnetwork.com Simon’s next Analytic-Network Coach Advanced coaching course in running in Bath in October 2015. Please contact enquiries@theperformancesolution.com for more details and to reserve your place. This course attracts ICF Core Competence CCEUs. The last two courses have completely sold out. The post Locating Myself: A Biographical narrative of work by Simon Western appeared first on The Performance Solution.

Regardless of the demographics within your company, it is vitally important to bring in younger workers—not only to keep positions filled, but to groom your future supervisors and managers, and remain competitive. Click here to read Diane’s article in The Official Journal of the National Insulation Association, June 2015.

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef Organizations face a double threat: The lost knowledge of mature workers walking out the door, and the lost opportunity of engaging the newest employees. This trend is influenced by…

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef Members of every generation want to work in a positive, satisfying work climate. So retaining your talented employees, regardless of generation, should be easy, right? The task is trickier…

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef 401K Plans/Pension/Retirement Plans Accelerate or shorten the vesting period to accommodate career mobility; make sure benefi ts are transferable between business units or divisions. This promotes fl exible careers,…

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef How to Bridge the Generation Gap in Your Health Care Organization For the first time in modern history, four generations are working side by side. Their different values, work…

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef "You can divide any working population into three categories: people who are engaged (loyal and productive), those who are not engaged (just putting in time), and those who are…

by Diane Thielfoldt & Devon Scheef Pop Quiz! Read the scenario below and choose your most likely response: You buy an appliance and you’re not sure how to install it. Unfortunately no one is available…