Let’s do a quick exercise. Can you list three ways mission gets established at your company? I imagine you included some form of your leadership team, the Board or the CEO. What if instead of saying this is a given—the way it’s always been done—we call it a design choice? Imagine an alternate choice where employees are engaged in an ongoing way to actually co-create the company’s mission.
Resistance
Employees are hired in service to the company’s mission; this is what we’ve been taught. Employees put their shoulders to the wheel that we CEOs provide for them. We are generous, we are supportive, but we close ranks among our leadership when setting the company’s mission. Isn’t that the way it’s always been done? Here’s a better question: Is that way working? It seems to be the case that it is not, given the millions of workers who resigned during the Great Resignation.
In an analysis of the Great Resignation by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2023, Abdulkhadir Senkal identifies several causes for the resignation of millions of workers: inadequate childcare; the freedom of not working or working from home; low wages; and a poor working environment. What he calls a poor working environment implies toxic management, such as favouritism, workers being played off against each other or deliberately isolated, and performance evaluations poorly set up, if set up at all.
Senkal’s first proposed solution to massive resignation is, surprisingly, greater automation. If that’s not possible he points to other solutions: “In addition to higher wages, better and more widespread healthcare and childcare benefits would also help address the problem of underuse of labour in competitive, peripheral, and low-wage sectors of the U.S. economy.” Addressing the company’s unique mission does not receive even a mention.
An unstated problem here is that these many millions of resignations, even within one week, were unforeseen. This occurred because we make sense of challenges, such as employee discontent, through a bias we have for perceiving patterns from the past. How can we orient towards the future, when much of our thinking is based on past patterns that are no longer relevant? The dynamics underlying the great resignation, including deep employee dissatisfaction, are still with us. These challenging dynamics offer us an opportunity to change company culture at its heart, with an eye toward doing things differently, toward being called by the future and not the past.
Let’s look at culture identity differently
In her book, The Awakened Brain, Lisa Miller provides an overview of different mindsets throughout history used to adapt to shifting historical contexts and demands. The current mindset, called “the achiever brain,” identifies problems and seeks to solve them, an increasingly ineffective approach, as it tends to address problems in isolation, and not take into account what it takes to maintain a cohesive, inspiring company culture. Instead, Miller posits “the awakened brain,” oriented around meaning and connection to the sacred, whatever that may mean to us. “Each of us has an awakened brain potentiality,” she writes, “a natural capacity to perceive a greater reality and consciously connect to life, and the neural circuity that allows us to see the world more fully. Our brains are wired to perceive and receive a result which uplifts, illuminates and heals.” Our question, then is, How can leaders help employees bring their connection to meaning into the workplace? And the related question, How can the workplace itself become more meaningful?
How to?
It takes thought and care to cultivate a company’s mission and an awakened brain. Imagine if an employee were not seen as someone harnessed to the whole, namely the company, but as an actual refraction of the vision, the part itself representing the whole. In a hiring interview, the prospective employee and the HR director could reflect together on the highest intention of a company, something we call the “why” behind the “why,” the reason that transcends and includes profit. The conversation turns toward the employee’s own highest intention in his or her role, first as a human being on the planet. Do these intentions jibe? How can the company help promote the employee’s intention, while in turn, the employee can help grow the company’s mission and performance?
This conversation extends beyond the initial hiring. Employees and management undergo on-going training together in developing awareness of the company’s mission: (1) training in articulating the company’s intention behind the intention; (2) training in letting go of conditioned habits of mind that limit the ability to see further and more widely; (3) training in dynamic inquiry, enabling participants to become skilful in following the thread generated by related questions—all of which can point to surprising insights. This shared training softens the management hierarchy, allowing lateral contributions to be both valued and to create direction, which in turn retains employees.
Management
One outcome of implicating employees in designing the company’s mission is that managers have their roles redesigned. Conway’s Law tells us that a management structure will inevitably result in employees who need to be managed because those who do not need to be will not stay with the company. Once a company is managing its people, it will find it needs to manage information, time, and projects, and extend outward to managing products, services, partners, suppliers and the people it serves. Alternatively, when all those who work for a company are engaged in creating and developing a shared mission, rather than being constrained by managing and being managed, unexpected directions open up with surprising possibilities for financial success.
We know that data analysis does not automatically lead to understanding how to retain employees, and that often, unfortunately, observable metrics take the upper hand in leadership. Incentives, flexibility and bonuses, while welcome, only go so far. Even a discussion of shared values will not develop a deep engagement with the company’s mission. In an awakened company, everyone sees themselves as valued both as a shoulder turning a wheel and the keeper of the mission as well. This goes a very long way in developing a meaningful company culture, which is crucial in moving a company towards an unmapped future.
