Striving to serve others at the highest level. Not for the profits or the status, purely to do good.
Brought to public awareness through the book “Reinventing Organizations, Evolutionary Purpose” is a paradigm shift in how businesses engage with their world.
“The evolutionary purpose of a Teal organization reflects the deeper reason the organization exists. It relates to the difference it wants to make in the community it operates in, as well as in the marketplace it serves. It is not concerned with competition or outperforming others; it is serving the ‘greater good’ that matters.”
In this short, the aim is to dissect and understand how to apply this approach to your world.
As Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one more responsive to change.”
Striving to serve others at the highest level. Not for the profits or the status, purely to do good. Honorable as it is, this strategy requires some specific and not too easy to grasp ingredients.
- Organization and employee values aligned
- Employee engagement at 100%
- All actions and decisions are driven by the Evolutionary Purpose
To start, we dive into the cheesy world of values. Adorning the walls of most businesses are their value statements.
Some created at massive expense using consultants with Scottish sounding names, others grabbed from the internet at monthly boardroom meetings.
Most are words on paper shared at an induction session and seldom referenced again. Very few are developed from the purpose of the organization. The reason is simple, if they are from your purpose, they are already intrinsic, already innate in your behavior.
For Evolutionary Purpose to function this is only half of the equation. Part two comes through the hiring process. It is critical that all team members have these core values intrinsically. Not word for word, but at least a synonymic version of it. A strong values system is the core of all behavior within the organization, and therefore forms the culture, which in turn creates the impact style of all collisions between the organization, its people and its external stakeholders.
Just think about that for a moment.
Every collision of people is borne from a behavior that supports the purpose! Skill , experience. are easy to check, values are tough. How do you interview for values? How do you find out what makes this person tick at their very core? Not easy.
100% engagement! Unheard of. Not possible. Or is it? If we successfully match values at the hiring stage, we have a strong start. Next, the organization must steadfastly apply those values in every interaction. Any collision that is not value-driven creates a gap, which in turn alters the culture and ultimately negatively impacts the purpose. When the purpose is supported by the values, these values drive behavior, leading to 100% engagement and, ultimately, success.
The final ingredient is a given if the first two happen. The WHY of everything you do is already 100% ingrained.
No need to add, no need to remind anyone, the Evolutionary Purpose is the filter that everything goes through. It creates the values, it attracts the talent, and it continuously filters the interaction to maintain performance.
To conclude, a story from the book, “A More Beautiful Question” by Warren Berger will be shared. The book discusses the creation story of the KIPP Schools in the USA. Some recent changes have impacted their approach, and they appear to have moved away from their origin purpose, with the goal now being to appease the growing woke culture of accepting the narratives of a much more liberal future. Articles in the New York Times, Harvard, and Bloomberg have questioned the value of this shift. Their origin purpose was to increase the number of children, in certain impoverished areas, who graduated high school. Success at this evolved the purpose to increase the number of high school graduates who went on to college. The schools had a very strict set of rules/behaviors that were enforced with a strategy called ‘Stop the School’. It was simple and powerful. When a rule was broken, an announcement went out over the loudspeaker system explaining the rule and clarifying its importance for the student’s future success.
Every action, every rule, and every interaction was born in the purpose of sending the student to college.