How to Be a Purpose-Driven Leader in a Capitalist World
Today’s business school education isn’t suited to the big challenges facing the world — climate change, economic inequality and racial injustice — that the leaders of tomorrow will be expected to solve. So, how can students and young professionals succeed in a system that primarily rewards profit? How can they create real change while working in a corporate world that’s mostly stuck in outdated business models? According to former CEO of Unilever Paul Polman, you must supplement your business education in three ways:
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In business school, we’re prepared to fill the management roles of tomorrow. But the training we receive is not entirely suited to the challenges we are up against. The world we live in is far from perfect. Climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice are just a few of our most pressing problems. As the next generation of business leaders, we want to solve them.
The tactical skills of our education are vital. At the same time, we need to cultivate a purpose-driven core to direct their application. We envision a future guided by a group of courageous leaders who are ready to reimagine what capitalism looks like and change the system into one that promotes economic, environmental, and social equity.
The big question for us, then, is: How can we succeed in a system that primarily rewards profit, with much less attention paid to social or environmental issues? How can we create real change while working in a corporate world that’s mostly stuck in outdated business models?
As two business students (Celia and John) and a business professor (Andy), we know first-hand how deeply today’s students feel the magnitude and urgency of these tensions.
We, Celia and John, have held roles in the food and social-impact consulting industries (respectively). Throughout our early careers, we were often told by our employers to keep our heads down, stay in our lanes, and meet our prescribed deliverables. Regardless of all the aspirational statements about “doing good,” these deliverables were designed only to increase share price.
When we questioned why every quarter’s numbers were the most important measure of success, the answer was always some variant of “our responsibility is to make money for some unseen shareholder.” This narrow focus was sold to us under the guise of what was necessary — no matter what the consequences — for the company to grow. We were blinded from the larger implications of our actions while the stock market grew and the rich got richer.
Our experiences shed light on a consistent theme in the for-profit business world: Short-term decisions are made that worsen problems like income inequality, pollution, and discrimination (among others).
When we left our roles and began business school with the goal of paving a better way forward, we found a curriculum that reiterated that exact message: Create shareholder value by using strategies rooted in growing net worth and securing short-term gains.
Similarly, as a professor, Andy has taught countless students who feel alienated by the underlying messages of business school. One student even confessed feeling that her values were under attack every time she walked into the building. He has seen first-hand what surveys tell us — 97% of young business professionals want a career with “purpose” while only 34% report having a deep interest in their work and only 16% report enjoying it.
If the next generation of business leaders does not alleviate this “purpose gap,” then a future that is equitable and sustainable will fade from sight.
If you’re a student, know that the world around you is changing way too fast for many schools to keep pace. Your curriculum asks you to master skills that maximize shareholder value in popular fields like finance, accounting, marketing, operations, or human resource management. But it falls short in teaching you that there are other important stakeholders — and a bigger purpose — to which those skills should be directed.
You can put purpose back into your work by taking ownership of your professional development and not accepting the curriculum as is. It’s a privilege to take a few years to immerse yourself at a university with vast resources and explore new ideas across a variety of disciplines. This time away from the traditional workday offers you space to unlearn antiquated or harmful business frameworks and replace them with forward-thinking and relevant ones.
To do this, you need to recognize the limitations of your coursework and supplement it in ways that broaden the lens of your own education. No one is going to explicitly guide you through this process. You have to seek it out these opportunities for yourself. If you don’t, your education will remain incomplete.
With this strategy in mind, we set out to supplement our University of Michigan MBA curriculum by learning directly from a forward-thinking business leader, Paul Polman. As former CEO at Unilever, Paul pushed his company to focus on long-term goals surrounding social and environmental progress by eliminating quarterly reporting and developing the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.
Now, as co-founder and chair of IMAGINE, a nonprofit that aims to advance sustainability through collaborative actions, he devotes his energy to partnering with other changemakers who are interested in transforming how we think about business.
Through a series of interviews with Paul, we sought to learn how to lead with purpose in a business world that seemingly wants to tamp that passion down. We asked:
If you are a business student or young professional looking to bring more purpose into your career, let these answers be the first addition to your new and improved education.
Our fast-paced world, bursting with data, notifications, and social media, leaves us with little time to think, reflect, and ponder our paths in life. The furious pace of business school doesn’t help either. Classes, clubs, meetings, networking, and job hunting eats up most of the time we could be spending on introspection.
But without careful contemplation of our futures, we risk neglecting the foundational purpose of our education in pursuit of status. When this happens, we are more likely to adopt popular but outdated viewpoints and define success in relation to our peers and professors — not by our own metrics. We are also more likely to end up where the system shepherds us, often in finance or consulting, enticed by high salaries as a return on our investments, measuring our self-worth by our net-worth.
To avoid this fate, make time to step back from the flurry of your school activities. Create space for yourself to discern your calling by finding the intersection of your purpose (what do you care about?), your skillset (what are you good at?), and what the world needs (where do you need to devote your energies?).
“Introspection is not for the faint of heart,” Paul told us. “You must know yourself to remain steadfast as you prepare to enter a world in which you plan to lead with courage and heart.”
Maybe you care about making business more sustainable (your purpose), excel in finance (your skillset), and know that serious problems threaten the future of our market system (what the world needs). How can you use the levers within your chosen sector to drive change? For example, John now uses his finance skills to do work that accelerates our renewable energy transition. Celia leverages her food science and supply chain experience to generate solutions to food waste challenges.
This process of discernment is going to take time and will be neither linear nor easy. It is not meant to lead you to a destination, but rather, to invite you on a journey of continued exploration. When you search for the nexus of the three questions above, you inevitably move closer to finding satisfying, productive work that is needed by others.
The pursuit of purpose is not an individual endeavor. It requires a community that will support and help you achieve your goals. That’s why you need to develop what Paul calls a “sphere of influence,” or a network of people — both inside and outside your school or organization — who share your values and believe in your vision.
How do you do this?
When you know what you care about, what you’re good at, and have some ideas around how to use those skills to give back to the world, begin looking for opportunities to do that work — and do it well to build credibility and respect. If you know your stuff, others will begin to trust you and look to you for answers. Stanford Professor Deb Meyerson calls this being a “tempered radical”: You are tempered (meaning you succeed at your work) and you are radical (meaning you hold firm to your personal values).
Second, you need to actively model to the people around you that you are true to the values of your purpose. You need to show people that “what you demand from others, you would first demand from yourself,” Paul advised us. “Some people think if they’re just compliant, then it’s equal to building trust. But that’s absolutely not the case.” By going above and beyond the tasks required of you in any role, you demonstrate to others that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them. That’s how you gain trust, which is the only way to move your relationships beyond the typically transactional nature of business.
Third, you must connect your work ethic to your values, thereby exemplifying an outward commitment that others can readily recognize. For example, at Unilever, Paul took the time to set up training for employees to define their purpose, starting first with 100 leaders, then 500, and so on until everyone had worked to discern their purpose. And of course, he started this process with himself.
People are more comfortable endorsing a leader who they know to make consistent and well-formed, value-based decisions, a leader who is willing to walk the talk.
The last piece of the puzzle is deceivingly simple: Choose to disrupt the systems that you find most harmful. Once you enter or re-enter the workforce, it will be easy to get distracted by the pursuit of your next promotion or nailing your next big project. But keep yourself focused on the long game. When you do, better opportunities — ones that align with your values and purpose — will arise in both local and global ways. You will also be opening doors for those in your sphere of influence, and those that come after you, to do the same.
“Unilever’s incentive was to show that business could be done in a different way,” Paul said. “We recognized that we also had to satisfy the shareholders, but if we failed in achieving our broader purpose, we would have failed the biggest experiment in mankind. If the private sector didn’t change, mankind wouldn’t function.”
Paul told us that he sees the role of business as an entity that can be called upon to solve the biggest problems that society faces. At Unilever, he argued that “…every brand had to solve the world’s problems.” For example, the incentive of Domestos was to build 30 million toilets to stop the issues of open defecation. The incentive of Dove was to reach 100 million girls and inspire self-love among them. The incentive of Lifebuoy was to improve health by motivating a billion children to wash their hands.
As his team pursued those goals, they got more in touch with society. They discovered bigger opportunities, their brands had a stronger reason for being, their customers saw a company that cared, and their businesses grew. In each of these ways, he was changing the system that guided people’s understanding of why they were coming to work.
While you cannot control how society at large will react to your own efforts to create change, you can put yourself in a position to transform practices you feel are inadequate. Act as the catalyst capable of starting a chain reaction that ultimately will unlock a new way of working.
At the end of our interview with Paul, he asked us a provocative question, “So what’s the game you’re playing here? For whom are you playing it?”
Now we pose that question to you.
Do you choose to be a hero for the short-term, justifying your decisions to increase profits in the next quarter? Or do you choose to play the long game for the whole of humanity, seeking authentic, moral leadership that looks far beyond shareholder profits?
Paul was quite blunt about the first scenario. “We are short of courageous leaders. These leaders that are not courageous — they play it safe. They play it not to lose instead of playing to win. They will never go out of their comfort zone. They will never make a commitment unless they are 100% sure that they can deliver. But [their ideas are often] repackaged. We call it greenwashing.”
If you choose the latter, like we did, know that you can’t begin tomorrow. You can’t wait until you have formal, positional power, or three letters (MBA) behind your name to realize your purpose and live it out. Your decision to spark systemic change should begin today, and your hunger for learning should not end when you receive your diploma. You must remain curious, continuing to develop new abilities, refine existing skills, and set yourself up to evolve with business and its societal impact for years to come.
The power that business leaders wield is enormous. Take this responsibility seriously and strive to steer business to be both successful and a positive force. The world you are inheriting demands it.
How to Be a Purpose-Driven Leader in a Capitalist World
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