In 2018, we had an incredible opportunity at Publicis Sapient.  Since Sapient’s acquisition by Publicis Groupe in 2015, we had tried multiple configurations of companies and brands (SapientNitro, DigitasLBi, Razorfish, Rosetta, SapientConsulting, Level, SapientRazorfish, etc.).  The market was shifting rapidly and by the start of 2018 we realized that our clients wanted a single brand they could engage with for integrated services across marketing, strategy, technology, design and data.  We retired our “brand soup”, as our newly hired CMO called it, and started re-organizing as a single company: Publicis Sapient. The big opportunity was to help our clients navigate the massive changes being driven by Moore’s Law, the Market, and Mother Nature (as Thomas Friedman describes so beautifully in Thank You for Being Late). And having reorganized as an effectively new company, our leaders started with defining our purpose and core values.

We spent most of 2018 on this journey of inclusively defining our organizational purpose and values, using techniques that were new to the company and turned out to be truly energizing. A short video describing the purpose work can be found here (password is “Sapient2018Purpose“), and a full description of our experience, including core values, follows in this article.

Background

Almost since its inception in 1991, Sapient had defined both Purpose and Core Values, but they were only loosely connected. In the early 1990’s, the Purpose had been a statement about impact but was really more about describing the energy that people felt working together and the reputation we would gain from that: “To kick all kinds of ass and be known for it.” The Core Values described what the founders and original leaders felt was important, starting with the reason for having started the company in the first place – Client-Focused Delivery. Other values were Openness and People Growth, and over time we added Relationships (when Openness manifested too often as brutal honesty), Leadership and Creativity. We embedded these Core Values in hiring, on boarding, performance management, promotions, recognition and internal communications. A small Culture Team was, and still is to this day, responsible for reinforcing the culture across the organization. Harvard Business School wrote a case study about Sapient’s purpose and values in 2005.

But by 2007, when we hired an external firm to audit our culture, there were massive differences between the values people experienced day-to-day, the values they felt were most important, and the espoused Core Values. Sapient had acquired a number of smaller companies with strategic capabilities, grown exponentially during the dot com boom, shrunk exponentially during the bust, shifted a third of its people to India by growing offices there organically, and changed its core strategy multiple times as demand for services shifted.

By the time we were acquired and merged with other Publicis companies, in 2018 we were experiencing a state of cultural chaos; and we needed to change ourselves in order to help our clients navigate digital disruption.

Exploring Impact Through Stories

So in January 2018, senior leaders met and agreed we needed to define a Purpose and a new set of Core Values to support it. The rate of change of our clients’ needs had been accelerating in 2018, and by the time we chose to re-integrate our services, we already felt behind the curve — which makes it even more admirable that our CEO and senior leaders saw the importance of defining our purpose and values as a newly formed entity. They could have focused, as many do, on just defining and executing our strategy – in this case, to address the digital business transformation market. But in parallel with that, they wanted people to feel there was a clear “North Star” that would create the emotional energy and alignment necessary for us to succeed.

The paradox of having an engaged leadership team was that their energy also led to a strong desire to announce a new purpose quickly. One trap we worried about was focusing on the purpose statement itself – the wording, rather than the organizational alignment and change it would drive. We revisited the purpose of this work (driving specific behavior, energy and mindset shifts) at the start of every discussion, out of fear that it would be too easy to forget the long game and focus instead on agreeing on the words.

In February we convened a diverse group of leaders from across the company for two days to develop a first draft of the purpose. The essence of this workshop was eliciting the client stories in which leaders felt the most pride, then bubbling to the surface the common themes. In a period of so much disruption and fear associated with change, tapping into feelings of pride created positive energy and generative thinking. We had seen this effect in other cultural workshops and leadership training we had done in the past, and it worked nicely here as well.

The pride themes covered a broad range due to the nature of our business, which spans digital marketing, technology and business consulting, and is quickly shifting towards digital business transformation. We wanted a purpose statement that would be most likely to drive organizational performance, so we looked for research on this subject. We couldn’t find any research that clearly correlated purpose formulations with performance, but there were some helpful themes that emerged: altruism, self-transcending ideas that describe positive impact on other people, pride in that impact, specifics around that impact. These themes are in contrast to profit or quantitative themes such as “maximize shareholder value.” So our frame for defining the purpose was “what is the impact we want to have that makes us proud?” “what is the work we need to do in order to have that impact?” After two days, we arrived at a draft of what we called an “impact statement” that described our work and the impact it has on our clients.

Rockets and Schools of Fish

Once we had a draft statement, things got interesting. Because leaders were so anxious to begin the alignment work and start to see behavior change, they wanted to communicate the statement we had developed in our 2-day Purpose workshop — an approach one of my colleagues calls “decide and announce.” This strong desire to tell people the purpose was in direct contrast with a few metaphors we had discussed during the workshop: rockets and schools of fish.

At the start of our purpose workshop, I showed the participants a New York Times front page with a photo of the Space-X Falcon Heavy rocket that had just successfully landed on a floating platform after reaching orbit. The point was that we have been sending rockets into orbit for over 50 years, but landing one intact was orders of magnitude more difficult. The same can be said for formulating a purpose statement versus creating the organizational change in behavior, energy and mindset we seek. Purpose statements have been written and put up on the wall for years, but changing human behavior in alignment with one’s purpose could be as difficult as landing a rocket from outer space.

The school of fish metaphor was meant to help us make the behavior change more achievable. As a company, we needed to shift direction – we could choose to do this like a cruise ship (decide and announce) in which the message comes down from the captain, is executed by the crew, and eventually the ship changes direction. In contrast, I thought about my favorite Pixar film Finding Nemo, and the scene where a school of fish re-configures itself into multiple images to help the hero and his sidekick find his lost son. The school of fish moves instantaneously because each individual fish decides on its own, in collaboration with the group, where to go. If changing behavior was an urgent, critical need in order for us to be able to help our clients, we would have to find a way to activate people as individuals so they would make their own decisions to commit and align to living our purpose and values.

But despite agreeing that organization change was the goal, and that people needed to feel they owned their own change, the push to decide and announce was powerful. That was actually the only model that our leaders had experienced and they were reluctant to take a more collaborative approach within the organization because they felt that people wanted an “answer”, and they wanted it now. There was some fear that taking a more collaborative approach might look like indecision or inaction. On the Culture Team, our feeling was that we had to stay focused on the purpose of the purpose and values work, and if we wanted to create organizational change, it would probably take less time to do it collaboratively.

We had reached an impasse and frankly we were in a slight state of shock and disappointment on the Culture Team that there was such a drive towards a top-down approach. So I went back to our CEO to clarify who was accountable for this work. He said “you are”, which was a critical moment for me, and for our team, on a number of levels. I realized that if I was accountable, I needed to ensure we took a collaborative approach to defining purpose and values so that our people would feel committed to it through their own sense of agency. Paradoxically, I didn’t want to tell our leaders that I had made a unilateral decision on behalf of the Culture Team – that would be “decide and announce” in a different form and antithetical to the collaborative approach we felt was so important. So I went back to the leaders and asked if they would be willing to try some collaborative sessions more broadly across the company where we could test the draft Purpose statement by eliciting more client impact stories from our people. They cautiously agreed, with the caveat that it couldn’t take too long.

Our team designed a 90-minute experience where participants could explore their own pride stories and start to triangulate on themes that defined our organizational purpose. Then they would explore the impact statement and offer their feedback. We offered an experience framework to our HR and L&D partners in EMEA and India, and they modified it make it resonate locally. Within a few weeks, to my surprise and tremendous satisfaction, over 500 people had attended one of these sessions. Our instinct that people not only needed to engage broadly, but that they wanted to, had been correct. Now we were off to the races with an inclusive approach to agreeing on a common purpose.

From Impact to Purpose

After reviewing all the ideas from these live sessions, in combination with stories we solicited online through our intranet, we used our own copywriters to develop a final Impact statement: “We partner with our clients to create digital organizations that thrive in the modern world.” This was specific, accurate and resonated with people, but it lacked the transcendent, universal quality of a Purpose statement. We looked at Simon Sinek’s golden circle idea (why/how/what) and realized that the impact statement did a nice job describing our work and its immediate impact on clients. The core values would describe how, but we needed a higher level why to complete the system. Having the benefit of professional brand strategists and copywriters on staff, we took the problem internally and tested some different versions of a purpose statement that found a higher elevation. Having arrived at a version that senior leaders liked best, we celebrated our work only to find there was some major conflict brewing.

It turned out that some of the language was not landing well in Europe, and people there felt they had not been sufficiently included in the process. We flew to London, met with about 30 leaders and listened — in a structured way: we started by asking people first to write down what they loved about the purpose statement, then discussed that. By asking them to write first, we avoided converging rapidly on a few ideas, and got to hear a wider range of thoughts. By starting first with what they loved, we tapped into the pride energy and shifted the emotional tone of the conversation to a more positive one. Then we went to what people didn’t like, and it turned out they were pretty excited about the concept and had a problem with one or two of the specific words. This time around, we enlisted a few people from that group to join our team and co-create the next version. We also took advantage of the delay to test the purpose statement more broadly, similarly to how we had tested the impact statement. I explained to the company that developing the purpose statement was like a lot of the emergent work we were doing with our clients: unpredictable. Another few hundred people weighed in on the purpose statement wording, and we were able to find words that satisfied most people and excited many: “Helping people thrive in the brave pursuit of next.”

This purpose statement is more inspirational and more emotional, and connected to the impact statement it gives a full picture of what we do and why we do it. Our CEO announced it on company-wide webinars in September and encouraged people to engage in the next step, which was to define the how.

From Purpose to Core Values

We had a rare opportunity, which was to define our Core Values in service of our organizational Purpose. Surprisingly, this idea raised some objections, as people wanted to define what they valued as individuals, rather than the values that would be most important to our Purpose. This made sense – people wanted to define a work experience that would inspire and satisfy them. Instead of debating the point, the Culture team designed an interactive workshop that would look at values from both the individual and organizational perspective. We suspected that there would be a lot of overlap and that looking for the intersections might also help us prioritize.

Our goal was to include as many people as possible in defining the values. We weren’t sure how many of our 18,000 people would participate, but we wanted everyone to have a chance to weigh in. Once again, the Culture team collaborated with partners across the company to deploy the experience in various forms so that it would be relevant to local audiences. We ramped up dozens of leaders across the company to run the sessions, which also served to create a more distributed sense of ownership. The interactive workshop started by exploring our new purpose statement, then moved to people considering their best experiences at work, where they had the most impact, and coming up with behaviors and underlying values they felt would be most important.

Because culture is driven so heavily by leaders, we felt a pure bottom-up approach to defining Core Values was too risky. Leaders needed to feel a strong commitment to these new values because they would need to model them – and the downside of their not modeling the values would be severe. So we nominated Values Delegates from each region (North America, EMEA, APAC and India) and each regional team held a briefing with their leaders to understand what they felt was most important. We asked them to agree on both criteria for good Values and a short list of the Values they felt were most important. That way we had the leaders’ criteria and short list, as well as the global data from the workshops and online portal, as input for the final Values workshops which took place in October.

In reviewing our data, we found that the ideas were gravitating around helping people in key situations:

  • Speaking truth to power
  • Understanding others’ perspectives
  • Working in a team
  • Working with clients
  • Solving client problems
  • Taking risks
  • Growing professionally

We brought the delegates together virtually, over video conference from a location in each region, for four sessions over the course of two weeks. We asked them to work separately, within their regions, then come together to reach agreement on a common set of values. By setting a constraint of no more than five values, we created a tension that forced people to really prioritize what was most important. We agreed on some important criteria, based on input from regional leaders, that also helped us focus:

  • Values should realistically be who we are today when we are at our best – not purely inspirational. They should feel authentic and our leaders must be able to model them.
  • No table stakes, e.g. integrity, leadership, etc. (thanks to Patrick Lencioni)
  • Must-have in order to live our Purpose

After the first two meetings we had arrived at five concepts that addressed the key situations from the data. It took a number of further iterations for us to name and describe these values:

  1. Inclusive Collaboration
  2. Partnering for Client Impact
  3. Engaging with Openness
  4. Embracing the Future
  5. Learning Mindset

Living the Purpose and Values

The work ahead of us in 2019 is to ensure that our people are living the Purpose and Values. We are embedding them in our people processes like hiring, on boarding, performance management, promotion, recognition, etc. We’re designing games and interactive experiences that each team can go through to help them personalize the concepts and think about how to apply them to get the outcomes they want. We’re also thinking about digital experiences that can help sustain the change, and ways of measuring our results so we know what’s working best.

Summary: Elements for Success

Looking back at the work of defining purpose and values, a few key elements probably led to laying the groundwork for success. Initial signals are promising, but it will be at least another year before we can measure the organizational change that will define a tangible victory.

  1. Driven by Senior Leaders – from the start, our CEO and senior leaders were passionate about defining a North Star
  2. Purpose of the Purpose – playing for the long game, ie the behavior, mindset and energy shift
  3. Values in Service of Purpose – linking the values to living the Purpose
  4. Purpose That Matters – using research to refine how the Purpose should be articulated
  5. School of Fish Approach – including people on a broad scale in defining their organization’s purpose and values
  6. Learning from Mistakes – listening carefully, making adjustments and revisiting decisions that were considered closed
  7. Returning Authority – Collaborating with each region and encouraging them to make their own decisions that would resonate locally.
  8. Designing values that were geared towards helping people in key situations where they use values to help them navigate.

Bibliography

Some of the writing that informed our work. The ones I consider most influential are in bold.

CEB, Building and Activating a Compelling Corporate Narrative, 2016

Centola, Damon, How Behavior Spreads, 2018

CIPD, Shared Purpose: the Golden Thread?, December 2010

Ellsworth, Richard, Leading with Purpose, 2002

Baldoni, John, Lead with Purpose, 2012

Burnham, David, Inside the Mind of the World Class Leader, 2002

Gartenberg, Prat, Serafeim, Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance, Organization Science, Forthcoming, 2018

Grant, Adam, Relational Job Design and the Motivation to Make a Prosocial Difference, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 32 No. 2, 393-417, 2007

Hackman, J. Richard, Motivation Through the Design of Work, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16, 250-279, 1976

Hurst, Aaron, The Purpose Economy, 2016

Kotter, John, Corporate Culture and Performance, 1992

Laloux, Frederic, Reinventing Organizations, 2014

Lencioni, Patrick, Make Your Values Mean Something, Harvard Business Review, July 2002

May, Douglas, Gilson, Richard, Harper, Lynn, The Psychological Conditions of Meaningfulness, Safety and Availability and the Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2004), 77, 11-37

McCord, Patty, Powerful, 2017

McLeod, Lisa, Selling with Noble Purpose, 2013

Mercurio, Zach, The Invisible Leader, 2017. Also check out Zach’s blog

Nadella, Satya, Hit Refresh, 2017

Pontefract, Dan, The Purpose Effect, 2016

Rohman, Jessica, Perks are Great But They Won’t Make Employees Stay, Fortune Magazine, March 14, 2016

Schein, Edgar, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2010

Spence, Roy M., It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, 2009

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