PURPOSE, INC.

Participants:

Michael Young

Pamela Rucker

More about Pamela at www.pamelarucker.com, www.csuitemomentum.com and

It's Important to Cultivate Your Organization's Collective Genius.

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

My guest today is Pamela Rucker, a noted and sought after speaker and trainer on innovation, digital transformation and corporate strategy and she works with leading Fortune 500 firms and executives there on these issues. And what got me interested in Pamela's work is her analysis of what she calls the crisis in corporate identity that we're witnessing today which is to say that organizations don't know how to respond today because they don't know who they are. And we're seeing this play out in real time driven by COVID and the pressures to end systemic racism in this country. And what we're seeing are the challenges that arise out of this crisis in corporate identity where organizations have to face trade-offs between people and profits and purpose. And Pamela has a very powerful examination and critique of corporate culture. And so, in today's episode, we talk about and Pam talks about the hidden layer of talent within organizations, what it means to be a trusted advisor. We talk about organizational collective genius, the value and importance of cognitive diversity within organizations. And we just get into a really mind-expanding conversation. Pamela is one of the most quotable people I've ever interviewed. She speaks with incredible power and intensity and speed. I was literally hanging on her every word but desperately trying to keep up. She's an incredible thinker on this topic. So, without further ado, my conversation with Pamela Rucker. Pamela, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Pamela Rucker:

Thank you for having me.

Michael Young:

So, a lot to talk about today and I know we will barely skim the surface of your work which is broad and deep. But the thing I wanted to kind of jump right into is something that I've heard you talk about which is the crisis in corporate identity. What do you mean by that?

Pamela Rucker:

So, as I've worked with organizations over the years, I found out that many companies regardless of their size have a lot of problems answering basic but fundamental questions that can have a drastic impact on how they approach their strategy, how they approach their work, how they approach the way that they work with people or even where they approach society. And so, for instance, I can't tell you the number of companies I've worked with that make billions of dollars but can't answer basic questions about their business identity like who are we, why are we in business or why are we different than every other company that looks just like us on a sheet of paper or questions like when we open our doors up to the world, what real value do we bring and why is the world different because we are here or questions like what problems do we solve and why are those problems important? And so, at the most basic level, every company should be able to answer those questions but research shows that they can't. And this is really similar to an identity crisis you might see people having as they move through life. They ask themselves questions like who am I, what work do I do or why am I different than every other person that looks like me on a sheet of paper or when I walk into the office every day, what value do I bring or why is the world different because I'm here or what problems do I solve by what I do and why that's important?

So, I believe that organizations struggling with that issue are no different than people struggling with that issue. But when who you are, it's really difficult for you then to operate outside of your purpose, right? And then when you don't know who you are, it's difficult for you to operate in purpose. You tend to get your identity from other people. So, in the same way that a person might look at social media or watch what people are wearing or watch the way that they are acting or the way that they're speaking and say, hey, that looks good to me, I think I'll do that too, you have organizations that look out at their competition or popular brands and say to themselves hmm, that looks like a good thing to offer or Company A was successful with this, Company B was successful with that, I think I'll do those things too. And they end up with this disjointed, disconnected, piecemeal version of an identity that changes with the wind and it's sort of like standing in the middle of Times Square with all of the different lights flashing as you look around and then trying to come up with a strategy from all of that. There's no real anchor to drive what you do or the decisions that you make.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And so, a couple of follow-on questions to that which the most obvious one as you were talking, I'm asking myself so why given everything that organizations have available to them to solve an identity crisis, why haven't they done it? Why is it still such a struggle? Maybe what's fundamental to the corporation that doesn't allow them to develop this coherent sense of self? What is it?

Pamela Rucker:

Well, my own practical experience tells me that I believe organizations are struggling with this because they tend to focus on what they do. So, when I ask people up and down the chain at companies who they are as a business, their very first response is to tell me what they do and that's not the same. That's like me asking you who you are and you telling me what you do. But you the person are far more than what you do and you're driven by a set of principles and beliefs that permeate every single part of your existence including what you do. And so, it's those beliefs about who you are or what you know or what your path in life has been that help you decide what you're going to do in the world and that helps you decide what job you're going to go after or where you're going to live or what you're going to wear or how you're even going to show up to the world. And it is also what helps you decide whether you want to try to change the world or whether you want to just exist in it. So, in the same way that what you know about yourself drives what you do in the world and how you act in it, that's true for organizations. And so, knowing who they are or why they exist helps them figure out the work that they should do every day, where they should do that work, who they should do it for, how they should operate and how they should treat the people that work for them. Most people though came to an organization after the fact. They didn't create that organization. They came into it and they're just repeating the work that other people have done. And so, oftentimes they don't spend the time working on the things that help them understand how they should be. They spend their time looking at what they should do.

Michael Young:

Got it. And where internally and externally do you see this manifesting and what are the costs and risks that come with this lack of clarity or this lack of definition within organizations?

Pamela Rucker:

Well, at a basic level, I think it manifests itself by having leaders that really don't know the company's purpose and they don't understand strategy well enough to say what they should be doing. And so, by itself in a normal year, if I was just talking to leaders, this would cause problems in a lot of different ways. Number one, because of what I mentioned before. If you don't know who you are or why you're different, then you don't know how you add value. If you don't know how you add value, then you don't know how to compete. So, you just keep trying to sell more stuff or do more things. You look at your competition, you see what they're doing, you try to copy them or you throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And so, in and of itself, that's already a problem and we talk about that in management theory every day. Number two though, when you don't know how to compete, you spend money and time and talent equity on the wrong initiatives and then because people haven't solved your identity crisis, you have leaders that are walking around with different ideas about who the company is and what the company should be doing or where the company was going or how they should get there. And because you're working on projects as they struggle through this, you're burning through cash as you work with teams that jockey for position and jockey for influence. More than that though, number three, you expand that problem by putting pressure on your employees to perform the impossible. So, you try to get them to do what you couldn't do and figure out a way to make all of this work which, of course, they can't because you haven't dealt with your root problem. So, you end up with employees that are completely overworked or frustrated or angry or confused about what to do every day.

Now as I said, this would be a problem in a normal year but because of what we've seen this year and the issues around the pandemic and social justice, I think those problems are magnified and I'll tell you why. First, when you don't know who you are as an organization or why you're in business or why you're different or what problems you solve or what values you even have, you don't know what to do in a crisis and that's a problem because all crises have a level of fear associated with them and that fear is contagious. Now research tells us that fear makes our IQ drop. So, when you would normally behave intelligently in a situation, fear lowers your ability to do that. So, even if you were equipped with knowledge about your corporate identity, it would take you some time to sort of respond intelligently in a crisis situation. But when you don't know your corporate identity, it's like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean at night. You can't see anything, the waves are jostling you around and you don't really have any point of reference. And that's dangerous because a couple of Harvard’s great leaders on crisis management say that one of the main questions you have to ask yourself as you think about crisis communication is what should people like us with values like ours do in a situation like this? So, if you don't know who you are and what you value, how do you know when you should care about what's happening in the world, how do you know what to say, how do you know what to do, how do you possibly respond to the absolutely polarized environment we find ourselves in with regard to the pandemic or with regard to ongoing social issues? And that's the question I've heard many organizations grapple with. Like what do we do and what should we say?

The second issue I see is if you don't know your identity, that doesn't really mean that your employees and your customers and your partners don't think you have one. So, in their minds you do and in a crisis, they're going to respond to what they think your identity is or worse yet, their own interpretation of how to live out that identity. And we know from research again that when people lack information, they make it up. So, now in one of our most difficult times in global history, you'll have your employees acting out their interpretation of life on your image or on your strategy. And we see this happening now on LinkedIn and other platforms. People are commenting on COVID-19 or social injustice issues and they are responding as individuals but the business is getting blow back as a company because society has this expectation of you based on your projected image even if you don't know who you are.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And I think at the top of that, you were talking about the management, the training, the recruitment of employees as process and behavioral and cultural norms. And I wanted to get into another one of your ideas that I've heard you talk about which is talk to me about the hidden layer of talent that doesn't get activated because of the lack of clarity and identity.

Pamela Rucker:

Yeah. So, when you have organizations that apply a lot of pressure for you to get that work done every day and you feel like they're asking you to do what you think is virtually impossible, you get into this cycle of just sort of fighting fires every day and as you fight those fires, you get assignments to put more fires out. This is what the normal work is. On top of that though, someone comes up with new ideas around work that you need to do to keep up with your competition. So, while you're running around fighting fires, they put more weight on your back and tell you that you have to finish these new assignments on top of the old fires. So, you might have ideas about how to solve some of those problems but you recognize that there are things that the organization will require you to do that might actually make you have to do more work I remember talking to a leader at an organization once and we were talking about how the reward for good work is more work. So, what people tend to do is just stop raising their hands. They might keep their ideals to themselves. I've actually had senior leaders in global organizations tell me that they have the answer that will solve the organization's problems but they know they won't get air cover for some of the work on their plate. So, they just keep the answer to themselves and watch the company struggle. Now when that kind of behavior happens all over the company, it creates these hidden layers of talent at the ground level, in middle management and in senior management. And so, then you have this entire shadow organization with immense amounts of power and capability coming to work but not being accessed because they are overwhelmed by the way that you work and they believe that speaking up about their talent would make their work life even more unsustainable. And that's bad for you as a company because remember, you're desperately supposed to be looking at who you are as an organization and why you exist and where you can add value and you want to match yourself with people that work with you and for you and sort of fit within your purpose.

And so, I've seen organizations going all out and looking to hire new people when they actually have the answer inside their own organizations, the relative equivalent of multiple consultancies inside their company but they just don't see it. And then the leaders that they have might leave their company and become the new rock star in a different company. And we've all seen that and we all understand that concept because we see it all the time in sports. A person might get traded as a role player from one team and turn into a marquee player at another team. All of those things don't just happen because they have new capabilities. It happens because they've been given the space to be themselves and to explore and to exploit that hidden talent. And in the past, that would just mean that maybe you aren't accessing all of your talent. But now in the gig economy, we’ve started to see people that sell that hidden talent off to other organizations to help them grow and succeed and that's just devastating to you as an organization.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. The other thing I've—well, let's talk about diversity, real diversity within organizations from the board level on down. And I know you advise across many, many top organizations on this topic. Other than the reasons that everyone cites, why is cognitive diversity so vital to organizations around innovation disruption and response to crisis? What are your thoughts there?

Pamela Rucker:

Yeah. I'm a real believer in not just having diversity because it's the right thing to do. Of course, that's great. You want to do that. But I really think you want different voices in different paths in life at the table because every time this new challenge comes up that you might see, it might be Challenge A, Challenge B, you're going to see it from your point of view and from your set of experiences. And if you have come from the same place as I have and we have the same types of experiences, well, first of all, we don't know anything about the universe that exists outside of our world. We don't know what we don't know. But more than that, we don't see our opportunities the same either. And I just ran across this with an organization that I'm working with. Because my past is different than yours, what you see as a barrier, I actually might see as an opening. And so, I was working with this organization that was struggling with how they were going to solve this problem that they felt like was a unique challenge for them and there just was no way to get over it. And the more they talked about what the challenge was, the more I saw this as an opening. But because they didn't have the experience I had or the experience other people that were coming to the table with me had, they never saw the opening. So, what you see as negative, I might see is positive. So, the idea that I try to tell people about is to get as many different types of people and voices at the table as you can because it expands your universe of opportunities and it increases your field of vision. So, when you have more places you can go for customers and more options to solve problems, you actually can increase your opportunities for success instead of just having to go down one path. So, one background and one way of thinking can give you these limited ways to succeed but having many backgrounds and many ways of thinking can give you many different ways to succeed, new options to explore, new customers to go after, new markets to go into and new ways to solve problems that you might not have thought about before.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And I mean I've heard you also use the term collective genius within an organization. I think that's one of your many, many pithy sound bites. Is that related to this topic, in other words, that we unlock the potential that the organization has within it through diversity across the organization? Is that how we should be thinking about that?

Pamela Rucker:

Yes, it is. And it's not just diversity of people. It's diversity of thought. It's diversity of experiences, of backgrounds and really then giving people the ability to speak up and talk because that's what's going to help you get rid of that layer of hidden talent, right? So, that it'll allow you to have those ideas bubble up to the surface. Because I've seen organizations struggle to bring people to the table but then never give them the opportunity to speak. So, collective genius actually pulls all of that together. It's out of some research out of Harvard where the researcher was looking at the different types of people that could kind of come together and as you come together with different types of thinking, together we're all more brilliant than we are than any one person might be alone. But I tell organizations when I work with them, honestly, that you can't do that without expecting some level of friction. And so, you want to give people the opportunity to turn that friction into something positive and some way to make things ignite. Instead of burning the whole place down because we don't agree, turn that into something that you can ignite that will spark something new and allow people to come out and have more innovation and more opportunity than they had in the past.

Michael Young:

And I've also heard you talk about being a trusted advisor within a company and being a safe haven. How does that manifest? Like what are the components of being that person within the organization and why is that so vitally important?

Pamela Rucker:

Yeah. I have this big smile on my face because the idea of being a trusted advisor is way more than we can cover in a few minutes.

Michael Young:

We have time because this is, yeah.

Pamela Rucker:

The real truth is as you think about the people that you work with every day, there are lots of people that you might see at work and you might know them, they might know you from face only. They don't know your name. They don't know anything about you. And as you work more closely with people, they start to develop relationships with you. They know more about you, they know who you are and they start to form this impression of who you are and what they think your value is. Your goal is to move higher up in the organization and to make these connections with people as you work with them so that they see you differently and form an opinion that says that they're willing to work with you in a way that helps you and you're willing to work with them in a way that helps them. Now when you become a trusted advisor, you're a person that actually puts the person in a place where they feel like you understand them, you get them and you're willing to use your knowledge of certain subjects in a way that helps them even when it doesn't necessarily help you. So, it's not that I'm trying to give this attitude of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. It's that you're a place that they can go and they can talk to you and they can get resolution of issues and they feel like you'll be there for them and they might be there for you. You want these types of relationships because when you're moving up in an organization, you're trying to make power moves and I don't believe that power moves are always made alone. I believe that they're made with other people and in order to do that, you have to get on the radar of the right people in order to get them to work on your behalf and to use their stroke and cachet [stroke and cachet? 00:21:55] to help open doors that you could never open on your own.

Michael Young:

Yeah. Great. Thank you. And I've heard you say that trusted advisor is somebody I think you said to rationalize my rage. Do I have that right?

Pamela Rucker:

Yeah. That comes from the book, Trusted Advisor, and I believe that everybody who's trying to actually become anyone that's rising up in value should read that because I think we need to think of ourselves as an entity that helps and not just the person or an entity that gets. I mean we all think about what we want out of relationships but I think even being a person who you can say someone can come to my office and just let it out, right? I can think about times in my career when I knew that I wanted to be promoted, I knew that I wanted to rise up in the organization and before I could ever get to that conversation, I had to let people spill out like everything they were angry about and talk to me about it. It was almost like having a psychotherapy session but it really did allow them to get some things out and then I could bring some ration to that rage and say, well, actually, that's not true or maybe this is true. Maybe we can work on this solution together. And I found in my experience—and my experience tends to mimic what I think a lot of the research finds as well—that by doing that, people trust you more because they realize that you've listened to them and you understand where they're coming from and you haven't judged that opinion, right? I didn't say you're right or you're wrong. I just listened and I helped you sort through those problems and kind of come to a resolution that would work for you and I had no way to benefit from that on my own.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. That's great. All right. So, the last and another sort of huge topic but if you could come back to thoughts about how COVID and Black Lives Matter and calls for greater equity and an end to systemic racism, how are all of those things impacting and further exposing this weakness in corporate identity and what do you think are the long-term—make a prediction—ramifications of social change and a lot of social rage? I mean it's fair to say people are angry and they're angry individually as people and in the streets and at the voting booth and at work and everywhere else. So, just kind of paint a picture of and maybe a little pressure has come off I hope in terms of a new day in Washington. But how do you see that and what are your thoughts in terms of can we be hopeful, are there things to look forward to? How is all of this going to look a year from now? And we'll come back in a year and I will hold you to account. You'll have to be right. But our goal with this is—I mean paint a picture.

Pamela Rucker:

Let's talk about this by going back to what happened earlier in the summer. So, when you look at the news and you literally see someone holding their foot on the neck of another individual for almost nine minutes until they choke the life out of them, right?

Michael Young:

Yeah.

Pamela Rucker:

The harshness and the level of dominance that you see physically should prompt you to look at yourself abstractly. So, if you're sitting in the seat of power in an organization, it really should force you to deal with those multiple identities or the lack thereof that I spoke about, whether or not you have multiple faces, how you see yourself as a company and how other people see you. If you're in an organization and you're watching this on TV, I think it naturally forces you to tackle these tough questions about whether your policies have had their foot on the neck of people no matter how great of an organization you strive to be. Go back and look at the data and ask yourself have you been systematically doing the very thing that you were horrified that somebody else was doing. And I feel like there's not necessarily a hard right and hard wrong or hard yes and a hard a hard no to those answers. I think the evaluation of them comes out of your corporate identity and you actually saying who are you. We also have these definable moments in life where we can look back in our past and say that going through that helped me figure out who I was or solidified what I believe in or created my bright red line that I know I'm never going to cross again. As I think about what I've seen in 2020, I believe that this year has been a bright red line for the world and what has happened is that people have been struggling with interpreting what to do about that line because they either don't want to admit the truth of what it means for them or they don't want to do anything about it if they do admit the truth.

And there's this great line out of a Harvard study where they talk about the management of crisis and they say, in order to deal with that, you have to ask yourself what should people like us with values like ours do in a time like this? Well, you can't really answer that question if you can't tackle the issue of your own personal identity and you can't tackle the issue of how much you personally care. So, I know we talked about this before but I'm going to repeat it here. I had this public event where I was speaking and the discussion turned to people saying that they didn't really know what to do about these difficult issues and we didn't really know how to handle them. And something in me just got a little quizzical because I felt like wow, if you took your child to the playground and your child played on the playground and a bully came over and started picking on them and that bully was bigger than your child and stronger than your child and everywhere your child went, the bully followed them and got in their way so they couldn't get on the swing or they couldn't play on the slide. It wouldn't even have to rise to the level of the bully pushing your child down on the ground or taking their candy and making them cry. It would never get there because you would immediately get up and get in the way of the bully and tell them to stop. You use in effect your size and your authority and your power to make that person stop because you love your child and you care about the things that happen to them.

So, we have entire sectors of people where bullies have blocked their ability to get jobs, refused to pay them what they're worth, bullies are putting their foot on their necks. But other people sit by and just watch it happening. So, it's like sitting on the playground and watching a bully beat another kid and being okay with it because they're not beating up your child. And so, you have to feel like a bully on the playground is bad for everybody, not just your child. And you can only feel like that, to care about the whole playground and not just the game your child is playing when you understand your identity and you talk to yourself about some of the deep and profound truths you need to about who you are, when you care about the world that you live in and not just what you can get out of it. So, when you ask me what's going to happen in the next year, I have to think about how we're all going to tap into our own personal sets of values, both the felt values and the unfelt values, right? Not just the emotional ones that come up that we know about that when we're introspective we think about them but the ones that make us behave the way that we behave. And if I can't figure out why I behave the way I do, then I need to look at the things that I do and how do I stop doing the things that I do. We'll all only get better as people if we can look at how we act and if we can look at what we do and ask ourselves if that's okay. Would it be okay if it was happening to my mom? Would it be okay if it was happening to my child? Would it be okay if it was happening to my dad or my sister? And act like everybody in the world is valuable because we're all on that playground together. So, I'm hopeful that we're all starting to at least look at the red line even if we don't like what it says because it's only in looking at that red line that we can start to make decisions about what we actually believe. And when pushed, I actually believe in the value of humanity. I believe people are all, we all have something good in us and even though we might tend to get off track at times, when pushed, we're going to probably do the right thing. So, I'm hopeful that in a year's time when we come back together and talk, things are going to be a lot better or at least trending in the right direction and moving in the right direction.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing I've heard you say is it's not that we don't know, to the schoolyard bully or the playground bully, it's not that we don't know what's right. The question is why don't we care?

Pamela Rucker:

Why don't we care?

Michael Young:

Why don't we care that that bully has his knee on the neck of another child?

Pamela Rucker:

Yeah.

Michael Young:

And that's the real fundamental issue and I hope we can—yeah, it feels like we have come up to a red line and we are pulling back from it I do hope. But we need to care and then we need to follow that care with right action and that I think has been the body of your work and your advice. I'm so grateful, Pamela, for you coming on and this was 30 minutes that went by, felt like three minutes. It went so fast.

Pamela Rucker:

Yes.

Michael Young:

But I am so grateful for you for coming on the podcast. Thank you.

Pamela Rucker:

Thank you for having me.

Conclusion:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.

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