The Perfect Purpose Statement Is Inspiring … and Credible

According to Anne Chow, the former CEO of AT&T Business, you should go beyond a focus on what you company does to zero in on why it does it—and how your company’s way of doing things makes it unique and better than the competition.

In this excerpt from her best-selling book, Lead Bigger, Chow, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of executive education at the Kellogg School, describes how an inspiring and actionable purpose statement can help a company thrive.

Okay, sure. It helps to have a purpose, and one that matters to your stakeholders. But how do you define it, exactly?

Let’s say you lead a team where the why is simply not clear. No Girl Scouts. No life-or-death concerns. Perhaps you sell chairs. How do you surface your why? What purpose will sustain you and your people through a commute in bad weather, or after your baby kept you up half the night?

Here’s how IKEA tied their work of “selling furniture and home goods” to their purpose statement: “To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.” By building an intentional purpose statement, IKEA underlines its contribution to society and lives up to it through their selections. Sure, you might have an empathetic ache in your back when you imagine “as many people as possible” sitting on the floors of their homes wriggling together flat-pack furniture with tiny Allen wrenches. But you can certainly agree that IKEA is affordable and functional, serving their purpose of clean, thoughtful design for the masses. College students, families, and startup founders can access aesthetically pleasing furnishings at prices that are within their reach, meeting a real need in society.

To access this deeper meaning, I’ve found it helpful to go beyond the focus on what you’re doing. Ask yourself and each other: Why? Why you? What makes your how the optimal choice and different from current or future competitors in the market?

No matter the size of your team or the work you’re doing, you’re on a mission to reach a destination, realize your vision, and achieve your desired outcomes. If you’re still struggling to express what you do differently, ask yourself, What if we didn’t exist? Who would care? And why?

In my early roles, before I had team leadership responsibilities, I learned to greatly value those bosses who explained the context for our work, within the broader why of the company. I strove to emulate them by creating localized purpose statements for my teams that would “ladder up” to the company’s vision. My very first boss at AT&T was one of my best, and she set the foundation for me of what bigger meant. I was an engineer focused on the billing architecture of AT&T’s network. She showed us how our work was used, took us on field trips to service centers that benefited from our projects, and constantly talked to us about the positive impact of our contributions to customers. Her approach was people-centric—from us as her employees, to our colleagues that we helped, to the customers we served. I became what I would come to call a “context gal” in that first role, constantly seeking to connect across the what, who, how, and why.

When I led a product management team, I’d highlight our customers’ pain points, to underline our company’s purpose: that we needed to constantly innovate. Then I tied this to the quantitative growth of the company in revenue, margin, and market share. Our ability to develop and launch new products could both serve existing customers and win new ones—and that was at the heart of growing the business. And our focus wasn’t just on the products themselves but on how our customers would experience them.

Bigger leaders are dealers in hope, and a primary objective I always had when speaking with my team was affirming to them how important their roles were to the greater good—to show them that they really mattered and give them a sense of how their efforts contributed to the current and future growth of our company.

To truly inspire people, you must choose your words intentionally when expressing purpose. While your statements should be aspirational and ambitious, you also want them to be attainable and actionable. Credibility is key. Oftentimes companies choose words that feel too lofty, abstract, broad, or buzzy, and the effect is like an astrological horoscope that is generically applicable but says nothing.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what words you choose if your stakeholders can’t envision what you’re seeking to create. Certainly, Steve Jobs’s brain was afire with futuristic notions of how technology would change our lives. But he kept Apple’s mission simple so that we mere mortals could keep up: “To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” Note the reference to “tools for the mind”—he was careful not to limit it to “computers”—even though the rest of us had never yet seen an iPod or an app store.

Let’s assess a few examples of companies who have made an explicit effort to be bigger and inclusive in their approach to their purpose:

Nike’s vision is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world,” with an asterisk that “*if you have a body, you’re an athlete.” That’s an ultimate statement of inclusion and leading bigger: Everyone is or can be an athlete. As a sporting apparel and gear company, they could reasonably have stated that their purpose was “to create groundbreaking sports innovation,” but they didn’t just focus on their customers. They included the many more stakeholders affected by their business: “to create groundbreaking sports innovations, make our products sustainably, build a creative and diverse global team, and make a positive impact in the communities in which we live and work.” The brand goes big here, asserting who they are, what they want to represent, and whom they serve. Do they need to say both “groundbreaking” and “innovations”? Is that perhaps redundant? We can nitpick. But in all, the statement lays the groundwork for customers and employees alike to strengthen their connection to the brand.

Let’s look at an unexpected business-to-business (B2B) example, Old Dominion Freight Line. You might expect a trucking and logistics company to settle on something like “We deliver on time, every time,” and while that would be sufficient, it would miss out on the potential of purpose statements to compel stakeholders to join them. I love the tagline they actually have emblazoned on their trucks: “Helping the world keep promises.” As you peel back what they do and more fully understand the how and why, you can appreciate their focus on dependability and the power of promises. They chose words that create meaningful connection and a visceral emotional bond to not just their partners or businesses, but the end customer as well. In just five words, Old Dominion captured the beating heart of their why.

The point is that you should strive to be conscious about the power behind your purpose statement, choosing language that embodies the work and the people you want to feel included in it. Your commitment should directly inform your choices about people, products, processes, and platforms.