147 | Unlocking Purpose in Organisations | Scott McInnes & Professor Peter Hawkins

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Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Delighted to have you with us today. Thanks a million for joining and for listening. If you're new, you're very welcome. If you're not so new, thanks for coming back and sticking with us. It means a lot. Whether you are a first-time visitor or a regular listener, please, as I always ask, please do take a couple of minutes just while you're listening to this episode to perhaps think about giving us a little comment or a little rating. I would really, really appreciate that. Thank you so much. My guest today, really interesting conversation I know we're going to have based on the conversation that we had a couple of weeks back. Professor Peter Hawkins is one of the world's leading authorities in systemic coaching, in leadership development, and the coaching of executive teams and boards. He has a list of roles as long as probably both my arms: Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Henley, Honorary President of the Association of Executive Coaching, the joint founder and Dean of the Global Team Coaching Institute, and just for a bit of fun in his spare time, the Executive Chair of Renewal Institute. When he's not doing all All that, he's putting pen to paper. He's a prolific author of books and papers on leadership, on board and team coaching, on systemic coaching, on supervision, and on organizational transformation, all of which are really close to my heart and really close and really resonant with the work that we do at Inspiring Change. So, I am really looking forward to digging into some of Peter's experience. Peter, hello, how are you getting on?

Great and lovely to be with you, Scott, and explore some of the great challenges of our times for leaders and organizations, and we might even say for humanity as a whole.

Yeah, interesting. And we're going to get on to purpose in a while because I know that you've got some quite strong views on that. So we're going to get on to that later on, hopefully. For now, let me ask you a gigantic question. What do you see as the essential elements for organizations in, you know, as we were a quarter of the way through the century. So what do you see as the essential elements for organizations as we head further into this century?

It's a question that I've kind of been very concerned with and addressed in my last two books, is given the great challenges we are facing as a planet and as humanity and looking at how do organizations become net benefit contributors to the wider world? I came up with kind of 5 keys, which I think are essential. The first is that they are purpose-led, not target-led or short-term profit-led. To be purpose-led is to answer the very fundamental question, what is it that we can uniquely do that the world of tomorrow needs? That then takes us— we'll come back to purpose. As you've indicated, Scott. But second is that we need to be stakeholder-centric. And by stakeholder-centric, and I think that word is slightly problematic, but it's the best we've got at the moment. I mean, is the organization focused on what its current and future stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, investors, communities where they operate, and the wider ecology? I've chaired several small businesses. And I've always done my annual report based on what have we received from each of those 6 groupings and what added value have we given back? So purpose-led, stakeholder-centric. The third is the ability to park many people we help, many organizations that we help through big transformation processes. They get overwhelmed by the number of people they have to serve. So they say, you know, HR, you look after the people, and finance, you look after investors, and sales, you look after the customers. But actually, we need leadership teams that can hold the complete stakeholder synergy. And what they do is they get overwhelmed because they see stakeholders as demands that they have to get it right for, not also as resources that they have to partner with. So how do you partner with your customers? How do you turn your customers into partners? Yeah. How do you turn employees into partners, investors into partners, the communities into partners? So the whole, the whole skill of partnering becomes critical. The fourth, which I've written a lot about in my latest book on Team of Teams Coaches, how do we have every team in the organization being high-value creating and more than the sum of its parts? And the team of teams more than the sum of the teams. And the fifth, which I know you and I touched on, Scott, is the learning. The fifth key is the organization learning faster than the world around it is changing. Not just individuals learning within the organization, which is where the learning organization has spent a lot of time over the last 40 years. But how does the organization as an organism learn and evolve? And most companies collapse, whether it's sort of Kodak or Enron, not because they haven't got the right products or the right people, but the organization isn't learning fast enough.

And Kodak or Nokia are brilliant examples of that, where they just weren't watching what was going on around them. They were market leaders for years and years and years. We all had a 6310i mobile phone from Nokia that seemed to have a battery that went on for years. And then suddenly they were gone. They just weren't watching, were they?

Well, and I always say, you know, when I work with successful organizations who say, well, we wanna be number one in our sector, I say, be careful, it's a dangerous place. Because if you're number one like Kodak and Nokia, you're the last to get the news that the world is changing because it hits your bottom line last.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, completely.

Yeah, yeah.

So, and you— and success is addictive. You get habituated to it. And that's where I think we have to talk about organizational unlearning even more than organizational learning.

We might get to that in a second. Before we go there, of those 5 elements, If I forced you to pick one that we might consider the most important or the one to get most right or a foundation stone, perhaps a cornerstone, which one would it be? Could you pick one?

I think you have to start— you see, it's not the most important, but where do you have to start? So in my model of team coaching, the first discipline is being clear about your commission or your purpose, because unless you're clear about where you can make a unique contribution, you cannot focus. And why I think that's primary, because I think it works at all levels of the system. I think you and I need to ask the question. I do it regularly. What can I uniquely do in my 70s that the world of tomorrow needs that I couldn't do in my 60s? I think every team needs to be clear about what's its unique contribution to the organization, where it adds value to the teams above it, upstream, downstream, beneath it. I think an organization needs to be clear about that. I think species need to be clear about what their role is in the ecological niche. It works at all levels.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And when you think about those elements, what do you see as the role perhaps of organizational culture, or to your point there, organizational learning in developing each of those elements out?

For many years, both in what is now becoming Renewal International, was Renewal Associates before that, was Bath Consultancy Group. We've worked on a very simple triangle, which is if the world is changing faster and in more complex ways, then you have to be constantly adapting your strategy. But, you know, as Peter Drucker says, the next bit of the triangle, culture will always eat your strategy for breakfast. You have a very clear strategy. If you plant a new strategy in old soil and you haven't prepared the soil, it's not going to flourish or take root, survive. But then on the bottom, we say you've got culture. You've also got collective leadership. We have a phrase that says collective leadership will get the culture they collectively behave, not individually, but collectively behave. We can tease that out if you like. And the difficulty is, is that many organizations, they go to McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group, you know, Bain's, one of these, to help with their strategy. They go to their HR department or a niche consultancy to help with their culture. They go to a business school to help their leadership development. And the real challenges don't lie in the three boxes, they lie in the interconnections. So to have integrated organizational change, you've got to deal with the triangle, not the points. Does that make sense?

It really does, because I guess it's how those three elements talk to each other.

And the same with the Five Keys. You know, you can't say, all right, we've done the purpose, tick. Well, now we'll do the teaming, tick. It doesn't work that way. I often quote— many people have heard me say this— when I was doing the global research on Tomorrow's Leadership and the Necessary Revolution in Today's Leadership Development for Henley right around the world. We interviewed CEOs, HR directors. We looked at all the best surveys. We talked to nominated future leaders who were at that stage millennials. We put that all together. But what I most remember is a CEO who said, 'Look, we've got lots of consultants who help us with parts of our organization. We've got lots of coaches who coach our individual leaders.' He said, 'But that's not where our challenges lie.' All the challenges, he says, all the big challenges lie in the connections, not the people or the parts. He said, where are the coaches, where are the consultants who coach the connections? He said, I don't mean just the connections between people in a team or between leaders, that's important, but between the team and the board or the sales department, the production department. But also the connections between the levels of the organization, or the connections to the organization and the stakeholders, or the connections between the stakeholders. How do you get your stakeholders to join up? And that's where I see an enormous need for organizations to get help. But, and I wrote about this in this Tiba Teams coaching book, that the development profession is totally fragmented. You know, there's 100 varieties of coaching, there's 100 varieties of team development, there's leadership development, there's OD, organizational transformation, appreciative inquiry. Um, and, and what, what's desperate need is, is for people who could connect change at the individual, team, team of teams organization, stakeholder world, ecosystem world. And those people are in very, very short supply.

When you talk about team of teams and when you talk about, when you mentioned there about leadership and collective behavior, acting as a leadership, acting as a collective, is that about alignment? Is it making sure that all of our teams are aligned, all of our leaders are aligned? Is that one of the core tenets or is it something else?

Yes, it's alignment, but it's more than alignment. If you take a top team and I've worked with them across 50 countries, most sectors, from not-for-profit to governments, many senior teams are not leadership teams. They're a team, a team of leaders.

Leadership group, I often call it.

Yeah, leadership group. Paul, one of my colleagues, has written a book 'Are You a Team or a Meeting?' Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is a nice title. Dick Pope. And that means that one of the first things you need to do is for the leader to be able to, the CEO to be able to say, this is where I see our big challenges that are coming over the horizon. But I can't solve any of them. I need all of your help, not just individually. I need you as a team to take collective ownership of the whole. And so it's not just we've aligned our messages or we've aligned our targets. It's at a deeper level that actually, you know, one of the case studies in this book, the big global engineering business, one of the nice little anecdotes was One of the executive teams saying to me, we got this feedback that we show up differently as a team. We finish each other's sentences. The finance guy talks about the people issues. You know, it's a felt sense that this team absolutely in their guts and their bones and their bloodstream, right, take collective ownership and that they're more than the sum of their parts.

Felt sense is seen. And felt by everybody else in the organization. When they see the finance guy finishing the sentences about people, or they see the people leader talking about IT, that's incredibly powerful because it does show that cohesion. And for me, that's a massive builder of trust in a senior team.

I once was with a team and they were discussing, do we trust each other or not? And after about 15 minutes, I said, look, I think we're having the wrong debate because I've never seen a debate like this get us anywhere. I said, you know, who do I totally trust in my life? My children. But that's just many years ago. They were still living at home. I've now got almost grown-up grandchildren. But I said, my children, most of the time, my wife more than my children, myself. Probably less than my wife. Right. They all laughed. I said, so let's get realistic. We don't, we don't need to 100% trust each other because otherwise we won't be challenging enough and questioning enough. We need to trust each other enough to put our mistrust on the table. And you can measure mistrust. I have a mistrust equation. If I got to do with you, Scott, I have to write down the number of people I tell about that difficulty before I tell you, multiplied by the number of days between having the difficulty and having a conversation. So, you know, the people watching this, you can think of somebody you have difficulty with and you can write their name down and you can think of the last difficulty you had and how many other people did you tell before you told them? And how many people and how many days was in the gap. And that gives you your mis— your mistrust quotient. And that you could do something about.

Yeah.

So I worked with one team, uh, there's a blog on it on my, on, on my LinkedIn and website. And it says, um, a team that came to an agreement that any difficulty you have with somebody else on the team You start the conversation within 24 hours. So, so it's not that we have to make trust the goal. We have to make— we address mistrust directly and quickly. People get into blaming the lack of trust. We can't— there's not enough trust around here, not enough psychological safety. That's how things— we can all take responsibility for.

Yeah, I love the idea of trusting each other enough to put our mistrust on the table. I think that's brilliant. And even just that mistrust quotient, I think, is genius. There'll be people listening to this scribbling down names and days and numbers of people they've told. So, definitely do that, listeners. It's worth a look. Do you think, just for senior teams to operate really, really effectively, Do they need to like each other in your experience?

No, no. I've been around group and team development since the 1970s. In the 1970s, it was all about T-groups. And, you know, if we had— and if we understand each other and get on and know each other's psychometrics, we're going to have a great team. And research doesn't support that. Yes, it's an added bonus, if you like, the people we will get on. What's more important is that we are absolutely committed to what we can achieve together that we cannot achieve apart. So I'm fairly radical insofar as, you know, going way back to working with PricewaterhouseCoopers Librand through their merger. I would even then, back in the late 1990s or mid-1990s, I said, you keep asking who is our client in this organization that they're working with. I said, it's the wrong question. No individual should be your client. I don't like talking about coaching clients or our team client. No, our coachee is our coaching partner. We're both there in partnership focusing on what does the world need from the coachee. Their stakeholders, their future stakeholders, those are the client. I can ask who's my gatekeeper to this organization. I can ask who's the sponsor of the work. Those are— as soon as we say, who's my— we start to take sides. Does that make sense?

Yeah, completely.

And, you know, I did some work. I did a podcast recently for the Army Leadership Center, who they've been at leadership development for years and everything. And it's very clear if you're in a battle situation, you don't worry about whether you trust the guy next to you, whether you like them or not, right? You just trust that they're going to have your back and you'll have their back because you're not focusing on each other. You're focusing on what is necessary.

And that idea of partnering with our stakeholders as opposed to them being our clients, our coachees, our customers, our board, whatever, just completely, it's interesting because it just completely changes potentially your perspective on how we deal with each other.

Yeah, because you stop looking at each other and being transactional, which is, no, I'll do this for the organization if the organization does this for me. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it becomes transformational because we're engaging with the customer about What is it we could do together that your stakeholder world and our stakeholder world both need? But focusing on the customer's customer, not the customer.

Yeah, it becomes about us, not you and me, but us together.

And this is why it's central to— there's something that coaching.com put out of me talking about weQ as opposed to IQ and EQ. And it took us a long time to get from IQ to EQ. But what the world is even more short of is WEQ or collaborative intelligence. And that means we stop looking at each other, we start looking at what does the world need from our relationship.

When you think about the idea of WEQ and collaboration, one of the things that I spend a lot of time talking to groups and leadership teams about in the work that we do is the whole idea of connection. Connection is one of those areas that I think has really suffered and struggled with IT coming in. You often read or hear, we're technologically the best-connected people in the world ever, yet loneliness is rising. And I think people feel more disconnected than ever from their work, their workplaces, their leaders, and the organization, the same from their teams. Have you seen anything in that regard or has anything popped up in your work that might support that?

Just dig deeper on what we mean by connection.

Yeah.

Because I think what you're pointing to is we're looking at connection in the wrong way. Right. So the first step in to learn to partnership, it relates what you said, you need to like each other. I wrote a blog called Partnerships Are Not Created by Partners. And I wrote it 2017, just before my 40th wedding anniversary. I mentioned that because I wrote about marriages, teamwork, and mergers. And I said, it's the purpose that creates the partnership, not the partners that create the purpose. And so connection, and this is fundamental to how I see also Leadership. Leadership does not reside in leaders. That's one of the big traps. We've wasted millions on leadership development, which was not leadership development, was leader development and coaching. For me, leadership, you have to have three things present: a leader, followers. Otherwise you just have a voice crying in the wilderness. But the third element of that triangle is you have to have a purpose that requires collaboration. Without a purpose that requires collaboration and someone to orchestrate the collaboration called a leader and other people to be part of that collaboration called followers, you don't have leadership. The same way is connection must be always triangulated rather than rather than two points on the line. Does that make sense? So for us to have a connection, it's not— I have to be thinking not, how do I impress Scott? Or Scott, you know, how do I ask him the right question? We have to be together saying, what is it we can do in this talk, right, that will really help and make a difference for people who listen to you, not what they want to hear, but what is the future and the people they make a difference for need them to hear. Yeah. So we have to be shoulder to shoulder looking future back, outside in, not at each other.

It was that idea that it's you and I doing something for somebody else, and they're the third point of that triangle. In, in this instance, the listeners of the podcast, and then onward to the people that they're perhaps serving.

Yeah, because the listeners need to be our partners, not our customer.

Yeah.

And, and, and, you know, my passion would be how together can we enroll them in the shift in consciousness that's needed, and without which the human species will be incapable of addressing the great challenges of our time. My purpose is more about that than giving them some quick, easy tips that they can use in their work with organizations.

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Let's go back to purpose because you've mentioned that a few times in what we've been speaking about, Peter. And it strikes me that purpose has become a little bit buzzwordy in probably the past 10 years. We talk about how people need to be purposeful and we have to have purposeful organizations and we have a purpose that talks more to our heart than our head. And that's more motivating for people that work in organizations. It feels sometimes that organizations perhaps are doing a little bit of purpose washing, trying to make their products feel a little bit more purposeful and important in the world than it actually is. And I just wonder from your perspective, how do we actually, and from your research and your work, how do we make work more purposeful?

Let me step back and just give us a bit of a historical perspective. Back in '80s, 1980s, 1990s, you know, I was helping top teams create their mission and values and strategy. And then I kind of woke up to the fact that the word mission comes from warfare. That's where the word first comes from. Then it was adapted for evangelism and colonization. It carries that whole sense of how do we become number one in our sector. Columbus had a mission, NASA had a mission. It's about going out. It's ambition-driven. So that's why I moved from mission, which is what, you know, we sit around and what do we want to achieve? And where do we want to get to, right? To purpose, which, as you say, has been co-opted and dragged back to be just another word for mission. But for me, you don't create your purpose as an individual or as a team or as an organization. I've said— I say that having started 5 organizations, right? You discover your purpose. You don't create it. And I, in working with top teams, I've used this phrase It's the purpose that creates the team, not the team members that create the purpose. And if you think about it, the purpose is there before the team members arrive. If there wasn't a purpose, the team would not have been formed. It's the same with an organization. You know, I've started 5 organizations, not because I had a great ambition to start 5 organizations. I happened to trip across things that I thought are desperately needed, right? I kept looking around for who was responding and thought, well, nobody else is responding, I better do something about this. So the purpose is already out there waiting for us to respond.

So you're not suggesting that purpose is an outcome of what we do, you're suggesting that purpose is a need that's looking for a response from an organization.

Yes.

And if you think about it like that, That must make it really hard, or certainly harder, for leaders to perhaps bring that purpose to life if we don't know what it is yet, or if perhaps it's always changing. Because if we don't have control over, if we haven't defined what our purpose is, if the purpose is just out there, then it's out there doing its own thing and we're kind of working towards it. If we don't define our purpose and we assume that the purpose is defined already and we're working towards it, how do leaders lead towards that?

Well, let me give you some practical examples. And I'll give one about marriage and one about mergers. So I was working with two very large investment banks that were merging. And they said, will you help us with the cultural merger? And I said, well, what are you trying to achieve? They said, we want a culture that is the best of both. I obviously grimaced or something. They said, what's the matter, Peter? I said, please don't start with that goal. They said, well, why not? I said, I can guarantee from my experience with mergers and acquisitions, you'll have 2 years of competition. The best of both. Well, who has the best investment managers? Who has the best investment products? Who has the best HR, IT, whatever? 2, at least 2 years of competition. You know, I've seen mergers where they're still talking about, oh yes, but are you a Beecham's or a SmithKline person? They're not even on to GlaxoSmithKline. They said, well, what question should we ask? And I thought, and I pondered, we did a bit more questioning and inquiry and dialogue. And I said, hey, how about this one? What is it through this merger together we can give birth to— notice the metaphor with investment bankers— that we can give birth to the financial world of tomorrow. Now that, right, we can start to discover, but it means we have to think future back and outside in, not self out. I want to do a merger so I can be a bigger CEO and Yeah, we can give more money to our shareholders or, you know, all those short-term things. We have to think, you know, what is it that we're coming together that neither of us can do apart? So now we know what's the unique place, the sweet spot we can play in, in the future, that neither of us could have done separately. That's what creates purpose into partnership.

That word you just used there of uniqueness. What are the unique things that each of our organizations can bring? Not the best things, not the best bits, not the best IT systems or HR people. What are the unique things that we can bring to make something better? And that to me feels like a challenge to everybody in both organizations to say, what's the best stuff that we can all bring to make something even better that somebody else wants? Much more powerful than, well, let's bring the best of both companies.

Well, except even there, I don't think it goes quite far enough. Because actually, what we can give birth to might be something that neither of us has yet. Right? That the purpose will— let's come to marriages. So I've been fortunate to also be a kind of interfaith or secular celebrant for marriages. One couple wanted me to marry them. I said they came and spent 3 days in my little cabin and I gave— I was going to be working in London. I gave them 2 questions. I said, if you could answer those 2, then when I come back, designing the marriage ceremony will be very easy. They said, what are the questions? I said, first is, is your relationship in service of not you or her? But what is it that your relationship is in service of? And the second question was, what's the truth your relationship needs to speak at the wedding and engage your community of family and friends in?

Questions that are as good for an organization as for a couple getting married.

Yeah. And if you think about— do you have children, Scott?

I do, I do. I have three, three gorgeous little darlings.

Right. Now, you'll remember when you had the first, that somehow we instinctively think actually the child will be a mixture of the mother and the father. And the moment they arrive, you suddenly realize that they're a stranger, that they're totally new, something that's never before been created. Right. So they're not 50%, you know, just of you and 50% of you. Right. There's a third that's come in that has a life of its own. And that's what Mergers should be producing, not just creating the uniqueness of the two and blending them. They're not a blend. None of your children are a blend of the two of you. That is what a manager should be going for.

Yeah, my, my children are only a blend of me when they're doing something wrong. Evidently, that's, that seems to be the evidence in our house anyway.

The, they unconsciously like the organizational cultures that they inherit, the habitual patterns. Right. But, but what you have to say is, of course, it's not your, your just your patterns inherit or your wife's patterns. It's no good arguing. Does that come from you or me? Because they also, I love this notion, there's fathering, mothering, and parenting. And parenting is what the habituated learning they get from the space between the parents, right? So I, you know, I go back to organizational culture. People say, I say, well, where is the organizational culture? They say it resides in the people. I say, well, you know, I've worked with organizations where I've seen every single leader leave one by one and the culture go marching on. So where does the culture reside? Actually, it resides in the— I have two ways of defining organizational culture. The first is it's what you stop noticing when you work somewhere for three months because it becomes part of your way of seeing, thinking, responding, right? The second is it lies in the collective habituated patterns, right? It's not what you're told in the induction, official induction program. It's what you absorb and get habituated into. So those patterns, you know, you can change every person in the organization. If you don't change them all at the same time, that the patterns have a life of their own, which will continue Yeah. And the same in marriages, that you think you're creating the relationship, but after a while the relationship has an habituated living life of its own.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop trying to shape it or trying to improve it or trying to make it better or trying to identify and address those habituated behaviors. Because actually sometimes they might annoy the hell out of us and then we have to have a conversation about it in our marriages. And the same surely is true in work.

But we also, you know, the Chinese phrase that I've quoted for many years, the last one to know about the sea is the fish. It's very hard. And this is where organizational culture work, the first thing we have to do is create the context in which the people in the culture can see the culture they're not seeing because they're swimming in it. And the same within the marriage. It's, you know, it's very hard to see any system that you are part of because you only see it from your particle and particular perception of it. You can't see the system in acting because it's acting through you.

Yeah, and you're in it. As you say, the fish. Yeah, of course, you're part and parcel of it. Yeah. Yeah. Peter, I could literally talk to you all day. And I suspect this will not be the first time that we will be meeting on this podcast. Because I'd love to have you back again. I think we could talk for hours and hours and hours. Unfortunately, for today, we're out of time. I just want to say thank you so much for being here. We will put all of your contact details, website, LinkedIn and links to your various books and maybe perhaps some of the articles and podcasts that we spoke about earlier on in the show notes down below. So guys, if you're listening, you can find that there. But for now, Peter, thank you so much for being here. I've loved the conversation.

Well, thank you, Scott. It's been a pleasure, you bringing the passion out of me that I still, after 50 years as a leader and 40 years helping organizations still feel because it is so critical, because without changing organizations, we will not manage human survival on this planet.

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