A Simple Way to Inspire Your Team: David Burkus (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of David Burkus’ talk titled “A Simple Way to Inspire Your Team: David Burkus” at TED conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

In 2014, KPMG’s leadership faced a problem: accounting is boring. Apologies to any accountants in the room, but that really was the issue. The senior leadership of one of the world’s premier accounting firms had been working for a while to improve morale and engagement across the nearly 30,000 employees of the firm. When they started, morale was in the tank.

Only about half of the employees had a favorable opinion of the firm when surveyed, which is to say about half of the employees had an unfavorable opinion of the place they continued to work. They had tried to pull the standard levers: perks, pay increases, more flexibility, more opportunities to advance. But their initial gains had leveled off. And it’s easy to understand why.

Accounting, in particular auditing, can be a boring and thankless job. For most of the day, you’re staring at documents and spreadsheets; you’re sitting in a cubicle provided by a client who doesn’t actually want you there and doesn’t want to answer any more questions either. And so, having run out of traditional ideas, KPMG’s leaders decided to do something different. They decided to put purpose at the core of their engagement effort.

The “We Shape History” Campaign

What they did first was particularly bold: they told stories. They launched what they called the “We Shape History” campaign, a promotional campaign designed to tell the story of how KPMG had been involved in pivotal moments in world history. They told the story of President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act, which sent billions of dollars in aid to the Allies during World War II, and how he tapped KPMG to manage logistics.

They told the story of how KPMG accountants resolved conflicting financial claims, which laid the groundwork for the release of 52 US hostages in Iran in 1981. They told the story of how KPMG certified the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994. They told stories about how KPMG’s work served a higher purpose, and they hung posters everywhere to remind everyone of those stories. It was bold, and it worked. Sort of. It moved the needle a little bit. What they did next was brilliant.

Understanding Purpose

To understand why their next move was so brilliant, though, we need to talk about purpose. See, most of us think of an organization’s purpose or mission as a bold and lofty ambition, like helping win a world war or certify a historic election. And most leaders think that to convey a purpose that truly inspires, they need a compelling answer to the question, “Why?” As in, why do we do what we do? And this is where it gets weird because then most leaders look to their mission statement.

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Even though mission is different than purpose, but that’s a totally different talk. They look at their mission statement, they work to rewrite it to make it more compelling. They go through rounds and rounds of editing and focus-group testing, and when their heavily workshopped, perfectly worded statement is complete, they send it out to employees in emails that get deleted. They print it on posters that get ignored. They put it on a page on the company website that no one visits.

The Power of “Who”

Because it turns out, most people are less inspired by a compelling answer to “why” and more motivated by a clear answer to the question, “who?” As in, who is served by the work that we do? I mean, think about yourself.

If I asked you to think of a time when you felt highly engaged and inspired at work, you probably wouldn’t mention the time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim. Instead, you’d probably think of the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or a coworker, the last time you felt your work was important to someone else.

The Experiment in Empathy

To explain this further, let’s switch cubicles. Let’s move from the cubicles of auditors at an accounting firm to the cubicles of student workers at a university donation call center. You thought accounting was boring. Maybe you got called by one of these student workers in one of these call centers. They call in the evenings. They always have a perfectly worded script. It always ends in a request for a donation.

So, you end up having to say, “No, I don’t want to donate $1,000 to the new stadium.” “No, I don’t want to donate $500 to the new student union.” “No, I don’t want to donate $20 and five cents to commemorate my graduation year.” It’s like some collegiate version of “Green Eggs and Ham.” “No, I don’t want to donate in a box or with a fox.” “No, I don’t want to donate in a house with a mouse.” “Kid, I don’t want to donate here or there,” “Kid, I’m just trying to pay off my student loans. And then you can call me back about donating.”

Think about the person on the other end of that line. They’re sitting in a windowless room; they’re constantly dialing people destined to hang up on them, yell at them, or worse. It’s got to be boring. It’s got to be thankless. It’s got to be draining. And you can see it in the numbers. Annual turnover in these types of call center jobs exceeds 400 percent. You do the math on that, that means that in any given year, the entire staff quits every three months.

A Change in Perspective

In fact, when Adam Grant and a team of researchers were looking for ways to improve morale at a call center at their university, one of the first things they noticed was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read, “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit.

You get a warm feeling but no one else notices.” The researchers wanted them to feel noticed, obviously not for wetting themselves.

They wondered if they could get the student workers to notice the difference they were making and if that would have a positive effect on them. So they took the break time that these workers received and they used it to run an experiment. Some of the workers, during one of the breaks, got to meet with a student who had received scholarship funds raised by that call center. And they got to hear how receiving those funds had made a positive impact on them. They got to meet their answer to the question “who is served by the work that we do?”

The Impact of Recognition

And when the researchers followed up a month later, that little meeting had a big impact on the workers. The workers who got to meet someone who directly benefited from the work they were doing, they worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour; they spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of $400 to more than $2,000 in donations. I mean, it’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

These workers, they didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any additional training. They certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing. The researchers argued that these workers were inspired by a sense of pro-social motivation, the desire to protect and promote the well-being of others.

The Power of Pro-Social Purpose

And that word, pro-social, that points to what’s wrong with most organizations’ attempts at talking purpose. When you’re talking about growth or shareholder value or disruption or even sustainability, it becomes awfully hard to tell specific stories about specific people whose life is made better by the work that you’re doing. But pro-social purpose is what we want from our work. And it’s what powered the second step of KPMG’s purpose initiative.

After the promotional campaign, after the corporate propaganda of the “We Shape History” campaign, the leaders launched what they called the “10,000 Stories Challenge.” In essence, they said to their people, “You’ve heard how we’ve made a difference in the past. Now you tell us how you’re making a difference right now.” They set up an online application that not only captured individual answers, but let people design their own version of the poster like the one from the “We Shape History” campaign.

And the answers started rolling in. Answers like, “I combat terrorism because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorist groups.” Or, “I help farmers grow because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.” Or, “I restore neighborhoods because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.” They wanted 10,000 stories. They got 42,000 stories.

The Impact of Individual Stories

And in time, they also got massive increases in morale and engagement across the whole company. But it’s important to emphasize why they got such a profound response. They got 42,000 stories because they stopped talking about purpose as a collective why, and started talking about it as an individual who. They didn’t give every employee a uniform answer to the question, “Why do we do what we do?” They helped each employee find a specific answer to the question, “Who is served by the work that we do?”

And just like in the call-center research, that switch made all the difference in the world. So what does this mean for you? Well, if you’re in a leadership role, it means part of your job is to become chief storytelling officer, always ready to tell the story of the client or coworker or community member whose life is made better by the work your team does. And if you’re not in a leadership role, you can still motivate yourself and other people by capturing every instance that you come across, every time you hear about someone who’s served by the work that you’re doing.

Conclusion

Every thank you that you get, capture it, save it for when you or anyone else needs a powerful story about how the work that we’re doing matters. Because in the end, that’s what we all want from our work, isn’t it? People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.

And the most powerful way to tell them isn’t to tell them some grandiose answer to “Why do we do what we do?” In fact, it isn’t to tell them anything at all. It’s to help them find the answer to the question “Who?” So let me ask you, do you know? Who is served by the work that you do? Thank you.