By Robert E. Quinn
I met with an old friend. He runs a business in an industry that is shrinking. He recently encountered a rare opportunity to move his business in an entirely new direction, and he was excited to talk about it. As we did we worked hard to think about how to help his people change. Towards the end, he made an interesting observation.
He said that for years he has been fighting for the survival of his business. He has been struggling along in a 90-day time perspective, meaning he has been constantly searching for ways to make cuts, to squeeze out enough savings to stay in business for another 90 days. When you’re working in this manner it is difficult and depressing.
But since the new opportunity emerged, he has been a different person. He is thinking more long term and he gets up every morning with new ideas. Instead of focusing on survival, he is focusing on growth and has visions of his business flourishing. He said he is happier than he has been in years. And his people are working with a new enthusiasm and sense of purpose as well.
I could feel how authentic the statement was. I was deeply impressed by the implications in the statement, not only for business, but for individuals as well.
Psychologists tell us that happiness tends to be associated with purpose and meaning, and avoidance goals are less energizing than approach goals. The survival mentality, described by my friend, is about the avoidance of death. The growth mentality, he is now experiencing, is about moving towards contribution, connection and energy. When we are growing, we tend to be contributing to the whole so that the whole is expanding and new resources are returning to us. When we are living just to survive, we need to make changes, we need to experiment and experiment until we find a new path, one in which our contributions are rewarded and our capacities increase.
In business most CEOs, if they ever enter it, slip out of the visionary role and get lost in the weeds of survival. So no one in the organization is doing visionary work, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible for the organization to be aligned with an emerging future; therefore, it is aligned with the past. A challenge for leaders is to create the resources to make the pursuit of purpose possible so the people in the organization are co-creating with the environment. As they co-create the organization evolves and is renewed. It becomes more than it was.
In the survival mode, the pursuit of purpose almost always seems impossible. Yet it is possible. It usually requires trusting others to do what the CEO thinks only he or she can do. It requires a personal transformation, a new way of seeing the self, a movement from management to leadership. It means becoming a person who monitors, nurtures and expands the collective paradigm. In the survival mode we do what we have to do. But a key is to do more than we have to do. While we are struggling to survive we need to do the extra work necessary to move from problem solving to purpose finding, form management to leadership. We need to create meaning, to give people a higher purpose.
In our personal lives the same principle holds. We need to move from a reactive, survival stance to a proactive, growth stance. We need to stop managing ourselves and start leading ourselves. We have to understand that life is about eternal progression and that we have to find the energy to continually change and grow. We need to find and live in our purpose. I am grateful my friend and his observation about the increased meaning in his life.