Is Your Mission Real or Just Branding? How to Tell (and What to Do About It)

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Chase Warrington: Having an open door to confrontation, like for example, for someone fairly junior to raise their hand and challenge the CEO on, Hey, why is this our mission statement? First of all, we have the culture where that can happen. That's acceptable and expected, 'cause that radical candor creates an open environment and most transparency and autonomy and all those things. But then also we acted on it and we had the conversation where we said that I think it has to matter.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast . We're on a mission to build a better world of work and help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Chase Warrington. He is the Head of Operations at Doist. We're gonna be talking about creating cultures of purpose. A quick heads up about this episode. I've met Chase at a conference in Austin, Texas back at the beginning of May, and that's where this conversation takes place. So when you hear a lot of background noise or you feel the difference in audio, that's why. We recorded this live outside on the lawn at a picnic table, as Chase had a break between speaking engagements, so forgive the audio quality. It's not quite as perfect as you'd usually get from us, but a such is the demands of live production. I hope you still enjoy.

First question for you was, do you have to define purpose in the context of remote work a bit differently than you would if the team's person? And I'm curious, would you say it's even more important for a distributed team?

Chase Warrington: I think that we've reached a point where distributed work is like part of the norm for most companies on some level. And so distinguishing between the two has become so difficult for me. It's a little challenging to say because for me, you're, any organization, whether you're co-located or distributed without purpose, you've got a whole bunch of people rowing in a bunch of different directions, and it's very challenging.

I do think when you're in an A distributed environment, it's uber important, that you're extremely intentional about your verbiage, about your goals, about the purpose of the company. And so we do spend an exorbitant amount of time on this. At DOIs. We wanna make sure that our values are very clear. We wanna reinforce those because people don't have a space that they walk into every day and get to see and feel that.

So we have to speak and say it a lot more. And so I do think there's a level of intentionality that's a little bit higher with fully distributed teams or teams that are based around distributed work.

David Rice: Would you say that's like the hardest part or like the biggest challenge that organizations face in maintaining a purpose driven culture?

Because there's this part of me that feels like how we build work the way we think about business, right? We've made it difficult for purpose to be anything not tied directly to the bottom line, we get lost. It's chasing that and we want the rewards that are tied to that and sometimes we spend a good amount of time on.

Chase Warrington: Very easy to do that. At one point our mission statement as a company. Was to build the future of work. So we had a lot of our marketing, our branding, our goals tied to that mission. And at one point during a leadership meeting, someone just raised the hand, like, why is that our mission?

Our customers don't fit that mission. We're building a company for a customer base that isn't aligned with that mission. And taking a step back and realizing you know what? Maybe we got the wrong mission. Maybe we need to change our mission completely. And we realized in reality what we were saying one thing, but we were actually doing another.

And so now our mission is to build simple yet powerful tools. And that guides us so much more. We bake that into everything that we're doing. Not just the products that we're building, but also like our operations. When we look at doing something, anything internally, we say, what's the simple yet powerful version of this?

And so that's really become like a guiding light for us. And I think it was articulating that, having a come to Jesus conversation with yourself, saying, Hey. I don't think we've got the right mission here, but it also has reinforced how important it's to have the right mission. And so again, like I, I think it doesn't, it's not just about the product for us, it's not just about the bottom line.

We're very explicit about that. We wanna build something that we're proud of and a company that outlasts us and all those things. But it does come down to our mission statement and then baking that into everything that we do.

David Rice: Now periods of change, contested organization's commitments to a purpose. And you just mentioned what you guys changed quite a bit there. Yeah. How can companies maintain or even strengthen their purpose during those times of transition? And I'm uncertainty, will it? 'cause I imagine when you started that you didn't know we, are we on the right path?

Chase Warrington: No. Yeah, we, you know what?

I think it's talking to your customers, whether your customers, in my case, like I'm. In charge of operations at our companies. So my quote unquote customers are my teammates who I'm trying to serve with an epic user experience. But for our product team and our marketing team, it's talking to customers and realizing what is it that they really want, or what do they actually use our tool for, or what do they actually want from us as opposed to just what do we want?

What do we think we are? And so I think getting outside of your own little bubble can be important. And I, and so I found this. I've learned a lot from like our product teams, for example, because I look at our team as a product and I go out and I talk to the team and I say, what's working? What's not working?

We do that through surveys. We do that, but we've also been doing a lot more one-on-one conversations to find out is our purpose aligned with what you actually want from us, or is there more that we can do? And it's led to some seismic shifts in the way that we do things. But little by little we're iterating day by day and creating a better system for our team.

David Rice: A lot of companies, they articulate their purpose through, like you said, the mission state, right? Yeah. And core values, but struggle to necessarily embed those into those ideals in a daily operation. How can organizations effectively translate the stated purpose into tangible actions and behaviors that we consistently demonstrate across all of.

Chase Warrington: Repetition is key. I think there's two things I said the leaders actually have to walk the walk. A lot of times it sounds great, like you write down cool core values and this, and then like I was talking to someone who said that one of their core values was. Like a company that was being very frugal, like they said we're going to, we're gonna be very frugal.

But then they actually weren't at all. They were investing all kinds of money and wasting all kinds of money on exorbitant trips and all kinds of things. They said, you're not really aligned with one of your core values. So I. We drill. At one point we had seven core values. We've drilled it down to four.

We've refined that year over year. We talk about it daily. There's not a day that goes by that we say, Hey, that what I'm seeing here doesn't align with our core value of communication. What I've seen here doesn't align with our core value of mastery. And so you, the leaders practice what they preach, but then we preach it over and over again.

And then I think the other thing is like documenting it like so we have a very robust handbook. It has a lot of detail on our core values and mission statement. And on top of that, we have baked in ways that people can react to others in a socially acceptable way. To say, Hey, you're not aligned with our core values in this particular instance.

And inviting that has really created a culture that allows people to provide some constructive criticism to someone when they're not aligned with what we're trying to do as a company. And so that's really made everybody very much so they're behind the values and they're living them every day.

David Rice: Purpose. This is the first time I've heard people talk about it, but it can be taken for a bit of a ride at times. Yeah. Folks wanna use it in employer branding messages. They PR effort. It's I'm, as you can call it, purpose washing. So if they're lacking that sense of genuine commitment.

I'm curious, what strategies can leaders employ to ensure that purpose driven initiatives come off as But they are authentic. Yeah. And not merely performing.

Chase Warrington: I mentioned this earlier, like we, we went through this phase where for many years our mission statement was the wrong mission.

It wasn't what we were actually doing or serving who we were actually trying to serve, but it sounded nice. And it felt good, but it wasn't really driving the bottom line in the way that we wanted, and it wasn't really aligned with what we were actually trying to do. And so having the conversation, like having an open door to confrontation, like for example, for someone.

Fairly junior to raise their hand and challenge the CEO on, Hey, why is this our mission statement? First of all, we have the culture where that can happen. That's acceptable and expected because that radical candor creates an open environment and the most transparency and autonomy and all those things.

But then also we acted on it and we had the conversation where we said that I think it has to matter. I talk to a lot of leaders where I don't know that they actually care too much about these things. They just wanna make money, or they just wanna create a really cool, shiny product and exit, or whatever it may be.

But for leaders who actually care about these things and want their business to be a representative of who they really are, I think those types of leaders seem to be thriving in the long run from my perspective.

David Rice: You mentioned their radical candor and I think like it's an awesome term and there's probably a lot of leaders that think, yeah, okay, yeah, but do I really want that? Take me through that conversation of yeah, this is good for us.

Chase Warrington: We have 10 communication standards written down. There are 10. So communication is one of our core values because we work in a hyper asynchronous environment, like good written communication that follows a series of standards is.

Paramount for that's the only way that we can work. And if we don't nail that, then our company's doomed from the beginning. So within those 10 standards, one of them towards the top of that list is radical candor, and it's promoted and expected, and it's more so I. Someone will use that radical candor on you if you're not using that radical candor.

So we really promote that type of environment. And I think it's, it's working in a somewhat hierarchal list environment where anybody is open to challenge anything. We put a lot of emphasis on building in public and sharing and making sure that it's very transparent what each team and what each squad in our case is working on, but then allowing people to question things.

And the challenge is saying, why are we doing it that way? And I think in our culture, at least you get. Praised for being the challenger and for being the one that would question something and hierarchy doesn't really matter and it's just, it's baked into the way that we work. And it sounds, I've talked to some people who think it sounds a little bit like lip service, like you can't really actually be that way.

But I can, I just, I. I don't, it doesn't behoove me to say that it really is, and I, for me, having worked in a couple different places, I really appreciate that because I've learned so much from people across the organization who come at things from a very fresh perspective.

David Rice: Yeah.

Chase Warrington: And so things that I may be a functional expert on, I'm getting challenged by someone who's not, but they're questioning, line of questioning is actually very helpful.

And so that multiplied across a hundred people opens up a lot of doors every single day.

David Rice: Aligning performance metrics, with organizational purpose can obviously be, of course, desired behavior, but what are some effective ways to incorporate purpose into evaluations and incentive structures to ensure alignment between individual goals and the company?

Chase Warrington: That's a great question. It's not my personal area of expertise. So our head of people would be much better at answering this than I am, and in fact. One of the projects that we're working on as we speak, we've got a quarter long initiative to revamp our whole feedback and performance system.

So basically just tearing down what we've built over the years and making a better version of it. Basically the idea behind it is that we wanna create a system based on a lot of peer feedback and a lot of be a little bit hard to go into it without too much detail, but everybody is simultaneously working on their individual team and on a cross-functional team that's tackling a specific project.

We want to create a system that is aligned with our core values and mission statement where people on both team level and the squad level, the cross-functional level, can provide feedback on how somebody operates in alignment with our core values. And then that is specifically tied to performance reviews and all the things that come with your performance review.

So at the core of it, again, is the core values and that's where the whole system is baked around.

David Rice: I wanna thank you for giving us some of your time today. Now, before we go, I always have two things I like to do. First, I wanna give you a chance to tell people where they can connect with you, find out more about what you got going on.

Chase Warrington: I am most active on LinkedIn. That's actually the best place to connect.

David Rice: And the last thing is we have a little tradition here on the podcast. Before I go sign off each episode, we give you a chance to ask me a question.

Chase Warrington: Yeah. Oh, fantastic.

David Rice: Anything you want.

Chase Warrington: I would love to know, is this your first time at running remote?

David Rice: It is. It is, yeah. First time here and it's it's been cool. It's actually my first time in Austin.

Chase Warrington: Yeah. Okay. Alright. What's been the best part about the event so far?

David Rice: Seeing the commitment to it. There's all these media narratives going around about it. They're, everybody's getting pulled back into office.

It's not gonna, it's gonna see through the, they never bought. But it's nice to see the level of commitment that's in the road to not only making it work, but making it better. Yeah. To figuring out like what the next version looks like. That's, yeah. It's refreshing. Yeah. And as somebody who works better remotely, I got, I get more done now than I ever.

Five X is watched on now, and so yeah, it's important to me like this is what I want.

Chase Warrington: Going to be surrounded by the people that speak the same language.

David Rice: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank you.

Chase Warrington: Thank you very much.