There are two types of business organisations – missionary oriented and mercenary-type. Mercenary types operate with short term objectives; they have one goal – turnaround as much profit as possible and exit the market as soon as a threat emerges. And if possible, place as little foot on the ground as possible.
In mercenary organisations, money is the main motivator. It is the carrot and stick. You perform; you are rewarded with big bonuses. It is less about how the objectives are met, but about the objectives themselves. In mercenary organisations, the end justifies the means. If one needs to threaten, cajole, coerce to achieve your objectives, then so be it. Mercenary organisations are in a rush to get in, do what needs to be done and get out.
Mercenary organisations are also the easiest to build. You do not have to think of big values, or some grand purpose. You simply name the price and assemble a group of people willing to work for that price. Then business gets moving. It is strangers with the least care for each other, but for the outcome at hand, and for what they get in return for achieving that outcome. The one thing mercenary organisations lack is the soul, when it gets hard, the mercenaries will escape.
Missionary organisations are the hardest to build. Usually, they start off with an obsessed founder, out to solve a genuine pain challenge. They have this vision of the future, which they share with the people they onboard. Although money/profits are important to them, they are not the core reason why people join the organisation.
People join the organisation because they are intimately connected to the mission. They are connected enough to care, to go the extra mile, to make the rare sacrifices. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the difference between the mercenary and missionary organisations was evident. In mercenary organisations, the quickest way to survive was to let go of some overheads, relieve some employees of their duties.
In missionary organisations, you had employees willing to forgo their leave days, do without bonus, if that is what it would take for the organisation to survive.
In missionary organisations, first comes the mission, the ‘why’ of the business, the rest flows from that spring. Increasingly, it is becoming rare to find missionary organisations. The CEO tenures have been reducing, thus eroding the ability for CEOs to drive mission, to drive culture, to drive values. Shareholders are anxious for quick results, thus eroding the mission – what is this organisation all about, why does it exist.
Worse, organisations no longer have their ‘academies’, they no longer groom talent. The idea now is to find good talent, poach it from wherever it exists. It is like the world of soccer. Clubs want quick results; they invest in buying ready talent regardless of whether they are a cultural fit. Can they score goals? That is all that matters. Thus, we rarely see the transition of players from the academy into the senior teams.
Organisations in the past hired fresh graduates and groomed them into the right performance culture of the organisation, connecting them to the mission. Thus, it became possible for these graduate management trainees (GMT) to become the future leaders in these organisations. But those days seem long past us. For organisations that continue to run these GMT programmes, it has become a sideshow, something you do for the sake of, but with less buy-in from the current leadership.
Since employers now behave like mercenaries, employees too have become like Eneke, the bird in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Since employers have learned to hire more for results and less for culture, employees too have lost their loyalty. They treat organisations as platforms to exploit, as stopovers for better things yet to come.
It is this mindset that has also driven the fraud culture in most organisations. Employees care less about the company assets. It is a two-sided exploitation. Now, organisations are dedicating their budgets to hiring fraud forensics firms to correct a culture they played a part in creating. It has become a field day for these fraud forensics firms as their demand shoots through the roof.
Back to the basics
But perhaps it is high time we got back to the basics and created organisations that are here for the long-term. And hired first for the culture, the mindset long before past performance. Past performance is a lagging indicator, it says nothing much about someone’s future performance. Yet, the right mindset is a leading indicator.
The choice is on the table, to continue this slippery slope of mercenary companies or to detour back to the missionary organisations. Will the boards give CEOs the mandate to build these kinds of organisations? Will the human resource departments step up to this challenge? Or perhaps it’s a little too late to sound this warning call, and we could as well enjoy the journey downwards across the mercenary organizations.