When reality parts company with the mission, trouble follows

Companies often embrace lofty mission statements, but chasing them can foster groupthink and resistance to change.

It starts with an uneasy feeling, a sense that your employer’s way of doing business doesn’t square with its principles or yours. What do you do when your employer strays from its mission?

About one in eight employees cite their employer’s mission as the main reason they stay on the job, according to a recent survey of 36,348 workers by Comparably, a workplace culture and salary site.

Companies often embrace lofty mission statements partly to retain workers, such as vowing “to inspire humanity” (JetBlue). However, intense pursuit of a mission can foster groupthink and resistance to change.

Joanne Sonenshine was dismayed when her former employer, a non-profit organisation promoting sustainability, began shifting funding towards courting and entertaining corporate partners, away from the grassroots development work she valued. The organisation’s mission had been a reason she signed on. “I felt strongly I was doing my part to change the world,” the economist and author says.

She says she tried to persuade leaders to shift their focus but faced mounting attempts to micro­manage her work. She eventually lost hope. “I walked into my boss’s office and said, ‘I’m totally done,’ ” she says.

She has since founded a consulting firm, Connective Impact, to help clients set philanthropic priorities and choose projects that will have the greatest impact.

Inspiring mission statements can blind people, says Adam Grant, author of Originals, a book on nonconformists.

“The point of a mission is that it’s never finished or never entirely achieved. This can make people extremely zealous about doing whatever it takes to fulfil it, even if some of their actions are at odds with the organisation’s values,” says Grant, a professor of management at the Wharton School.

Some employees mount protests about ethical issues via Coworker.org, a meeting place for dissatisfied workers. Dissenters are most vocal in Silicon Valley, home to some of the most ambi­tious corporate missions. (YouTube aims “to give everyone a voice and show them the world”. Snap chat’s parent, Snap Inc, claims to “contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves”.)

Former employees and managers have formed or joined advocacy groups to battle what they say are the addictive, divisive effects of the technology they built.

Many signed petitions recently protesting against their companies’ work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the agency’s role in separating mig­rant children from parents.

Sandy Parakilas, a former platform operations manager at Facebook, was drawn to the company in 2011 partly because of its mission of connecting people and its success in doing so during the Arab Spring uprising.

He says he tried while working there in 2011 and 2012 to call executives’ attention to data-security problems. Facebook’s data-privacy problems hadn’t yet surfaced publicly at that time and Parakilas got what he calls “a feeble response”. He left the company and has written opinion pieces criticising the company.

Facebook changed its mission statement last year to put more emphasis on building community. Its previous mission was “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”. Now it aspires to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.

Facebook encourages dissenters to speak up, says Bertie Thomson, director of corporate communications.

“Some of our hardest product and business decisions have been the subject of very heated debate” internally, she says.

Facebook has said in an internal posting in response to Parakilas’s criticism that while it was fair to criticise its enforcement of privacy policies in 2012, it’s devoting hundreds of people and new technology to better enforcement now.

People who object on principle to their employers’ conduct face many obstacles. One is the bystander effect — people’s reluctance to intervene against wrongdoing when others are present and witnessing it too — Grant says. Ask yourself in such cases, “If no one acted here, what would be the consequences?” he says. While most people think first about potential damage to their reputation and relationships, the long-term effects could be worse, he says.

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