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Bringing purpose to life

The role of business in helping people realise their potential

Part of respecting people’s dignity is seeking outcomes that enable each person to reach their full potential, through creating an environment where people can find meaning through their work through relationships, mastery, autonomy and so on.

This dynamic applies not only to employees but also shapes all the interactions a business has which affect other people and have an impact on their lives – whether as customers, suppliers or communities.

We can lose sight of how all the decisions people make have an impact on the person themselves – that our actions change us, and that we develop through them. We are all beings with potential and we gradually realise that potential (bring it into being, make it real) through our actions. In doing so, we start to create habits, settled ways of doing things, which can either be really good for us, (referred to in philosophy as virtues), or bad for us, (vices). We can think about these habits, virtues and vices, as forming a character that we can recognise.

This thinking is drawn from virtue ethics – for more on this we recommend these articles from Mark Storm:

We also realise here that we are not the only people who form our own characters, but that the circumstances and people around us have a lot to do with it, which we would expect if we are relational beings. In practice, this means that every day, working with each other, or interacting with other people through the business, our characters are being formed, by us and by others, and we are forming others.

Businesses have the ability to form but also to de-form people

Businesses can help people realise their potential and help them to develop. This means decent work with fair pay for all, and structures and processes that appeal to intrinsic motivation by giving employees the freedom to thrive, grow and develop their own potential. It also means creating an environment that encourages behaviours that help to build people of character in the business – people that will make the decisions that will be good for the business and for society and to hold the business and each other true to the purpose.

Our Framework sets out these behaviours and these are explored in more detail in: Understanding the Blueprint Framework

This idea is also important in the context of our view of the role of business being to create value by serving society – and is part of what we encourage people in business to think about in considering how their business creates value for society (contributes to the common good) and whether they are producing goods that are good and services that truly serve. How businesses help or hinder people from realizing their potential and how they form and deform people as part of producing and delivering their goods and services is an important part of this.  

Our view of the role of business in society is the second of the key ideas that underpin our work and is explored in detail in the course: What is the role of business in society?