Knowing your “WHY” is valued – Unilever Chief Learning Officer

If you still still think discovering your purpose or your ‘WHY’ is too touchy feely, listen to the podcast interview by Jacob Morgan of “The Future Organisation” with Tim Munden is the Chief Learning Officer at Unilever.

Company background
Unilever owns several brands including Dove, Ben and Jerry’s, Knorrs, Walls ice-cream. Unilever is found in over 100 countries with more than 160,000 employees.

Tim talks about putting 14,000 of Unilever employees of all levels through a workshop involving the discussion of their personal motivation WHY and linking that to their learning and development needs, bringing the whole self to work.

From the “Future Organisation” website,
Tim’s career started to have focus when someone asked him two questions:
1. What do you really love?
2. What do you want to learn about?

Tim’s advice for managers is to know how to answer– what is the purpose of our business? Keep asking why, why, why. Go on the journey with the senior leadership team.

Also, ask yourself what is the business case of the potential of all of your people. All the passion and energy. What is the price of not doing this? The well-being of employees, not just physical but mental.

Tim’s advice for employees is to make sure you challenge your own humanity, don’t check it at the door. Don’t be shy to bring yourself to work.

His main challenge at Unilever? Getting people to collaborate and share knowledge in a way that creates new learning. These sessions are part of the process to get there as well as reverse mentoring. Partnering older people with younger ones and have young ones teach the older ones.

What You Will Learn In the Episode:

● What Unilever is doing to help their people find their purpose
● Why do companies need to focus on purpose?
● What learning looks like at Unilever and how it has evolved over the last 25 years
● How to create a culture of curiosity and hunger to learn at work
Link from the episode