Building Corporate Soul

Powering Culture & Success

with the Soul System™
Ralf Specht
©2022 Ralf Specht
Adapted by permission of Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 978-1-63908-002-1
Estimated reading time of summary: 7 minutes

Key Takeaways
• Corporate soul is a function of shared understanding, shared behaviors, and shared purpose.
• Employees learn to recognize what a company does and doesn’t value based on what leaders do—
not what they say.
• Learn to identify and promote your company’s soul drivers to sustain your company’s soul.
• Adopt hiring strategies that prioritize emotional intelligence.

Overview
The term “soulless corporation” was popularized at the turn of the 20th century and can still be used to
describe some organizations today. In Building Corporate Soul, Ralf Specht draws on research and
experience to provide an evidence-based model for harnessing the cultural benefits and competitive
advantages of corporate soul.

The Soul System™

Visualize the corporate soul as a circle, with an outer ring representing shared behaviors, a middle ring
representing shared understanding, and your company’s center: its shared purpose. Companies with
corporate soul excel because all stakeholders—C-suite leaders, employees, and shareholders alike—
share ownership over all three components. Shared purpose refers to the essential reason your company
exists: the unique value it provides. Shared understanding ensures that what your company stands for is
authentic, cohesive, and inclusive, and has four components:

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Building Corporate Soul Ralf Specht

1. Vision. Encapsulated in a vision statement, a company’s vision describes the end goal of its current
long-term plans. Vision is the foundation that informs and contextualizes the decisions of company
leaders.
2. Mission. Your mission statement should identify not only what product or service your company
provides, but what distinguishes its offerings from others on the market. Your mission should con-
nect what makes your company different back to its larger vision.
3. Values. These are the connective tissue between the culture your company strives to maintain and
the behaviors that enable it. Values should be clear and actionable so that there’s no ambiguity for
employees about what it means to advance the company mission in day-to-day interactions.
4. Spirit. According to Lexico, “spirit” can be defined as an entity’s characteristic “courage, energy, and
determination.” Spirit emerges from the shared behaviors that differentiate companies with soul,
and it energizes organizations in organic and incredible ways. Focus on the eight areas of shared
behaviors—leadership, eco-system, drivers, compensation, recruiting, development, partnerships,
and followers—to build company spirit and discover your company’s soul.

Lead with Soul

As your company expands, the role-model function of its leaders becomes increasingly critical to pre-
serving the company’s soul. Because your internal and external stakeholders are a diverse group of
people whose needs relate to the company vision in different ways, a diverse leadership cohort is better
prepared to make decisions that advance all dimensions of the mission. On an individual level, leaders
should appreciate the role they play to build and maintain the strength and resilience of the organiza-
tion—both by modeling behaviors that demonstrate what it means to put company values into practice
and by recognizing and recruiting future leaders based on alignment with the company vision. Be sure
that your leaders consider:

• The reputation risk. Particularly in today’s lightning-fast digital communication landscape, every em-
ployee’s experience working for your company can either bolster or undermine the brand it’s trying
to build with customers, investors, and other external parties. While this can be a liability, for com-
panies with soul, it’s an opportunity to let what makes their organizations special shine.
• Great leaders can help others become great leaders. Andre Lavoie, CEO of ClearCompany, has identi-
fied five techniques effective leaders use to foster leadership potential in employees: they (1) en-
courage employees to network, (2) act as mentors (or assign ones), (3) provide opportunities for
growth, (4) maintain feedback loops, and (5) lead by example.

Nurture the Soul Ecosystem

Behaviors—not words—show employees what a workplace does and doesn’t value. Communicate
your company’s values and long-term goals in clear, actionable terms and follow up with practices,
data monitoring, and incentives that link organizational and individual success to the company’s values.
Keeping the focus on company purpose is especially important amid today’s often disrupted industry
landscapes. When people work with big-picture, long-term goals in mind, they know what to do to
course correct for the good of the company when contingencies arise. Company soul doesn’t just create
a positive environment in the short term, it helps future proof your business for the long haul.

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Building Corporate Soul Ralf Specht

Promote Soul Drivers

Soul drivers positively reinforce the shared behaviors that create and sustain company soul. They provide
a company with a priceless cultural edge, and their success shows other employees what the company
truly values. Accordingly, identifying and promoting soul drivers should be a high priority for supervi-
sors on all levels. To recognize and respond to the soul drivers on your team, consider the following
questions and strategies:

• The theory is compelling—what do you do? Your promotion practices should be fair, transparent, and
aware of individuals’ personal career goals and ambitions. Make sure you can answer three ques-
tions about each person you supervise: What’s this person aspiring to in the long term of their ca-
reer? Does this person seem aware of their potential? Does this person appear to understand how
their coworkers perceive them?
• What promotion opportunities exist? Make sure your team members know when relevant opportuni-
ties are available. New openings are opportunities to celebrate the company’s overall progress and
your team’s role in it. They’re also perfect moments to invite high-performing individuals to reflect
on, and perhaps expand, their sense of their own potential and the scope of their aspirations.
• Managing the news. For every successful applicant, numerous denied candidates are left to wonder
what they could’ve done differently. However, there are communication strategies companies and
supervisors can adopt to acknowledge these feelings constructively. Don’t leave candidates guess-
ing about why someone else was selected: Provide individualized feedback on applications. You can
also foster a sense of shared purpose by gathering team members to discuss the opportunities that
will open at later milestones along the company’s growth trajectory.

Reward Soul Supporters

Rewarding the people who make your company’s success possible goes beyond the size of salaries.
Implement feedback systems to gain insight into what employees want and need. The more effort and
attention your company invests in understanding the systemic and logistical hurdles impacting its
people on a regular basis, the better able it will be to provide benefits that enhance performance and
make employees feel heard and valued.

Thoughtful measures designed to reward soul supporters can also help make organizations more
inclusive by opening communication channels through which employees can express observations,
concerns, and suggestions related to identity-based discrimination and privilege-enabled implicit
biases.

Hire Soul Makers

Emotional intelligence is lacking in today’s workplaces. Why? Because companies pay more attention to
candidates’ on-paper credentials than the character traits and soft skills that indicate whether a person
will be a credit to coworkers, clients, and culture. Increase your company’s capacity to hire for behavioral
traits. In other words, restructure your hiring search and interviewing practices to better gauge whether
candidates have the specific attitudes, people skills, and intrinsic motivation factors that will enable
them to thrive in your work environment. Ask questions that will provide insight into applicants’ values
and experiences. Don’t be afraid to ask interviewees to return to parts of their stories to elaborate on
their decision-making processes or explore key moments in their careers from another angle. Other tips
for hiring to sustain your company’s soul include:
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Building Corporate Soul Ralf Specht

• Diversity and performance. Connect with organizations in your field supporting underrepresented
students and professionals to establish pipelines for new talent. Prioritize employee experience to
improve retention and attract high-quality talent. Make sure your talent search and hiring touch-
points reflect the inclusivity of your workplace. Finally, strive to make your company a model of
equitable practices and inclusive culture for your industry.
• The workforce demands it. As populations in Western countries age, young, innovative workers will
become harder to attract and more selective about the work environments they want to enter. To
remain competitive in the long term, it’s more important than ever that the values associated with
your “brand” are attentive to the preferences and social and environmental concerns of a diverse
workforce.

Grow Soul Leaders

Because non-C-suite leaders and the teams they supervise are essential to the short- and long-term
health of a company, internal procedures and communication norms and strategies should be designed
with these leaders in mind. Use your understanding of individuals’ personal goals and career aspirations
to establish a cycle of fair promotions and continuous feedback that promotes transparent communi-
cation patterns and supports individual growth. Not every soul supporter aspires to a senior position,
and that’s okay. Your company should also offer professional development opportunities that cater to
employees of all ambition levels. Great leaders help people grow not by talking to them, but by talking
with them. Keep these points in mind:

• Culture matters. Differences in work cultures between countries can keep leaders working with inter-
national teams from understanding the nuances of workplace dynamics and identifying ambition
and potential in the people they lead. Research has shown that while workplace norms differ across
the world, workers from all nationalities still tend to weigh six key factors when assessing the quality
of a work environment: the employees’ sense of purpose, opportunity, success, appreciation, well-
being, and leadership.
• Consider employee experience vs. employee lifecycle. Research has also shown that perks are no sub-
stitute for the quality of employees’ everyday experiences working for a company. The behavioral
norms and standards that manifest in interactions with coworkers, user-friendliness of internal sys-
tems, and other frustrations and rewards of a typical workday are the evidence employees use to
decide whether to stick with a company for the long haul.

Identify Soul Allies

Increasingly, companies are heeding the call to consider their corporate social responsibility (CSR).
People used to think of CSR as initiatives taken by companies out of the belief that they should give
back to improve the world, but the idea has since evolved to acknowledge the social and environmental
impacts different companies can have based on the specialized nature of their work and the access and
connections they possess. Partnering with civil society organizations (e.g., local and national nonprofits),
national organizations (e.g., government agencies), and nongovernmental organizations like the World
Health Organization and the World Wildlife Fund can be a great way to leverage your organization’s
unique capacity to make the world a better place. Remember that partnerships should align with your
company’s purpose and reflect what it seeks to contribute to its stakeholders and the world at large.

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Building Corporate Soul Ralf Specht

Create Soul Followers

Strive for a company spirit that inspires people both within your company and beyond. A strong pur-
pose feeds our desire to connect over goals and values that we share with others. Look for opportunities
to create events and spaces that encourage employee and customer engagement with the tangible and
intangible elements that make your brand special. Here are a few tips:

• Allow customers to become ambassadors. Reflecting on the success of Porsche’s decision to connect
with and encourage the establishment of previously independent local Porsche Clubs, company
leader Deborah Ginsburg believes there are three keys to fostering brand loyalty: Make your cus-
tomers feel special, let your customers contribute to the brand experience, and reward your most
loyal customers.
• Connect humans to humans. Don’t let people associate interacting with your company to interacting
with a machine. Prioritize the human-to-human connection to take employee and customer experi-
ence to the next level.

About the Author

Ralf Specht is the author of Beyond the Startup. He developed the Soul System™, a framework that
powers culture and success for any business. His books introduce a new language of success into the
world of business based on his mission to make the leadership behaviors that build soul synonymous
with the behaviors that build success. After two decades with McCann Erickson in various executive
roles, he was a founding partner of Spark44, an innovative, industry-first joint venture with Jaguar Land
Rover. Under his leadership as CEO, Spark44 grew to a 1,200 people business in 18 countries. His driving
vision is to make soulless companies a thing of the past.

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