“Mom, this company really shows their believingness.”
So said my nine-year-old daughter. She had just noticed that the tag hanging from the T-shirt I gave her for Valentine’s Day was made from “100% post-consumer waste”.
She already knew that the T-shirt was from a company called PositiviTee, that the graphic image printed on the T-shirt celebrated the charity group Heifer International, and that five dollars from what I paid for the T-shirt had been donated directly to Heifer International.
By the time she finished reading the tag, she knew that the fabric was 100% organic fair trade cotton and that the shirt had been “manufactured with respect for the environment and human beings”.
But this company “shows their believingness“. What does that really mean? I decided to inquire.
Me: What do you mean when you say “hey really show their believingness?”
Daughter:Â Well, the tag is made of recycled paper. I was surprised because I didn’t think that they would go that far, and they even put the shirt in a recycled bag.
Me: You were surprised? Why?
Daughter: I was surprised that they thought of that little detail. I mean it’s not just the T-shirt, right? It’s all the pieces.
What my daughter noticed was that the words that the company used to describe what it believed in and “who we are” were demonstrated in each of the details of the product. It was this consistency that caught my daughter’s attention and that demonstrated for her that the organization was authentic.
Authenticity in organizations often seems esoteric and amorphous, like something abstract that has to be divined through deep investigation and lots of thinking. But in this moment, my daughter showed me some important things about Authentic Organizations:
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An organization’s authenticity isn’t necessarily hard to see.
People do notice when an organization’s proclamations and its actions are aligned, especially when “who they say they are” is demonstrated with every phase of their product’s creation and delivery.
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An organization’s authenticity can surprise us.
When we recognize that authenticity is there, that an organization’s claims and actions match, we are reminded that we don’t always notice authenticity, and we don’t notice it because all too often organizations themselves aren’t even paying attention to authenticity.
Organizations achieve and sustain authenticity when authenticity matters to them. When choices were made about how to label, wrap and ship their product, people at PositiviTee used “who we are” to guide their decisions. The authenticity that they created takes effort and requires an organization’s attention.
When authenticity matters to an organization and when they demonstrate it, the organization can reap an additional benefit: trust.
Daughter: I wonder if they used natural dyes to get my shirt so pink.
Me: I don’t know sweetie, it doesn’t say so on the tag.
Daughter: Well, it does say that they buy everything fair trade. I bet if they couldn’t get natural ink, I’m sure they bought something that was fair trade. That’s a good thing.
In the case of PositiviTee, their effort with all the pieces led my daughter to trust that they would do things right. Ergo:
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When an organization demonstrates its authenticity through actions we can see, we come to trust that the organization is demonstrating authenticity in the actions we can’t see.
I’ve purchased shirts from PositiviTee three times now, some for gifts and some for myself. I wear my own PositiviTees often, because I love the softness of the organic cotton, I adore the cute cow graphic, I appreciate that it supports a charity I believe in, and I know that my shirts came from a company that is making a difference. Every time someone compliments me on my T-shirt, I tell them about PositiviTee and the work they are doing.
What’s more, I know that PositiviTee is finding new ways to demonstrate that they are who they say they are. How do I know? Because this time, when my package arrived in the mail, the envelope was labeled “carbon neutral shipping”. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as carbon neutral shipping. Now, I feel even better about my T-shirts, and even better about PositiviTee.
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When organizations are authentic, people respond to them in a positive way.
Consider that PositiviTee’s tagline, the way they articulate the essence of their brand’s promise, is “Look Good, Feel Good, Do Good”. You bet they do.
I am an organizational consultant, change advocate, and organizational identity/reputation scholar with a PhD in leadership & organizations. I research, write about, and consult with organizations on the relationships between organizational identity, actions, and purpose. I teach Technology Management, part-time, at Stevens Institute of Technology.
My current research focuses on how social technologies in the workplace can drive organizational change, generate meaning, and catalyze purpose. See the 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I just love this story. Sometimes it really is obvious that a company is walking its talk, and thats something I really appreciate. its too bad that we dont know more about what’s going on inside a company, so that we can patronize only the organizations that are trying to live their promises.
Kids will always surprise us with their inventivity and ideas. Your little girl is such a cutie, and that makes a confirmation that the she is a chip off the old block.