If someone stopped you in the street and asked you what your purpose was for the day, what would you say?
Can you define your professional purpose? What about the purpose of your company? Can what you do, what you strive for each day, be distilled into a single sentence or phrase?
If you’re lucky enough to have just a single purpose for the day (whatever it is) it’s likely to have a motivating and focusing influence. It can anchor your whole day and give you a central place to come back to if you get distracted. It’s good for productivity, motivation and performance.
This rationale extends to all facets of daily life – and is particularly relevant in business. Having a single purpose, a deeper goal that drives and motivates your employees is a business imperative. Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School even goes as far as to say that having a single company objective is a:
‘precursor to purposeful or rational behaviour.’
What’s Your Purpose?
If your team members don’t know what their purpose and the purpose of the company is, how can you expect them to project and sell that to your customers?
However, before you can hope to communicate the wider purpose of your organisation to your team, you need to understand it yourself.
‘A clear and compelling purpose is the glue that binds together a group of individuals. It is the foundation on which the collective “we” of a real team is built’ – Harvard Business Review
On the surface, this ‘compelling purpose’ is your mission statement as a leader within your organisation. It clarifies the intentions of your business, and what customers can expect from your services. It needs to be clear, and effectively blend a delicate mix of idealism and reality that cuts straight to what your company is about.
Communicating ‘Purpose’ to your Team
It’s important that company purpose and employee purpose are not to be confused as one and the same. While you might like to think that you and your employees come to work for the same reasons, true success is about tapping into the individual intents of your employees. What are the deeper motivations that push their buttons? If you can harness this, you can help to encourage eagerness and performance.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix here. To communicate and feed your team’s collective purpose, you need to understand the motivations and priorities of each individual team member.
Only by understanding both the purpose of the organisation as a whole AND the individual purpose and motivations of each of your team members can you determine where the two converge. However, if you can manage it, you will soon find a ‘sweet spot’ for each of your employees.
Everyone performs better in a role that they deem to be meaningful. Purpose at work can be the source of that ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ in their lives and what they do. It can be that something larger and more important than ourselves that we all seek. So it’s hard to overestimate how valuable ‘purpose’ can be in creating a team that is motivated and that works together as a team.
Give them a reason to be there – a reason to engage and be motivated. Make their work necessary in their lives. People engage with what is necessary in their lives.
Want to find out how we help companies find their purpose? Want to create a ‘culture of involvement’ within your organisation? Why not give us a call?