A Clear Organizational Purpose

Once we’ve dialed in on our own clear purpose for leading, and we’ve developed a foundational understanding of the emotions that drive us as well as an approach for managing those emotions, we can shift our focus to what our teams are counting on us to do; lead them well and provide them with a clear picture of the purpose we’re working to achieve as an organization. Before we dive into how we can do this, I’ll caution you not to mistake it for being as simple as reading the company’s mission and vision statements during new hire orientation and calling it done. While executing this task effectively is certainly not complicated, it’s nowhere close to being easy - and it’s definitely not something we can do just once and hope everyone falls in line!

Investing the time into understanding myself did wonders for recognizing and understanding my own emotions, but learning the patterns Marston laid out in defining each of the four primary behavioral styles within the DISC Model of Human Behavior gave me a framework for determining, with a high degree of accuracy, how the team members I was working with were wired to communicate and behavior; the third component of emotional intelligence that Travis Bradberry referred to as social awareness. We’ll look at that in more detail soon. For now, I’ll just say that this alone was one of the most useful things I’ve ever learned for passing a message along to others…

A while back, I made a case for how much purpose really matters to each of our team members, emphasizing that it ain’t (just) about the pay. If anything at all has changed since I initially made that statement, it’s how much more I’m convinced of it now than I was then! But to have any hope of earning even the slightest increase in discretionary effort from our teams, we’d better be prepared to do an amazing job of detailing exactly what our organizational purpose is AND who we will impact in the process. This cannot be vague, and it cannot be some pie-in-the-sky statement that no one ever really sees come to fruition. As leaders, our responsibility is to communicate this clearly, consistently, and continuously - all in a way that resonates with the teams we lead.

When we apply what we’ve learned in developing our own social awareness, our message actually has a shot of getting through all the other noise that’s constantly bombarding our people and we see exactly how they’re making a positive difference in the community we’re a part of as well as for each individual customer we serve. While having that clear purpose to strive for will never replace the need for fair compensation (at least for the majority of folks), it will be powerful in attracting great people to our teams and attaining their buy-in.

Before we can expect to do this well, and over the long haul, we’ve got to make sure the dots are adequately connected between the purpose that drives us individually and the one we’re working toward as an organization. While this may seem like a no-brainer, I assure you that I’ve seen far too many in leadership roles who have not made this connection and struggle mightily in sharing a message with their teams that truly is clear, consistent, and continuous - so we’ll pick up there next time!