Leading with a Clear Purpose Drive Profitability!

If we’re going to connect the clear purpose we’re working toward with the kind of love that Marcus Buckingham described as “the most powerful force in business for driving behavior,” we’ll need to draw for the idea we looked at before in Prioritizing to Our Purpose and really hone in our those three R’s! For our purposes here, I’m going to assume (and hope that doesn’t make anything particular thing out of U or ME, if you get my drift) that you’ve done the work of determining which tasks are truly Required of you - and only you! Once you’ve got those identified, we need to take a hard look at how we can connect the Return and the Reward.

Here’s where the Pareto Principle idea we use to isolate which of the Required tasks yield us the best results, understanding that we’ll nearly always get a large part of our overall productivity from a select few things we have to do. But that can’t be where we stop! If we’re going to lead well and lead long term through what can often seem like a zoo (because of the monkeys that decide to throw crap at us), dialing in on where we find our Reward is no longer something that’s just nice to have…

In each of the Emerging Leader Development course lessons where we work through this, we emphasize that making sure the work we do is indeed rewarding will likely be more difficult by itself than both of the first two R’s combined. Difficulty be damned; it’s something we absolutely must do. To tap into the powerful force that is love, we need to be able to pull some sense of Reward from as much of what falls on the Required AND Return list as we possibly can. In detailing how complex this is for many people, I make the point that the person we report to usually has more than a little bit of say in where our time is focused. And this brings us back to Marcus (and his British accent that often makes me want to throw tea in a harbor).

In the same talk, I heard him cite some sort of study from the Mayo Clinic that said (and I’m butchering here, but hopefully you’ll still get the point) some of the best performance they saw came when the people they studied connected love with just 20 percent of what they did on a routine basis! Yep, only TWENTY!!! So much for that idea of loving everything we do, huh? He followed that by suggesting that “we can do anything lovingly,” explaining that this wasn’t a factor of being soft but creating strategies for building love into how we do those things. Buckingham also compared the results we could achieve when we love the things we do to the power that comes from water, specifically steam, when it moves from not boiling to boiling. He described these tasks as the things that seem to make time speed up and give us energy rather than suck the energy from us.

I’m guessing you’re tracking with me on some of this but we’ll go into more specific detail about how we can build love into our tasks soon. Before that though, we need to make sure that this isn’t just about us so we’ll work through that next.