Simple Steps for Providing a Clear Purpose

If we’re going to earn the kind of buy-in that yields the 57 percent increase in discretionary effort and 20 percent improvement in individual performance detailed in the Harvard Business Review article I referenced multiple times throughout What’s Killing Your Profitability?, there’s no better way than providing our team members with a clear purpose they connect with. But before they’ll hold the goal in higher regard than their individual role, we need to make sure they have clarity on what the organization is working to achieve - not just the financials that generally get shared at the end of a quarter, but who you’re serving through the work that you do - and how what they do ties in. While I maintain that this is indeed simple, very little in leadership is truly easy…

While practicing The Law of the Big Picture will be important, we’d do well to pull a few more lessons from The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork to earn the engagement we really need. In detailing “The Law of the Compass,” John Maxwell shared that “vision gives team members direction and confidence.” I’ve heard him take that even further by saying that a leader needs to communicate that vision with their team almost constantly, especially early on, to make sure it sticks. Just like we’re rarely able to tell our kids something once and have it sink in, our team members won’t likely get the direction or develop much confidence if we only mention our organization’s vision in passing or with little energy. I suppose I could even make a case for it being a weak vision if the leader isn’t talking about it enthusiastically ALL THE TIME, but hopefully I don’t need to…

If we’re willing to then build on that vision by putting “The Law of Identity” to work, our team as a whole should be well on their way to having clarity around the organizational purpose. John’s statement that “shared values define the team” is part of what will rally our folks around a clear purpose. But for that to have a true impact, those shared values must be more than something buried in a policy manual. We’ll go deeper into that soon. For now though, just know that putting those practices into motion provide a foundation that we can work from as we give each team member what they need to build a personal connection to that clear purpose. Shared values and a strong organizational purpose are certainly important in business, but even you and I will put more into a task when it falls in line with our own purpose so that’s what we’ll look at next as we close this high-level look at leading with a clear purpose.