Supporting Their Purpose

In a lesson I wrote several years ago, I referenced something I had first read in The Servant by James Hunter, suggesting that servant leadership requires the individual leading to determine what they’re team members truly need in order to best serve them. This falls right in line with what we just worked through regarding doing for our teams what they cannot do for themselves and maintaining high expectations around everything they can and should be doing. This can be yet another one of those things that are simple, but not always easy…

Consider this as a very basic example: When our son was young, it wasn’t uncommon to find several pairs of clothes on the floor of his bedroom every day. I don’t think he actually wore them all; in fact, I don’t believe he could have! I believe that as he pulled something from the drawer or closet to decide what he was going to wear, he threw everything that didn’t make the cut on the floor rather than hanging it back up or putting it back in his dresser. Whatever the case was, me or Cindy following him around to pick up everything he chose to chuck aside would have provided no lasting value of any kind to him - and it would have resulted in us being constantly frustrated. At that stage in his life, the thing we could do for him that he wasn’t yet able to do for himself was to set expectations and hold him accountable to meet them. Today, he’s an incredibly hard worker and is very disciplined. You’d have to ask his wife if we helped him break the habit of throwing every piece of clothing he touches on the floor though. While we may not have been completely successful with that, I believe we at least laid a decent foundation for her to work from…

I realize helping our team members work toward their own definite purpose while they’re engaged in the tasks required to reach our organizational purpose will be more involved than simply holding them accountable to pick their clothes off the floor. I only share that because we’ve heard so many folks in leadership roles share how often they jump in to help their team members with routine activities, saying they won’t ask anyone else to do something they’re not willing to do themselves. Please understand, there’s a tremendous difference in being willing to help and ensuring the help we provide adds the most possible value. Lending a hand may ease their immediate load but it can also suck up time, preventing us from having the capacity to do other things that only we can do for them.

Helping them move toward their purpose will require more than a surface level look at where we could lend a hand. In many cases, we’ll need to use every bit of information we’ve learned from them to even begin identifying the things we can do for them that they can’t do for themselves. Think back to the things we worked through before about asking the right questions, listening to what they tell us, and observing what they put the most energy into. If we’ve done that well, we have a keen understanding of why they’ve chosen the path they’re on, what motivates them to get out of bed each day, and where they hope to be in the years ahead.

As Cindy and I wrap up the final lesson in our Emerging Leader Development course, we share a fourth R to the initial three that we learned from “The Law of Priorities”, chapter seventeen in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. This fourth R, Reproduction, is something we first saw detailed by John Maxwell in Good Leaders Ask Great Questions, but I can’t point to the specific chapter. The idea, though, stuck with me. He emphasized the importance of being intentional about who we delegate things to (which ties in with the first R, Required) so that the experience they gained through the process helped prepare them for a bigger opportunity down the road.

I believe, as leaders, we can apply this same concept in helping our team members move closer and closer to achieving their individual purpose while they’re engaged in the required duties of their daily role - as long as we’ve invested the energy into really learned what their purpose is (and assuming we’re competent enough to understand what their role requires). Then, we need to provide them with something that many organizations promise in their mission statements but few actually make good on; we need to empower them - so we’ll look at how we can do that soon.