The Impact of Their Purpose

As we started looking at ways to provide a clear picture of the purpose each of our team members are working toward, I shared how Pat Lencioni defined “immeasurability” in The Truth About Employee Engagement. Just to be sure that’s fresh in your mind, here it is once more:

Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions or whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be. Without a tangible means for assessing the success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.

The part I’ve enjoyed about Lencioni’s books the most has been that each I’ve read has started with some sort of story about made up characters, and I’ve been able to picture myself or someone I know personally in each of them! As he paints the picture of removing “immeasurability” for the people in this story, the main character works with each of his employees to define the most important things they do throughout their work day in a way that they have a clear view of the progress they’ve made at any time. In his example, that helped each member of this particular made up team understand exactly how they were contributing to the goal that business needed to achieve. While connecting the monotony of any job to something monumental the entire organization is working striving for can create focus and lead to strong results, I believe that each of us have a responsibility for making it even more personal (read: rewarding) for each individual we lead. I believe a leader should be just as intentional about connecting how the work their team members are doing to help the company win helps each individual win in the way that matters most to them!

Hold on though, saying it matters is the easy part! Detailing how takes a whole different level of work, especially when so many positions - in every industry - involve doing the same thing every single day… Earlier I shared a little about my time operating a press where I could routinely make thirty to forty thousand parts in a shift. Those parts were metal blanks of varying lengths with different patterns stamped into them. As they came off the press, I stacked them into neat piles in a basket that was then stored on a rack until they were needed for the next stage of the process. Those parts typically went through one or two more processes before being staged in different racks along the assembly line that would eventually connect them with a couple of other parts and stuff them inside a muffler.

I had a decent understanding of the big picture; I knew if I got all the parts done off the weekly build plan as quickly as possible, there was less chance of mandatory overtime - but that’s really where it stopped for me. I rarely had visibility of what specific type of muffler any given batch of parts would be used in, when it would be assembled, or who would ever use it. If you’re old enough to remember the guy in the Dunkin’ Donuts commercials who looked like a Super Mario Brother (“time to make the donuts…), trudging to and from work, you should have some perspective for how making those parts usually felt.

Interestingly enough, we had no shortage whatsoever of things to measure - I just can’t point to how any of it mattered to anyone but the bean counters. We measured the parts on each run, the number of pieces of scrap, the time it took to change from one run to the next, and plenty of things in between. But I don’t remember ever having the slightest measurement of how it impacted someone directly, including me (with the single exception being that I knew what my monthly productivity average needed to be to stay employed, which was fairly easy to achieve after just a few months). What helped me maintain a reasonable level of sanity was competing against my own best performance in the role. And while I still couldn’t explain how that would have a lasting impact, it provided my Driven behavioral style with a way to have a bit of fulfillment from the results I was able to achieve.

What if though, we were able to help each of our team members who are in roles similar to that have clarity about how even the most tedious and mundane tasks that they do day and day out connect directly with our organization’s purpose as well as with what we’ve learned to recognize as the purpose that drives them? What if we could help them see exactly how their small daily wins, those things that often seem insignificant in the bigger picture, are absolutely compounding over time and having a direct impact on reaching their purpose? What if we could help them realize how those things were exactly how they needed to eat the elephant? One bite at a time!

With that in mind, let’s consider how we can help them measure more than just their daily progress. We’ll look at how we can help them connect what they do daily to their progressive results next!