The Power of Having a Clear Purpose

Any time I’m talking with a business owner, an executive, or really anyone with responsibility for attracting and retaining great team members, I share a critical lesson I learned early on during my time working in behavior based safety: people rarely shy away from tasks due difficulty, risk, or the level of compensation! If they did, there would be no such thing as a volunteer fire department or any of the great civic organizations that do so much to impact our communities. In each case, the individuals involved commit their time and energy to these causes because the work ties to their purpose!

Truth be told, this same thing applies at least as much in the workplace. A few years ago, my son chose to change jobs, moving to a role that initially paid him five dollars less per hour, because the work he had been doing for the six years leading up to that point was no longer providing him with purpose and the company he went to was very clear in communicating their purpose to every team member. We’ll revisit this soon enough. For now, let’s consider the power of having a clear purpose for anyone with leadership responsibility…

If we’re really being honest with ourselves, leading a team of any kind never allows us to just go through the motions. If we want to achieve anything of significance through the team we lead, we need to give it all we’ve got. (I’d go so far as to argue that anyone disagreeing with that statement has no business in a leadership role, but that’s a fight for another day…) In the fourth chapter of Intentional Living, John Maxwell gives some context to this by sharing “How Your Why Helps Find Your Way” when he says that “significance is usually not the result of anything spectacular. It’s based on small steps in line with purpose.”

A few years back while helping a company fill a few positions that would require a fair amount of overtime during a three-month period each year, but a really flexible schedule the rest of the year, I remember struggling to understand how any candidate that had an issue with an extra ten to twenty hours per week for such a short period of time - which they were well compensated for… I’m not sure I can point to a time in the last twenty-five years when I’ve only worked 50-60 hours in a week; be it directly in a full time role or any combination of a job and side hustle, and definitely not since becoming completely self-employed! And through all of that, I can only think of one time where it was truly exhausting…

For the last year or so I held a full time role, I had responsibility for human resources and safety with a construction company that had close to 100 employees. While it was a heavy workload, I had worked in both spaces (HR and safety) for the decade and a half leading up to that and had developed a strong skill set that helped me get solid results. While the work itself wasn’t terribly hard, it did require a high degree of focus to ensure the company maintained at least a reasonable level of compliance in both heavily regulated areas. Although that company now has that role divided between two or three people, I still produced what I believe were better than average results in 45 to 60 hours per week. 

I had started our business just a couple years prior to this, though. By that last year in a full time role, I usually had nearly as many hours involved in our business each week than I did in my job. Don’t miss my point here, this ain’t a sob story about me working too much! I had chosen all of it. The point I need you to understand here is that I was absolutely drained as I left my work office almost every day but I felt recharged immediately as I moved to work in my own business.

Physically and mentally, the tasks were very similar. But the purpose I drew from each was completely different! The longer I dealt with checking the government compliance boxes tied to employment law and safety, the more I considered looking for a tall bridge with fast moving traffic below it. But the heavier the workload became in our business, the more energized I was, largely because I was seeing an immediate impact on the people I was supporting.

I was earning a reasonable salary in that role and I could have lived comfortably with plenty of time left over to clown around outside of work. But I just wasn’t satisfied. In No Limits, John Maxwell shares a poem he wrote in his twenties called “The Mundane Man” that sums up where I would have been had I stuck with a role that didn’t fulfill my purpose.

Sad is that day for any man when he is absolutely satisfied with the life that he is living, thoughts that he is thinking, deeds that he is doing, until there ceases to be forever knocking on the door of his soul, a desire to do something great for God and his fellow-man.

Having a clear purpose was crucial in helping me avoid being that mundane man John talked about, but it’s just as crucial for a leader to have their own purpose if they’re going to achieve all they’re capable of. Identifying that purpose can prove more difficult though so we’ll pick up there next time…