The Power of OUR Clear Purpose: Identifying Our Purpose

Since we started this look at the importance of leading with a clear purpose, I’ve shared a few references to the definite purpose that drives me and Cindy today, and I promised to go into more detail on that before we wrap things up. Before I do that though, I'll emphasize once more that accepting the responsibility for truly leading a team is hard - and so is being a great team member! In both bases, having an extremely clear picture of what we’re working to achieve individually and as an organization makes a tremendous difference. As leaders, we need to keep our purpose top-of-mind AND we need to help our team members do the same; purpose certainly does matter for each of us! With all that fresh in your mind, let’s take a walk down memory lane…

With hopes of saving some time and an ounce or two of credibility, I won’t go into detail on the complete train wreck that I was when God put Cindy in my life; I’ll skip ahead just a few years to right after we got married. I started a new position in the manufacturing facility I worked at the day after we got back from our honeymoon. I had been with the company for just over four years and was still in the bottom twenty percent of overall seniority. In that new role, I was one of four folks who had been tasked with rolling out a new Lean Manufacturing initiative that had been mandated from the corporate office. As a twenty-four year old kid, I got to train folks on a new way of doing things that many of them had been doing longer than I had been alive. Sounds simple enough, huh? The interesting part was that there was almost no local management or supervisory support for this process that would involve shutting lines down, rearranging processes, and changing behaviors for any hope of achieving sustainable results.

Let me be very clear here: I didn’t bid on or interview for that position because I wanted to change the world. I can’t even say that I was very interested at that time in changing how anything was done in that plant. I just wanted something resembling a promotion that could help build my resume and offer me a steady work schedule so I could possibly finish up some coursework at the local community college I had hit a few times with a stick. To say that I wasn’t doing a whole lot to pursue meaning in my life at that point would be a strong understatement! I wanted to grow in the organization, and earn more in the process, I just didn’t have anything resembling a purpose to tie any of that to.

I won’t go into as much detail about where Cindy was at the time, that will be a great story when she shares it, but I will say that she was ahead of me in every way; I was still relatively new at the whole responsible adult thing… The part I will share is that, as newly weds, we were working as hard as we knew how and chasing every opportunity we thought we were supposed to take to climb our respective career ladders so we could build a better life for our little family. Having both taken on new roles where we needed to achieve results with the help of coworkers who didn’t report to us, we started looking for every resource we could get our hands on that would help get the results we needed; the results that our jobs depended on… Interestingly enough, applying what we were learning not only helped us perform well in our roles, it led to new opportunities within the companies we each worked for. And those new opportunities were where we caught our first glimpse of a clear purpose for our lives - so we’ll pick up there next time.