We’ve Got to Connect It Personally First

I’ve frequently heard folks say that when you love what you do, you’ll never work another day. While I understand the sentiment, I promise you it’s not quite that simple; but it never really is, right? That said, it doesn’t have to be complicated either!

When we’ve invested the time and energy into building the foundational understanding of how we’re wired, and how that impacts our emotions through different situations, we can indeed increase our own level of self awareness - which then supports our ability to do what Travis Bradberry referred to as self management. As we leverage that knowledge to crystalize the individual purpose that drives us, we can expect to be more energized. But don’t mistake this for a blanket statement that applies to everything we do, all the time. Before we’ll be able to truly love all that we do, and have a real shot turning most of our work days into something we genuinely enjoy, we’d better make sure the purpose that provides us with fulfillment lines up with the organizational purpose we need to lead our teams toward.

Although I don’t believe this will be overly complicated for someone who’s taken responsibility for leading a group of any size, I know firsthand that it won’t automatically happen either. Cindy and I have written several lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program on the importance of defining clear values that can be used to guide the behaviors our teams use daily as they perform their work. While nearly every company we interact with has a set of core values listed in their handbook or on the wall for everyone to see, few go so far as to define exactly what living out those values look like on a routine basis. Creating those definitions will require a significant amount of effort, especially if we want them to be clear and concise enough for everyone to understand them immediately. If we want to connect our individual purpose with our organization’s purpose in a way that provides us with the kind of fulfillment we’d get from pursuing a hobby or volunteering our time for a charity we’re passionate about, we’ll need to be just as intentional about how we create a detailed description of what achieving our organization’s purpose will look like.

With this level of clarity in place personally, there may well be a lot of days where the tasks we’re responsible for don’t feel like work. If we’re being honest with ourselves though, I’d still struggle to go as far as saying that we’ll never work another day. I’ll emphasize it yet again here; there are plenty of times where leading is just plain hard - even when we’ve got the clearest of purposes!

With all this in mind, we can’t lose sight of one advantage we’ll have over most of the folks we lead; as leaders, we have a high degree of control over the purpose our organization is working to achieve and how we go about it. Rarely will our team members have that same level of control. As leaders, that’s where we’ll need to provide them with equal clarity on how their required tasks contribute to the organizational purpose. And just like a blanket statement doesn’t serve us very well for connecting with purpose, we can’t expect it to do any more for them. This will require us to get very specific, and it will require us to be in tune with what they actually do so will work through that next.