What Impact Does Your Purpose Have?

Earlier I shared how my purpose in chasing that first role off the manufacturing floor was a far cry from definite but grew a bit closer when I took the initial trip to provide training at another facility within the company. Over the years that followed, my purpose became more definite and began resembling something that I could put into words. The more clarity I developed around my purpose, the more opportunities I seemed to have to take action on it - be that within the organization I worked directly for at the time or through any of the side projects Cindy and I were involved with over the years. Interestingly enough, I could nearly always find a way to connect the specific responsibilities of my job to things that fell within that purpose of helping the folks I was working with grow in their respective careers. For me though, the challenge came when the purpose I was chasing became bigger than I could achieve by simply connecting my required tasks to the results I could achieve through them; and that just happened to be when many of those tasks were still tied to checking the compliance boxes that drained so much of my energy…

As we wrapped up 2019 and began 2020, Cindy and I had the biggest workload we had experienced since starting our business, with even more opportunities stacking up. We had to make a few tweaks in mid-March due to the idea of “two weeks to flatten the curve,” with some of the bigger gigs we had on the books being postponed briefly - or so we thought… Not being one to pay much attention to the media, or to get too caught up in really any kind of Chicken Little tales of the sky falling, I kept pushing forward with everything else I possibly could, assuming that the two weeks (which had already went beyond that) would pass soon enough and we’d pick right up where we left off. Through that somewhat naive push, I also made arrangements with the business I had been providing some part time safety and human resources support for, to step away from the fifteen or so hours each week to go all in on with our business. On May 29, 2020, I submitted my last time sheet as a W2 employee and was ready to take on the world!

The world, as it turned out, had other plans. The deeper we got into 2020, the crazier things were. To hopefully avoid causing you (or me) any Covid-related PTSD relapses, I’ll skip the details. I will, however, share that stepping away from consistent income and immediately having almost every opportunity to do other billable work taken away was terrifying. Oh, and the biggest event we hosted each year at that point was limited to twenty percent capacity with the same fixed costs and several expenses that didn’t exist any year prior; masks, hand sanitizer, etc… Ugh!

If any of that had happened while I was doing the behavior-based safety thing, it would have changed my approach but probably wouldn’t have impacted my income. Had I still been a Human Resource and Safety Manager, my scope of work would have definitely been different, but my paycheck would have been as secure as it had ever been. But neither of those would have allowed me to make the full impact I wanted to have. And being able to articulate a definite purpose, specifically what we could provide for every individual and business we were supporting, was exactly what I was able to hold onto through the second half of 2020 while we only sent two or three invoices…

Had Cindy and I not continued defining our purpose, relentlessly, over the years leading up to that, I can’t imagine how differently that scenario would have unfolded. We had developed a tremendous amount of clarity around how we could achieve our definite purpose and we could picture it with the same kind of specificity as we had for our favorite restaurant! While your purpose for accepting leadership responsibility won’t likely be the same as ours, you will need to develop that same level of clarity so we’ll pick up there next time…