Why Our Organization Needs a Clear Purpose…

Just for the sake of setting a foundation, let’s assume we - as the leader of our team - have an incredibly clear purpose that gets us out of bed each morning, ready to charge hell with a water pistol! Let’s also assume that having that kind of clarity personally allows us to be able to detail the same kind of clear purpose to every individual on our teams… (I realize there’s far more involved in doing that than just identifying our own purpose but we’ll get to that soon enough.) How would that impact our entire organization? And how much of a difference would that make to the clients and communities we serve?

In chapter seven of What’s Killing Your Profitability?, I worked through an example of how the “57% improvement in discretionary effort” suggested in that Harvard Business Review article would look in most organizations, specifically in how that increased level of employee engagement led to higher individual productivity. I won’t hash all that out again here but we’re on track for a Feb 20, 2024 release date and we’ve started accepting orders for signed copies so you can reserve yours if you’d like to go deeper in that detail. For the sake of what we’re working through here, I’ll share that for anyone to be able to increase their discretionary effort by a whopping 57%, the most they could have possibly been contributing prior to that would have been just 63% of what they were capable of. I also emphasized that I’ve never seen anyone achieve a true level of significance with barely over half of what they had in them…

In detailing “The Cost of Disengaged Employees” (chapter seven), I also referenced a Forbes article called “Why The Latest Engagement Statistics Are Unacceptable” that shared  this from Gallup’s “State of the Global Workforce” 2022 report:

Imagine out of 100 people in your business:

• 21 people are powerfully rowing toward your company goals.
• 19 people are actively rowing against them.
• 60 people are just along for the ride, creating drag for those who are rowing forward.

I’ve never seen any high level of employee engagement in an organization, at least not engagement that lasted for any real length of time, without the majority of the team members having a clear purpose to strive toward. To have even a conservative picture of why our organization needs a clear purpose, consider the difference we could see in our bottom line if we saw only enough increased discretionary effort to yield just a 10% improvement in individual performance from 79 percent of our workforce…

If a 57% increase could amount to a 20% improvement, I think it’s fair to believe that a 29% increase would get us to 10%. And since the 21 people (out of a 100) who “are powerfully rowing toward your company goals” are the ones generally considered actively engaged and are probably giving us nearly all they’re capable of already, we won’t expect even more - although far too many organizations do just that without ever attempting to increase performance from the rest of the workforce!

For now, I want you to consider how much better your organization’s performance could be if nearly 80% of your workforce improved their individual productivity by 10% in the next quarter… How would that impact profitability? How could that better serve your clients? And how much more good could your company do for the community you’re a part of?

I’ve often heard the phrase “transformational leadership” held up as something that few leaders ever achieve. In fact, Cindy and I served as part of a small team for several years to identify someone worthy of the annual (at the time) John Maxwell Transformational Leadership Award. The longer I’ve studied leadership and human behavior, the more convinced I’ve become that transformational leadership does not need to be rare or difficult to achieve. I believe it is as simple as providing a clear purpose to our team! Moving forward, we’ll look at the power in having that purpose and just how simple it can be to identify it…