Have you ever seen a professional sports team that’s absolutely stacked with talent but rarely, if ever, wins a championship? The older I get, the less I can tolerate the ever-increasing nonsense that’s seemed to have taken over professional sports so I can’t speak in much detail about any specific ...

Now that we’ve worked through a big-picture idea covering the importance of leading with a clear purpose and some very specific steps we can take to paint a clear picture of the purpose our organization is striving to achieve, all while staying dialed in our own definite purpose as we push through i...

Today, Cindy and I have the pleasure of working closely with several organizations where the leaders have created the kind of atmosphere in their respective teams where each member understands the purpose they’re working to achieve and how their daily responsibilities connect with their company’s mi...

A Harvard Business Review article by former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly called How to Connect Employees to Your Company’s Purpose opened like this:

When I ask CEOs in the new CEO workshop we run at Harvard Business School to rate the importance of having and living a great corporate purpose to the s...

Since I’ve shared a few things I learned from Jeff Henderson here already, this seems like a great time to include one more. First though, let me provide some perspective. I often talk with business owners and executives who have grown a bit weary after painting a picture of their organization’s pur...

I recently read an article a friend published on LinkedIn called “Why ‘Purpose’ Might Not Be the Answer (and What to Do Instead)” where he opened by saying “lofty purpose statements can feel abstract and disconnected from employees’ day-to-day tasks. Shared challenges, on the other hand, are specifi...

Providing our teams with clarity around the mission, vision, and values that we’re working toward as an organization can be powerful! One thing I see many leaders struggle with though is keeping those in front of their team members consistently. From the start of this look at the importance of leadi...

Make no mistake, I’ve seen some incredibly eloquent verbiage used in defining companies’ missions, visions, and values. But I’ve rarely seen the people in an organization rally around all that eloquence in a way produces. Even when the results seem to match the mission and vision, it’s far more like...

I want to challenge you to really churn through this mission statement for a deep understanding of all it captures:

“Our mission is to delight our customers as the number one technology driven global manufacturer and marketer of value differentiated XYZ products and services. We will strengthen o...

When we’ve accepted the responsibility for leading, be that of a team under our authority or an organization made up of volunteers, having a crystal-clear definite purpose and understanding that we will always need to go beyond what’s expected to achieve it is a must! But to carry this forward throu...

I’ll say it once more in case you missed it, nothing hurts as much when we have a definite purpose! The one thing I can assure you of though is that there were plenty of times in the decade that followed that last story where I wasn’t sure we were actually winning. But as I look back at it, I can po...

From March 2013 to September 2014, less than half of the time in my full time role was dedicated to interviewing, hiring, and onboarding team members for roles throughout the manufacturing facility I worked for. In that time, I hired 225 people. Just out of curiosity, can you guess how many people y...