The Impact of Their Purpose

As we started looking at ways to provide a clear picture of the purpose each of our team members are working toward, I shared how Pat Lencioni defined “immeasurability” in The Truth About Employee Engagement. Just to be sure that’s fresh in your mind, here it is once more:

Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions or whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be. Without a tangible means for assessing the success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.

The part I’ve enjoyed most about Lencioni’s books has been that each I’ve read has started with some sort of story about made up characters, and I’ve been able to picture myself or someone I know personally in them all! As he paints the picture of removing “immeasurability” for the people in this story, the main character works with each of his employees to define the most important things they do throughout their work day in a way that they have a clear view of the progress they’ve made at any time. In his example, that helped each member of this particular made up team understand exactly how they were contributing to the goal that business needed to achieve. While connecting the monotony of any job to something monumental the entire organization is working striving for can create focus and lead to strong results, I believe that each of us have a responsibility for making it even more personal (read: rewarding) for each individual we lead. I believe a leader should be just as intentional about connecting how the work their team members are doing to help the company win also helps each individual win in the way that matters most to them!

Hold on though, saying it matters is the easy part! Detailing how takes a whole different level of work, especially when so many positions - in every industry - involve doing the same thing every single day… Earlier I shared a little about my time operating a press where I could routinely make thirty to forty thousand parts in a shift. Those parts were metal blanks of varying lengths with different hole patterns stamped into them. As they came off the press, I stacked them into neat piles in a basket that was then stored on a rack until they were needed for the next stage of the process. Those parts typically went through one or two more processes before being staged in different racks along the assembly line that would eventually connect them with a couple of other parts and stuff them inside a muffler.

I had a decent understanding of the big picture; I knew if I made all the parts listed on the weekly build plan as quickly as possible, there was less chance of mandatory overtime - but that’s really where it stopped for me. I rarely had visibility of what specific type of muffler any given batch of parts would be used in, when it would be assembled, or who would ever use it. If you’re old enough to remember the guy in the Dunkin’ Donuts commercials who looked like a Super Mario Brother (“time to make the donuts…”), trudging to and from work, you should have some perspective for how making those parts usually felt.

Interestingly enough, we had no shortage whatsoever of things to measure - I just can’t point to how any of it mattered to anyone but the bean counters. We measured the parts on each run, the number of pieces of scrap, the time it took to change from one run to the next, and plenty of things in between. But I don’t remember ever having the slightest measurement of how it impacted someone directly, including me (with the single exception being that I knew what my monthly productivity average needed to be to stay employed, which was fairly easy to achieve after just a few months). What helped me maintain a reasonable level of sanity was competing against my own best performance in the role. And while I still couldn’t explain how that would have a lasting impact, it provided my Driven behavioral style with a way to have a bit of fulfillment from the results I was able to achieve.

What if though, we were able to help each of our team members who are in roles similar to that have clarity about how even the most tedious and mundane tasks that they do day and day out connect directly with our organization’s purpose as well as with what we’ve learned to recognize as the purpose that drives them? What if we could help them see exactly how their small daily wins, those things that often seem insignificant in the bigger picture, are absolutely compounding over time and having a direct impact on reaching their purpose? What if we could help them realize how those things were exactly how they needed to eat the elephant? One bite at a time!

With that in mind, let’s consider how we can help them measure more than just their daily progress. Let’s take a look at how we can help them connect what they do daily to their progressive results!

Compounding to Reach Their Purpose

Even without knowing where all those parts I stamped out each day would eventually go, who would benefit from them, or how any of the blood and sweat I put into them had even the slightest lasting impact on the greater good, I still found a way to motivate myself each day in spite of always achieving well beyond the numbers required to remain employed; I realized that competing against my own best performance gave me something to strive for! And since us Driven folks are so fueled by results, that was enough for me to push through the mundane - since no one there had painted a clear picture of an organizational purpose (and certainly not an individual purpose) that I could focus on.

Before you disregard the “blood and sweat’ comment as embellishing my experience, let me assure you that I’m not. Most areas of the factory averaged between 90 and 100 degrees from mid May to late September. While most work stations had some sort of fan pointed in the general direction, there were plenty of times that I had extensive work in areas with no airflow whatsoever. I can’t say that it was always as bad as what I did in construction, pouring concrete or nailing down roofing metal at 100 degrees in the glaring sun, but it was still plenty warm. And if you were to dig into OSHA’s laceration statistics for the sheet metal manufacturing sector, you’d quickly see that blood was indeed part of the process as well. Once in 1999, as I cut a metal banding strap off a coil of steel I was loading to my press to stamp more blanks, the strap sprung back and hit my forearm just above the Kevlar protective sleeve I was wearing and cut an artery. Since that happened before the first break, I dug a Band-Aid out of my toolbox and kept working; I had a lot to get done! I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend that approach for treating a cut artery!

In complete transparency, still today I can get just as consumed in churning out parts in competing with what I view as my previous best. Although the “parts” today aren’t metal blanks that eventually get rolled up to serve as the guts of a muffler or metal on a roof of a chicken or turkey house, I can still lose sight of what all the smaller tasks I’m so focused on checking off my list are building to - and more importantly, how they compound toward achieving the definite purpose I’m working toward.

God clearly had a plan when He put Cindy into my life. I won’t go into all the reasons I have for making that statement here, but I will share how great she is at making sure I routinely take time to reflect on what all the daily and weekly tasks we’re working to knock out add up to. In The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, John Maxwell shares that “The sooner you make the transition to becoming intentional about your personal growth, the better it will be for you, because growth compounds and accelerates IF you remain intentional about it.” Just like making a transition to become intentional about our own personal growth, even the most monotonous and mundane work we do that’s in line with achieving an organizational purpose and our individual purpose compounds! The key for any of us to draw energy from that lies in taking the time to reflect on the progress we’re making over time rather than remaining fixated on just trudging through our daily routines. And as leaders, we need to be every bit as intentional about helping each of our team members measure how their daily work has contributed to reaching their individual purpose! 

So before we move to looking at what we can do to help our team members have the best possible shot at achieving their own definite purpose, let’s take a look at how we can ensure them that what they value really matters and be sure we’re connecting how what they’re doing daily does indeed contribute to them achieving it.

How They’ll Achieve It & Why It Matters

Assuming we’ve fulfilled the part of our leadership responsibility that lies in tying our organization’s mission, vision, and values to a definite purpose and we’ve invested the effort to recognize what our team members have shown us to truly drive them, we have the key pieces in place to help them recognize exactly how those things connect with each other and why all the energy they put into both matters. Part of us doing this will be tied to us making sure they’re doing what we just covered and reflecting on the progress they’ve made over time. But it’s just as important that we continue painting a clear picture of the future that lies ahead. I have yet to meet a single person who’s willing to contribute everything they’ve got today for something they accomplished yesterday.

This is where the time we’ve invested into knowing each team member on an individual basis can provide a tremendous return. While we may be able to share a general message with our entire team, we’ll do much better to provide specific examples in one-on-one conversations. Earlier I shared how understanding how much the facility I worked in made from each muffler, and how having that perspective - as well as knowing exactly how many people were involved in building each of those mufflers - gave me incentive to make sure I learned everything I possibly could when I attended a workshop or conference so I would have a shot at applying that knowledge to improve our workplace. If I tie that same idea back to how I could help the next operator who handled the parts I was stamping by making sure the pattern was to one edge of the allowed tolerance, I can see how even that made the extra work required so much more worth it. I can only imagine the difference had I understood at the time how any of that served our customer or how it connected to anything I was striving for personally.

Decades later, I can draw a few squiggly lines between those things and I can pull lessons from nearly every job I’ve had that serve me well today. But how much more effective would be in our leadership roles if we used all we understood about our organization's purpose, coupled that with what we’ve learned about our team members, and were incredibly specific with them in detailing why the things they value (collectively as a group and individually) matters and how the work they do each day contributes directly to achieving those things value most?