The Power of OUR Clear Purpose: Identifying Our Purpose

Since we started this look at the importance of leading with a clear purpose, I’ve shared a few references to the definite purpose that drives me and Cindy today, and I promised to go into more detail on that before we wrap things up. Before I do that though, I'll emphasize once more that accepting the responsibility for truly leading a team is hard - and so is being a great team member! In both cases, having an extremely clear picture of what we’re working to achieve individually and as an organization makes a tremendous difference. As leaders, we need to keep our purpose top-of-mind AND we need to help our team members do the same; purpose certainly does matter for each of us! With all that fresh in your mind, let’s take a walk down memory lane…

In hopes of saving some time and an ounce or two of credibility, I won’t go into detail on the complete train wreck that I was when God put Cindy in my life; I’ll skip ahead just a few years to right after we got married. I started a new position in the manufacturing facility I worked at the day after we got back from our honeymoon. I had been with the company for just over four years and was still in the bottom twenty percent of overall seniority. In that new role, I was one of four folks who had been tasked with rolling out a new Lean Manufacturing initiative that had been mandated from the corporate office. As a twenty-four year old kid, my role was to train folks on a new way of doing things that many of them had been doing longer than I had been alive. Sounds simple enough, huh? The interesting part was that there was almost no local management or supervisory support for this process that would involve shutting lines down, rearranging processes, and changing behaviors for any hope of achieving sustainable results.

Let me be very clear here: I didn’t bid on or interview for that position because I wanted to change the world. I can’t say that I was very interested at that time in even changing how anything was done in our plant. I just wanted something resembling a promotion that could help build my resume and offer me a steady work schedule so I could possibly finish up some coursework at the local community college I had hit a few times with a stick. To say that I wasn’t doing a whole lot to pursue meaning in my life at that point would be a strong understatement! I wanted to grow in the organization, and earn more in the process, I just didn’t have anything resembling a purpose to tie any of that to.

I won’t go into as much detail about where Cindy was at the time, that will be a great story when she shares it, but I will say that she was ahead of me in every way; I was still relatively new at the whole responsible adult thing… The part I will share is that, as newly weds, we were working as hard as we knew how and chasing every opportunity we thought we were supposed to take to climb our respective career ladders so we could build a better life for our little family. Having both taken on new roles where we needed to achieve results with the help of coworkers who didn’t report to us, we started looking for every resource we could get our hands on that would help get the results we needed; the results that our jobs depended on… Interestingly enough, applying what we were learning not only helped us perform well in our roles, it led to new opportunities within the companies we each worked for. And those new opportunities were where we caught our first glimpse of a clear purpose for our lives.

The First Glimpse of Our Purpose

While doing all I could to fulfill my responsibility in the Lean Manufacturing process rollout, I stayed very involved in the behavior-based safety process I was a part of while I was still operating a press. In this role though, I was able to be more hands-on in supporting the new process facilitator (a position I had applied for myself prior to bidding on the position I had just accepted). He had far less experience in the behavior-based safety process but moved from a supervisory position. As fate would have it, the four of us rolling at that lean initiative would soon be reassigned to report to him anyway. 

I won’t go into it here, but choosing to help him be successful in his new role rather than choosing to be bitter because I wasn’t selected for the role played a critical piece in everything that’s happened in my life and career since. In complete transparency, I can’t explain why I took that approach - but I’m forever grateful I did. After being in the behavior-based safety process facilitator role about a year, my boss opted to move back into a supervisory position similar to where he had been previously. Having significantly more exposure to all aspects of that process from all I had done to support him during that year, I bid on the position again and was successful.

I won’t pretend that my first year or so in the position didn’t come with plenty of bumps and bruises, but everything I had started digging into with hopes of learning how to build stronger connections and influence with my peers was beginning to show signs of return on investment. Somewhere around the 18-month mark, our corporate safety director contacted me about providing some training on what we were doing to make our process successful for one of the company’s facilities in Georgia. With my (new) boss’s approval, the same boss who suggested I interview for a new position at least once each year, I stumbled through my first attempt at booking a business trip and was on my way (although I’m still not sure why I was selected for this as one of the newest, youngest, and likely least formally educated process facilitator in the company).

The training I provided for the other facility apparently hit the mark. And the results we were achieving through the process at my home facility seemed to be turning heads as well. By the end of my second year in the position, I found myself in a conversation with the same corporate safety director and the fellow who was responsible for providing behavior-based safety training and support for all eighty or so facilities in the organization worldwide, discussing options for me to cover the North American sites since he was based in Europe. Albeit an informal role that wasn’t added to my actual job title at the time, it was an amazing opportunity - and one that gave me my first glimpse of our purpose!

When I agreed to take on the task they described, my boss and his boss still had to sign off on it. They eventually did, but with the stipulation that I maintained full responsibility for the behavior-based safety process in our local facility. That didn’t scare me! I had been working at least one full time job, and usually juggling some extra on the side, for more than a decade at that point so how hard could this possibly be. What I didn’t realize then was that I would be expected to do it all with very little (if any) overtime since I was still in an hourly position and paying OT for indirect labor roles in that company was frowned on more than violating the majority of the Ten Commandments!

So where did I get that glimpse at our purpose, the thing that gave me an opportunity to pursue meaning? When I provided that initial training for the folks in Georgia, I covered the canned presentation as well as I knew how but I also worked to pass on some of the tools I had been digging into on my own with hopes of helping them build better connections with their team members. Throughout our organization at the time, the behavior-based safety initiative had three core tenets: no names, no discipline, and no sneak-ups. To achieve any lasting behavioral change and reduce the risk of injury, we relied solely on achieving buy-in from our peers. We had to earn trust and influence, and that rarely happens without connecting with others. I had been working to share those same tools with each of the folks who worked the closest with me in the process locally, and they stepped up tremendously while I traveled to plants across the continent.

The work I was able to do in behavior-based safety had a direct impact on decreasing the number of injuries, in my home facility as well as at each of the sites I provided training for, but what excited me even more was seeing the folks around me grow in their current roles, get much deserved recognition for what they were doing, and have opportunities for promotions that they may not have had otherwise! Cindy and I had been digging into everything we could get our hands on that would help us develop our own leadership and communication skills, mainly just to survive in the positions we each held at that point, but seeing the difference we could make in others as we passed on what we were learning was indeed something that started the process of finding purpose in our lives. With that in mind, let’s look at how that purpose started coming together.

Purpose Starting to Take Shape

After more than a decade of leading the behavior-based safety process in my home facility, supporting other plants across North America with their processes, having a hand in other various Lean Manufacturing initiatives, and helping out with multiple human resource functions, I had the opportunity to move into a full time HR role. While that was yet another lateral(ish) career move, it would offer a kind of experience I just wasn’t likely to get in the safety field. For that reason, and a few others I won’t take the time to hash out here, it was time to make such a move. After all, a role completely dedicated to a human resources department in an organization that size appeared to fall right in line with that purpose I had gotten a glimpse of; having a hand in the intentional development of our human resources - the people we worked with.

I’ll circle back to that piece about intentionally developing the human resources shortly. First though, I need to share what was without a doubt the most gratifying thing I had experienced in my career to that point. Like most positions within the organization, the behavior-based safety position that I was stepping away from was posted internally. Because so many folks who were involved in the process had stepped up to help however they could while I was out of the plant supporting other locations, no less than six of them were very equipped to fill the role. The one who was finally selected, after a few intense rounds of interviewing since there were several great candidates, built on the things I had put in place and made the process even more effective.

Over the next several years, nearly every member of the team that had worked closely with me in that behavior-based safety process during the decade I was responsible for it accepted promotions of some kind. Seeing a direct connection between being able to share just some of the things Cindy and I had learned as we worked to keep ourselves employed and my friends applying them to grow in their own careers offered a bit of proof that the purpose I had gotten a glimpse of was indeed worthwhile! And moving into a position where I should be able to focus on growing and developing the company’s human resources seemed like it would fall right in line with that purpose…

Before throwing my name in the hat to be considered for the HR position, I had a conversation with the fellow who had managed our local department for years before taking a position at the corporate level. I won’t go into everything he shared but the part that resonates still today was him asking if I was prepared to focus on primarily compliance-related tasks for the remainder of my career. I didn’t give it much thought at the time because I was still elated about the chance to develop our human resources…