Providing a Clear Organizational Purpose

Once we’ve dialed in on our own clear purpose for leading, and we’ve developed a foundational understanding of the emotions that drive us as well as an approach for managing those emotions, we can shift our focus to what our teams are counting on us to do; lead them well and provide them with a clear picture of the purpose we’re working to achieve as an organization. Before we dive into how we can do this, I’ll caution you not to mistake it for being as simple as reading the company’s mission and vision statements during new hire orientation and calling it done. While executing this task effectively is certainly not complicated, it’s nowhere close to being easy - and it’s definitely not something we can do just once and hope everyone falls in line!

Investing the time into understanding myself did wonders for recognizing and understanding my own emotions, but learning the patterns Marston laid out in defining each of the four primary behavioral styles within the DISC Model of Human Behavior gave me a framework for determining, with a high degree of accuracy, how the team members I was working with were wired to communicate and behave; the third component of emotional intelligence that Travis Bradberry referred to as social awareness. We’ll look at that in more detail soon. For now, I’ll just say that this alone was one of the most useful things I’ve ever learned for passing a message along to others…

A while back, I made a case for how much purpose really matters to each of our team members, emphasizing that it ain’t (just) about the pay. If anything at all has changed since I initially made that statement, it’s how much more I’m convinced of that now than I was then! But to have any hope of earning even the slightest increase in discretionary effort from our teams, we’d better be prepared to do an amazing job of detailing exactly what our organizational purpose is AND who we will impact in the process. This cannot be vague, and it cannot be some pie-in-the-sky statement that no one ever really sees come to fruition. As leaders, our responsibility is to communicate this clearly, consistently, and continuously - all in a way that resonates with the teams we lead.

When we apply what we’ve learned in developing our social awareness, our message actually has a shot of getting through all the other noise that’s constantly bombarding our people and we see exactly how they’re making a positive difference in the community we’re a part of as well as for each individual customer we serve. While having that clear purpose to strive for will never replace the need for fair compensation (at least for the majority of folks), it will be powerful in attracting great people to our teams and attaining their buy-in.

Before we can expect to do this well, and over the long haul, we’ve got to make sure the dots are adequately connected between the purpose that drives us individually and the one we’re working toward as an organization. While this may seem like a no-brainer, I assure you that I’ve seen far too many in leadership roles who have not made this connection and struggle mightily in sharing a message with their teams that truly is clear, consistent, and continuous.

We’ve Got to Connect with It Personally First

I’ve frequently heard folks say that when you love what you do, you’ll never work another day. While I understand the sentiment, I promise you it’s not quite that simple; but nothing ever really is, right? That said, it doesn’t have to be complicated either!

When we’ve invested the time and energy into building the foundational understanding of how we’re wired, and how that impacts our emotions through different situations, we can indeed increase our own level of self awareness - which then supports our ability to do what Travis Bradberry referred to as self management. As we leverage that knowledge to crystalize the individual purpose that drives us, we can expect to be more energized. But don’t mistake this for a blanket statement that applies to everything we do, all the time. Before we’ll be able to truly love all that we do, and have a real shot turning most of our work days into something we genuinely enjoy, we’d better make sure the purpose that provides us with fulfillment lines up with the organizational purpose we need to lead our teams toward.

Although I don’t believe this will be overly complicated for someone who’s taken responsibility for leading a group of any size, I know firsthand that it won’t automatically happen either. Cindy and I have written several lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program on the importance of defining clear values that can be used to guide the daily behaviors of our teams as they perform their work. While nearly every company we interact with has a set of core values listed in their handbook or on the wall for everyone to see, few go so far as to define exactly what living out those values look like on a routine basis. Creating those definitions will require a significant amount of effort, especially if we want them to be clear and concise enough for everyone to understand them immediately. If we want to connect our individual purpose with our organization’s purpose in a way that provides us with the kind of fulfillment we’d get from pursuing a hobby or volunteering our time for a charity we’re passionate about, we’ll need to be just as intentional about how we create a detailed description of what achieving our organization’s purpose will look like.

With this level of clarity in place personally, there may well be a lot of days where the tasks we’re responsible for don’t feel like work. If we’re being honest with ourselves though, I’d still struggle to go as far as saying that we’ll never work another day. I’ll emphasize it yet again here; there are plenty of times where leading is just plain hard - even when we’ve got the clearest of purposes!

With all this in mind, we can’t lose sight of one advantage we’ll have over most of the folks we lead; as leaders, we have a high degree of control over the purpose our organization is working to achieve and how we go about it. Rarely will our team members have that same level of control. As leaders, that’s where we’ll need to provide them with equal clarity on how their required tasks contribute to the organizational purpose. And just like a blanket statement doesn’t serve us very well for connecting with purpose, we can’t expect it to do any more for them. This will require us to get very specific, and it will require us to be in tune with what they actually do.

Competence Connects to the Organizational Purpose

As we wrapped up our looks at identifying our own specific purpose and helping each of our team members reach their individual purpose, I referenced the keynote session that Cindy and I frequently share called Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision, specifically the emphasis we place on tying the tasks we do to what our mission or vision statements say our organization is working toward. Connecting our own tasks to the organization’s mission or vision shouldn’t be all that difficult for anyone in a leadership role; if someone can’t, I’d have some major concerns about them supervising or managing others, and they’re certainly not leading… When we’re able to do that, it shouldn’t take much more effort to connect our own purpose with that of the company as a whole. But providing that same kind of clarity for each of our team members will require more!

As we looked at what being part of something that really matters does for each of our team members, I shared how important it is for a leader to be competent in the tasks the individuals on their team perform each day so they can help them connect those activities to a purpose they’re motivated by personally. For our purposes here, especially since I’m actively challenging you to build this into your daily leadership routine, I want you to think about how you can use what you know about each role within your area of responsibility to be intentional in connecting those required tasks back to not just a mission or vision statement, but to how executing those tasks well will indeed contribute directly to achieving the purpose the entire organization needs to be focused on.

I’ll say it once more with hopes of making it stick; a blanket statement will not get the job done here! We need to be able to articulate how even the basic pieces have a lasting impact, and we can’t do that when we’re not at least competent in what our team members are required to do. Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not suggesting that we need to be an expert in everything! Just that we need to understand the work they’re doing. In helping at least a dozen organizations implement or enhance their performance evaluation process, I’ve set this same expectation for supervisors and managers to be competent in the roles they’re evaluating. When they review performance with a team member, a general score or a proverbial pat on the back provides little value. But when that supervisor or manager can give specific examples of how that individual’s performance contributed to (or took away from) the company’s profitability, they provide the person being evaluated with a clear picture of what they’re doing well or what they need to do to improve. This same level of competence is critical in helping our team members connect what we expect them to do with the purpose we’re working with them to achieve.

Being aware of how we’re wired can help us manage our performance and connect our own purpose with that of our organization. Learning to recognize the emotions of our team members, and thereby understand more about how they’re wired to behave and communicate, can help us connect their work to our organizational purpose even more effectively. It can help us share that message in the exact way they need to receive it.

What They Need, Not Just What We Want…

Earlier, as I emphasized that even the most powerful organizational or individual purpose won’t completely replace the need for equitable compensation, I shared that we can’t communicate with all of our team members the same way and expect the same results, suggesting the idea of applying The Platinum Rule… Even when we’re extremely competent in the tasks our team members are responsible for daily, helping each connect those tasks directly to the organization’s purpose will require us to do more than share a message like we’d want to receive (as most of us have be told to do in following The Golden Rule); we’ll need to provide the message in the way THEY want (and need) to hear it if we really hope to help them tie the two together.

I recently watched an early episode of Leave It To Beaver where Eddie Haskell put Beaver up to saying something to his friend in Spanish that offended the friend. Beaver and Chuey had been getting along great prior to this, even though they didn’t necessarily understand one another’s words; Beaver only spoke English and Chuey only spoke Spanish. Beaver didn’t know what Eddie was telling him to say, but wanted to speak his friend’s language so he trusted Eddie (and it was always a mistake to trust that twerp). If you’re not familiar with how that all unfolded, you owe it to yourself to be more versed in that show - especially the first few seasons - so check it out. Once you have, you’ll see how similar it can be when we share a message with one of our team members the way we’d want to receive it rather than how they’ll best understand it. They may not run home crying like Chuey did after Beaver unknowingly told him he had a face like a pig, but they’re very unlikely to get everything they need from it to buy-in at the level we need them to or draw the level of fulfillment they could if we had delivered it in a way they could best comprehend it, even if we are both speaking English.

Not only can adapting our message to meet their needs help them connect their work with the organization’s overall purpose, it will be huge in giving them a way to tie their individual purpose back to both the tasks they perform and what the company is working to achieve. Understanding our own behavioral style, and the emotions driving that, gives us a higher level of self awareness, allowing us to become better at that thing called self management. Recognizing how our team members are wired provides a foundation for social awareness and adapting our communication to meet their needs is key in relationship management.

With regards to your organizational purpose, my challenge for you is to become very intentional about helping each team member who counts on you for leadership to connect their daily routine directly with the impact your organization is striving to have on the clients you serve as well as the community you’re a part of - and do it in the way that they’ll have the best shot of digesting it. As a quick side note, I’ve referenced the DISC Model of Human Behavior, communication/behavioral styles, and emotional intelligence heavily here. If you’ve completed a DISC assessment and you aren’t completely tracking with how all this fits together, or even if you’ve never heard of any of it, reach out to me directly. I’ve talked with far too many folks who have been sold an assessment but haven’t understood what their results meant or how they can use the science behind it to get immediate results in everything they do. That pisses me off! If that’s you, I believe you’ve been cheated and I’d like to help make things right.

When we have the correct tools, we’ve been trained to use them properly, and we invest the effort into using them consistently, I believe we can make tremendous strides toward reaching our organizational purpose. But, as leaders, we’re still responsible for helping our team members move toward the purpose that fuels them as individuals so that’s how we’ll wrap this all up.