Supporting Our Team Members' Purpose

Once you have a solid understanding of how to apply the DISC Model of Human Behavior for immediately improving in each of the four components of emotional intelligence - self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management - I’m confident that you’ll be able to identify your own clear purpose and connect the work each of your team members do to the organizational purpose you need to achieve as a group. But to lead and not just manage those team members, I believe this next step is a requirement; we need to help each individual on our teams dial in on the purpose that drives them AND connect that back to the purpose our organization is working toward.

At least once through each step of this look at leading with a clear purpose, I’ve emphasized that accepting leadership responsibility can be incredibly difficult. This last part is no exception! Not only will it require more than most are willing to invest, especially those who attempt to run things based solely on the authority that comes with their title, there’s a risk we have to be willing to accept when we take this approach. We’ll get to the steps a leader will need to take shortly. For now, I believe we need to have a clear understanding of the risk we’ll be exposed to…

One of the most common reasons I’ve heard folks in leadership positions use for not investing in the development of someone on their team has been the chance of that person using the new skill they learn to find a position with another organization, saying that “if I train them, they may use that training to get a better job with our competitor.” I take issue with that thought process for several reasons. First, taking this stance leaves us with a group of folks who aren’t good enough at what they’re doing to have other opportunities. Next, it certainly seems like we’re admitting that we can’t (or aren’t willing to) advance this person within the organization as they develop new skills. Finally, I believe it wreaks of being interested only in our current scenario rather than the future of our organization or the best interests of the individuals who count on us - and that final piece alone will keep me from ever referring to someone choosing this stance as a leader!

If we’re going to truly lead with a clear purpose, part of that will require us to make investments and take risks. Anyone suggesting that being responsible for even a small team within an organization would be easy was absolutely not speaking from a place of leadership. Leadership comes with risks, like occasionally seeing the people we’ve helped grow toward their own purpose moving on to another organization or a business of their own, but I’ve never known a great leader who wasn’t genuinely excited to see their team members have better opportunities - even if those opportunities were somewhere else. The work we’ll need to do to help each member of our teams identify their individual purpose and connect that back to our organization’s purpose will initially seem hard. I’d argue that it’s no harder than the work we’re already doing, but it will produce significantly better results; better results in our organization’s bottom line and in the leadership legacy we’re each able to leave! As we wrap this up, we’ll work through just a few simple things we can take action on to make this happen…

Understanding Them as Individuals

While supporting our team members’ purpose won’t always be easy, it does not have to be complicated. If you think back to I shared before on how we can recognize their purpose, specifically when we looked at the importance of listening to what they’re telling us, you likely remember the reference I made to Pat Lencioni’s book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, and how we can actively work to ensure anonymity isn’t something any of the folks on our team experience. To be sure that’s fresh in your mind, let’s revisit how Lencioni defined anonymity:

People cannot be fulfilled in their work if they are not known. All human beings need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by someone in a position of authority. As much as this may sound like an aphorism from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it is undeniably true. People who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.

When we’re at least competent in the tasks they’re required to perform and we’ve learned to recognize how they’re wired (which gives us a strong foundation for that social awareness piece; specifically, recognizing the emotions of others), we’re able to practice self management in a way that genuinely contributes to relationship management; connecting what they’re doing to the organization’s purpose by adapting our communication style to provide the message they need most rather than how we’d normally share it. Not only does that increase the likelihood that our message will get through all the other noise we’re competing with, we’re showing each team member that we care enough about them to understand them as individuals. We appreciate their unique qualities, we recognize their individual needs, and they’re most definitely not invisible, generic, or anonymous!

Taking this specific step lays the groundwork for us to be extremely effective in connecting their work not just to what the company needs to achieve, but to a purpose that matters most to them. And as we’ve invested our energy into being able to remove that anonymity, we should also have learned the pieces that make up their individual definite purpose. This is critical in helping keep their purpose top-of-mind! Our next step, then, falls right in line; we can help them see exactly who they’re impacting through the purpose that’s driving them.

Who They Impact Through Their Purpose

When running a large company, or even a small department within an organization of any size, it may seem a bit odd for some to consider how we can help our team members accomplish their own dreams and goals; their individual purpose… In What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!), I shared a few examples of folks I knew who were promoted into roles where they were supervising people who had been their peers, many of which were actually their very close friends. I also provided details on how those close personal relationships contributed to some of the struggles those new supervisors faced in how they held their teams accountable. If you were to consider just those struggles, I could see how someone would be reluctant to build the kind of relationships with their team members that allows us to understand them as individuals. But we cannot consider just those struggles if we’re going to fulfill our leadership responsibility, have any shot of achieving our organization’s purpose, or help each of those team members work toward their individual purpose.

While I’ve stressed this in other places, I need to clarify something before I move on here; supervising or managing someone we have a longstanding relationship with can be awkward but that doesn’t mean we should be treating them any better or any worse than every other member of our team. All too often, I’ve seen people in this situation struggle in separating the action a team member takes from the outside relationship they have with that team member. Just like becoming a trained observer can help us differentiate between what someone says is their goal and what they’re actually willing to work toward, seeing behaviors for what they are without assigning intention to them can be the determining factor between supervising a group of people and leading a team that achieves great results. Since that’s outside our topic here, I won’t go deeper but you’re welcome to reach out to me directly if you have questions.

Make no mistake, none of what I’m suggesting here should take away from holding high expectations for each team member to execute their required job duties. If anything, helping them work toward an individual purpose that’s directly connected to our organization’s purpose will likely result in them exceeding what’s expected of them. If the purpose they’re motivated by has no connection to what we need to achieve as a company, it might just serve everyone involved to help them find somewhere else that’s more in line with what they need. There is, however, a chance that the path toward their purpose pulls them away from our organizational purpose over time. While seeing someone move on comes with costs, especially when we care about them and we’ve invested into their growth, the best leaders I’ve ever known have been more interested in seeing their people succeed than holding those people back for the sake of what's easier at the moment.

Having addressed all that, how do we help our team members see exactly who they’re impacting as they work to achieve their individual purpose? By knowing who and what they care about most, we can be very specific in detailing how their work makes a lasting difference in the lives of their family members, their friends, or even the client base we serve. As we paint that picture with a message that’s tailored just for them, we can help them see how building to both our organizational purpose and their individual purpose matters now as well as how it can leave a positive mark for generations to come.

One of the last questions I’ll ask you in this look at leading with a clear purpose is “Are you willing to go the extra mile to do it?” Rather than leaving it open-ended, I’ll wrap this up by providing a reason that should show even the most task-oriented executive on the planet that the juice is indeed worth the squeeze!

Leading Everyday, On Purpose! 

That last question was NOT rhetorical! Are you really willing to go the extra mile to identify the clear purpose that drives you? Are you really willing to provide the kind of clarity around your organization’s purpose that each team member understands how the work they do contributes and exactly who benefits from it? And are you really willing to help them see who they’re impacting as they work to achieve a clear purpose of their own - one that you’ve helped them connect back to your organizational purpose?

Much of what we’ve looked at through this process may seem soft, or even touchy-feely… Don’t be fooled by what far too many hardass executives use as an excuse to avoid developing the kind of real leadership and influence with their teams that gets measurable results. For close to a decade now, I’ve closed every lesson that Cindy and I share by challenging everyone we’re with to detail the one thing they can put in place right away that will have an immediate impact on the productivity and profitability within their area of responsibility. Before leaving you with that same challenge here, I want you to consider one last time how much of a tangible impact you can have by earning your team’s engagement by leading with a clear purpose. One last time, here’s the piece from the Harvard Business Review article called Things They Do For Love, that I’ve been sharing with every group I speak with:

“Company leaders won’t be surprised that employee engagement—the extent to which workers commit to something or someone in their organizations—influences performance and retention. But they may be surprised by how much engagement matters. Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort—that is, employees’ willingness to exceed duty’s call. That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement and an 87% reduction in the desire to pull up stakes, according to the Corporate Leadership Council, which surveyed more than 50,000 employees in more than 59 organizations worldwide.”

By simply asking folks in each group, all of whom have been top performers in their respective organizations, to compare their own discretionary effort for the worst manager they’ve work for to the best leader they’ve worked for, I’ve seen the wrinkled foreheads and scowls of doubt for this strong statement immediately replaced by heads nodding in agreement. Don’t misunderstand this as me suggesting some sort of scheme to get rich quick by manipulating your team. It’s anything but that. If anything, the work required will be more difficult at any given time. But the long term results, as well as the fulfillment we gain as leaders, will dwarf what we’d ever hope to achieve any other way. Do to this well over time, we need to always remember that everything we do as we lead with a clear purpose has to be ON PURPOSE!