What’s your purpose… your driving why?
Clarity of purpose makes decisions easier. It gives us a clear filter to assess and prioritise options. Let’s explore this at a personal and organisational level.
Read the full Your Purpose post with practical actions.
Your Personal Why
Most of us are looking for happiness and meaning. Purpose is key to this. As Emily Esfahani Smith outlines in her great TED talk, she concluded from her positive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy research that there are four pillars to meaning: belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling – especially the stories we tell ourselves.
We want to do work that’s meaningful and matters. It’s fascinating seeing the trend of expectation toward meaningful work. Research shows 90% of employees are willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work.
How much? The average was 23%! Though I disagree with the premise that we should earn less when doing purposeful work that creates multiple types of value (financial, social, and environmental). That’s a failure in our market system.
There’s a lot of talk about finding your purpose – often with language that implies our one true purpose will be revealed to us and we’ll know what to do in life. I disagree. So does the research. As Kira Newman writes in her article How Purpose Changes Across Your Lifetime, where she reviews some of the research over the past 30 years:
“In fact, purpose isn’t something we find at all. It’s something we can cultivate through deliberate action and reflection, and it will naturally wax and wane throughout our lives.” – Kira Newman
It’s worth the time to reflect on what motivates us, what we get energy from, our driving why – but don’t expect it to be absolute and unchanging. And if this isn’t something you’ve already been working on for a while, don’t expect to have it resolved after a half-hour session.
Your Organisation’s Purpose & Vision
Organisations often spend a lot of time and money crafting vision and mission statements, cultural values, and maybe even principles. Traditionally these are inward facing and centred on the organisation. Over the past decade or so there’s been a trend to try to focus these statements on the customer.
Customers or people who will buy and use our solutions are very important, but in purpose-driven business the context of our primary purpose is even bigger. Let’s focus on one real question – why does our organisation exist?
Clarity of purpose makes decisions easier. It gives us a clear filter to assess and prioritise options. When we have a meaningful driving why, it helps us keep going through all of the challenges we face. It helps us persevere. A compelling purpose and vision also increase engagement with our teams, customers, and investors.
Values
I strongly recommend articulating a set of values for your organisation. The important step is to turn this into practical guiding principles and be explicit about what these values look like as behaviours. The behaviours you expect of yourself and each other – and the behaviours that you won’t accept.
This activity also works well when you have existing value statements. Too often, organisational values are a generic set of words that don’t mean much in practice – and mean different things to different people. When done well as a collaborative process, they’re a powerful guide for decisions and behaviours.
During the 20th year of Dynamic4 in 2021, I shared our core values and guiding principles, with some reflections on what I’ve learnt.
Teams
If you’re a team within a larger organisation, you might want to do this activity at a team level too. It should align with the overall organisation purpose. I recommend doing each action as an individual first, and then discussing it as a team to see where things are common and where there are differences. Understand why, and take the opportunity to align.
The full post guides you through an activity to draft your purpose statement.
Let’s Collaborate
At Dynamic4, we specialise in coaching, training, and working alongside leaders to solve problems that matter.
A key way we do this is by designing and delivering action learning experiences with masterclasses, workshops, innovation sprints, and leadership, design thinking & innovation programs. These sessions build personal, team, and organisational capability to solve problems that matter with more:
❤️ Clarity on your purpose, goals, and approach to navigate complexity and make progress
🎯 Momentum to achieve your goals by building the workflows, rhythms, and habits for success
🌿 Confidence to move forward with more certainty and less risk while increasing your wellbeing
Ready to have fun collaborating to solve problems that matter? Book a free 15-minute discovery call.
What role do you think purpose should play in business?
Which of these statements do you agree with? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
- Every business should be purpose-driven with the purpose driving strategy and guiding every decision
- Good business means being profitable while also creating great outcomes for people, communities, and our planet
- It’s crucial in engaging talent and providing them with a sense of meaning and fulfillment in their work
- It’s a way to differentiate the brand in the market and attract customers
- It’s important but should be balanced with other business objectives like profitability and growth
- It’s a nice-to-have, the primary focus should be on financial performance and shareholder value
- Milton Friedman was right “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits”
I’m doing some research with leaders who navigate complexity to lead, design, and deliver change. I’ll present the findings from my research in a report. It might even evolve into my next book.
I’m curious to learn more about how you’re adapting to meet the rapidly shifting expectations of your teams, customers, investors, and regulators.
Get involved!
Join the waitlist for the report now. You’ll be the first to get it and I’ll also share insights that are emerging during the process.
When you join the waitlist, you’re also invited to complete the survey that takes ~5 minutes, and you can express interest in being interviewed.
Ideas
A couple of blog posts for you…
Your Strengths & Assets
What are your strengths & assets? By focusing on our strengths and taking a strengths-based approach we increase our performance, productivity, and wellbeing.
Create your strengths & assets list.
Bridge the Gap Between Tech & Human Experience
In March I spent a couple of days with 130 leaders facilitating four interactive workshops on desirability, viability, feasibility to get beyond the hype of tech… and to bridge the gap between tech and human experience.
Here’s a brief overview of the sessions with the deck of 20 desirable, viable, feasible cards we designed to prompt the conversation.
We specialise in designing and delivering masterclasses, workshops, and innovation sprints.
We don’t just coach and do training though, I also work alongside you and your design, product, and digital transformation teams to do strategic design with a focus on business, experience, and solution architecture. Delivering work while helping build internal capability.
Keen for some help solving problems that matter and to have some fun collaborating? Book a free 15-minute discovery call…
Have fun!
Ben
