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5. Creating Purpose


More and More organisations are finally understanding the importance of defining and following a strong purpose for being.


This is the first and arguably most important step of creating a strategy.

 

Without this ‘reason for being’, those involved with the organisation can lack direction, become confused and frustrated and ultimately waste a huge amount of effort and resources. This in turn leads to underachievement against every performance metric and an environment that is hard to attract and retain talent within.

 

When people understand and believe in the company’s purpose they can easily recognise the impact of their contributions and feel a sense of ownership and pride.



We are all much more likely to be engaged, motivated and productive in our work when it is meaningful.

 

Its important to understand that this also has a compound effect, as each individual feels part of a cohesive community that is trying to achieve the same thing, fostering an exciting environment which not only encourages, but relies on a total teamwork mentality. Forged against a common goal these are traits that will be relied upon when trying to enact the growth strategy.

 

What makes a good purpose statement


A good starting point for a purpose statement should consider that it is:


  • Meaningful and can generate an emotional reaction which the people involved with the organisation, including customers, partners and investors will want to align behind

  • Why you exist, not what you do or even how you do it.

  • Simple to understand and easily communicable

  • Distinguishes you from others, without being too specific – be careful not to reduce your opportunity for future innovation

  • Bold and has longevity, you don’t know what the future might hold!

 

How to create a purpose statement

 

The reason why an organisations exists is a surprisingly hard question to answer and requires a little time and the right minds to get right. Having experienced external support to facilitate this conversation and help the curation process will help.

 

It is critical that the leadership team, along with its sponsors, come together and collaborate on this task to obtain buy in on the direction and by extension, the subsequent actions to deliver it. Before attending the session, they should have had time to collect their thoughts on their vision based on the bullet points above. Asking their team members may also be an eye-opening health check on other people’s perceptions.

 

A good practise is to start by encouraging each individual to continue to think about their view on what the purpose should be for a few minutes and write that down, in large lettering and in as concise a form as they can on a single piece of A4 paper.

 

Then, as a team, share these for discussion one by one, posting each purpose on the wall for all to clearly see and read.

 

There will be synergy and natural grouping between some, some will be adjacent and one or two might be completely unexpected but with all on the wall to review, it will drive the right discussions until a single statement coalesces.

 

Be wary of over working this final statement, grammatical accuracy for instance can be assured later, the aim at this stage is that the team simply understand and agree that Purpose and are excited about communicating this vision to all stakeholders.

 

On a practical level, this statement will guide all future decision making and can be used to check thinking. Emotionally, there will be a shared vision for each individual involved in the organisation.

 

The ability of the leadership team to weave both elements into their behaviours and actions is fundamental to creating a high productivity, high morale environment that will deliver unimaginable success, faster than ever believed. We will explore these two ideas in future articles.

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Hi,
I'm James

Passionate about helping people understand how they can deliver more with the resources they already have

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