There are plenty of purpose statements in the world, but very few purpose driven businesses. The reason for that isn’t a lack of good intentions. Being generally purposeful isn’t enough. To be purpose driven, you need a purpose statement that is good enough to unlock the transformation, growth and full impact your business is capable of delivering. Purpose cannot be a lofty statement of good intentions, neither is it a bland description of the business you are in today. It is a call to action that defines where you play, the impact you want to have in the world, is anchored to your specific right to win… and opens up the broadest range of opportunities you have for more growth and impact. Unless your purpose integrates fully into your strategy and how you make decisions every day, then it is nothing more than a tag line, serving no one.
Your purpose needs to be used as a tool for how you evaluate your business, defining the types of decisions you need to make, how you make them, then how you execute and assess their impact. To do that you can’t just have a purpose statement, you need to make it who you are and how you do things. Emotional commitment to your purpose is the core of forming a high performing, purpose-driven culture.
Deep Commitment
The world of business is obsessed with engagement, but engagement is a pretty low bar. Commitment is far more important than the fleeting quality of engagement. There will be ups and downs in engagement. Things will go wrong and times will get tough, but successful teams are committed enough to work through the difficulties that will inevitably arise.
Some individuals may not be committed enough. That is OK, but then it’s time to go because to achieve your full potential your business needs everyone pulling hard in the same direction. This isn’t about being mindlessly positive or building some weird cult. It’s about everyone knowing they are part of something ambitious that really matters to them. If you want your business to perform, your people need to care enough to have the difficult conversations about how we are doing, what we need to get better at and changing what needs to change to succeed.
Leaders need to build emotionally committed teams and they need to ensure this is deep-rooted. But what do you want people committed to? How do you create this kind of commitment and how do you sustain it?
Committed to what?
The most powerful form of commitment is to feel part of something that matters. Group identity and belonging are the foundational components of an effective team of teams. We have all felt the positivity of casual affiliation: you studied what I studied. You grew up near me. You like motorbikes too. But the kind of culture businesses need to actually do business better requires affiliation and belonging at the level of having a shared mission. Then we can create one inclusive, purposeful group, with everyone hellbent on achieving the same thing.
Identity built around purpose will sustain performance, drive innovation and retain balance. It’s about coming together to do something and have an impact. It’s intrinsically forward facing, it demands agility and it’s adult-to-adult. When purpose sits at the heart of your identity, it requires every team to have open conversations around whether they are doing what they said they would. This type of identity creates a deep emotional bond that unites people for a reason. This creates healthy dynamics that ensure teams sustain performance.
Purpose orientation creates better teams
Uniting around purpose makes every team more inclusive. Belonging is based on what we will do together rather than an abstract sense of who we are as a group or an arbitrary set of values we share. This deep, purposeful sense of belonging encourages individuals to bring all of their ingenuity and talent to work every day, and to take the interpersonal risks needed to create real progress.
Purpose-built teams are more collaborative. People want to help each other out, preventing unhealthy intergroup competition. Instead, people will share ideas and lessons learnt earlier and more generously.
Teams that share a purpose are also faster to adapt. They are focused on impact and outcome rather than themselves, and are open to the world around them. Change does not threaten the integrity of the group but rather elicits a positive emotional response and an opportunity to grow.
Developing a purposeful affinity across teams is critical to creating the conditions for brilliant teaming at all levels of the business. Standards and structures play a role too, of course, but having a deep sense that we are on the same team because we share the same mission is the foundation.
To create this kind of purpose-orientated affinity within all your teams, you need to ensure it’s in the bones of every individual and that they have felt the power of it personally. It’s no easy task.
Building commitment & Connecting the dots
People commit at different speeds, but they need the same things in order to commit deeply. That means engaging them in real conversations. The starting point is to connect to the case for change and the unvarnished context of our business. People need to know everyone gets the challenges they’re facing, and they need to understand the challenges everyone else is facing too. This creates the fertile soil for them to embrace a new direction and the change that will demand of them.
What does the purpose really mean and how does it connect to the strategy? Is the strategy credible and compelling? How much change will it take to execute it?
Making your mission who you are
Having initiated commitment, we now need to lock in belief and deepen it. Ensure your people and teams have personally felt the power of your purpose by bringing it to life in tangible ways, letting them experience it for themselves rather than just hearing about it in town halls and from annual reports. A good example of how to do this comes from PayPal.
PayPal’s purpose states that it will ensure everyone can “take control of their financial lives”. It forces innovation beyond transactions to make the world of finance intuitive and accessible to everyone, no matter their background or level of knowledge. But when its CEO, Dan Schulman, discovered that a significant percentage of the company’s 30,000 employees did not themselves feel in control of their financial lives, he questioned whether PayPal could create that sense of control if the company’s people didn’t themselves know what it felt like.
PayPal introduced a comprehensive employee financial health programme to ensure every employee knew what being in control of their financial health felt like. It includes training, tools, adjustments to pay and employee benefits. The result was a workforce that has more disposable income, deeper understanding and commitment to their purpose, and a team of teams that has continued to deliver huge growth, reaching nearly half a billion active accounts and with plans to get that to one billion in the near future.
What deep-rooted commitment really takes
Ultimately, deep-rooted, sustained commitment is about the relationship people have with their work. You are building a team of teams full of people who are committed to delivering the same things. They care enough to have open, honest conversations about how the business is really performing and what is and isn’t working.
Make your purpose the core of your employee value proposition and recruit people who connect with your purpose. You don’t need more concepts to attract the right talent, just a powerful way of engaging them in your purpose.
Make sure purpose is at the core of how you interview. You are not looking for people who can demonstrate they align with a set of values. For example, do not ask: “Can you describe a situation where you demonstrated real integrity?” This is incredibly ineffective. Anyone can fake a good-values story. It also does little for your culture, emphasising conformity and homogeneity as the foundations for your group.
Instead ask: “What does our purpose mean to you?” Or, “How might you connect your work in this role to our purpose?” These are much harder questions to fake an answer to.
Manage performance for purpose. How are team members anchoring their work back to purpose and how are they measuring their impact? Teams should be learning and developing the new skills they need to deliver more purposeful impact.
Back that up with a deal that focuses on both rewarding performance and enhancing team members’ professional growth through the experiences they will have. Then you have the making of a purposeful talent engine that will create a huge boost to your culture. The challenge is delivering on that promise, not superficially with wacky offices and daft benefits packages, but by building a highly committed, exceptional team of teams. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
