The point of purpose

Our understanding of purpose now includes a developing awareness of the company’s mission and, importantly, the employees’ life mission as well. When these two are in harmony, the organisation has a tensile strength. It can adapt more quickly; it can engage the loyalty of its employees more readily and it can position itself to respond to the markets more quickly and more holistically in our rapidly changing world – making it a living company.  

Given the importance of the corporate mission, the question becomes: how do we best integrate that into our company. Do we embed it, or do we instead try to imbed a process for achieving purpose? While there are advantages to both, by choosing to embed a process the company’s mission will have a far greater reach and a greater power.

Be wary of imposing a sense of purpose

It can be enticing for leadership to find a sense of purpose for their company and incorporate that into the company, as its mission statement, for example. It may seem efficient for management to impose that sense of purpose. There may well be those employees who resonate with the company’s mission and help the business move forward.

What about the employees, however, who go through the motions and who merely give lip service to that purpose? At first glance, employee dissatisfaction and lack of engagement may seem unrelated to the way purpose is expressed in a company, yet we have found a real and unmistakable connection between them.

If we begin with discovering a company’s purpose or mission, it becomes clear that this is not a matter of one and done. Even if you think you know your company’s mission, it is not static. As the world changes at a dizzying rate, the mission will need to evolve and rapidly shift in its application, at the very least.

Initiate a process of enquiry

One way for the company to keep itself ahead of the curve is to initiate a process of enquiry in which the questions asked about its mission are open-ended. For example, if we suggest a purpose in a team meeting, the next question will be, “Why this purpose?” Other questions are likely to follow: Does the mission reflect the best the company can be? What does that call us to do and to become? Notice the emphasis on the being of the company and not only the doing. 

As a result, we find a surer footing about why our enterprise was created in the first place, enabling our brand to reflect our mission and to perfect it, to make it living. Through an on-going practice of enquiry, we are able to address change as it is happening and recalibrate our mission accordingly; something that is difficult to do if our mission were simply embedded and that task checked off.

A breakthrough in business extends to our employees a similar process of developing their individual life mission. This means supporting staff in their own exploration of their life mission, apart from that of the company. While this may seem counterintuitive, in fact it is just this generosity that deepens the commitment of the employee to the company.  Likewise, the employee delves into the questions in an on-going way of why they are on the planet, what that calls them to do and who that calls them to become.

Through this process, some employees may leave, as they should, since their vision is not aligned with the company. Those who stay, however, are dedicated. They find meaning in their workplace and in their lives. And they know that the company has their back – all of this enhances both a person’s quality of life and their performance.

Avoid alientating employees

Without an ongoing commitment to its mission in the form of an enquiry, the company can actually alienate its employees. One corporation decided that the employee’s mission was to lower costs for its customers. This was, of course, not a personalised life mission and failed entirely to contribute to their own sense of meaningfulness.

We are meaning makers: the more this sense of meaningfulness is reflected in the workforce, especially for the younger employees, the more stable, innovative and ‘living’ the company will become.

Autonomy and a sense of meaningfulness follow from this approach of embedding the process as part of the discovery and rediscovery of a company’s purpose, building a living company. Google Maps, for example, arose from this encouragement for employees to explore independently.

It seems clear, then, that embedding process has a far greater potential to create new products, to develop a sense of engagement in the workforce and to enable the company to respond more fully, more precisely and more profitably to rapid change, while embodying the kind of vision we need as business leaders