If we look across our team or our organisation most people know what they’re doing – there’s a reassuring competence. The work gets done, results get delivered. What may be missing though is whether people know why they’re doing what they’re doing. What’s the higher purpose for their endeavours?
We know that purpose, why the organisation exists, is fundamental to performance. To attracting and retaining colleagues who are aligned with the organisation’s aspiration and bring their best to its achievement. In short, purpose brings meaning to the work so that what we do each day matters to us beyond the monthly pay check it delivers, connecting with our passion to make things better.
Yet this meaning has, in some organisations, become a casualty of the pandemic. The sustained period of working from home has stretched the connection with purpose tenuously thin. And, for many in the workforce who started in a new organisation in the confines of a home office, dining room, kitchen, spare bedroom the sense of the organisation’s purpose may be non-existent.
So, as leaders, we need to explore the health of our organisational purpose. Does is exist? Is it clear, explicit and operational i.e. does it inform all decisions and actions? And, crucially, are our people connected to it?
Anything less than a resounding affirmative to these questions tells us there is important work to do, now…whether that’s rebuilding visibility of and connection with purpose, taking the opportunity to refresh it, or developing a new purpose more attuned with these challenging times and pointing the organisation toward helping create a better world.