Lisa Earle McLeod* has suggestions for leaders who want to inspire workers jaded by routine but necessary tasks.
If you woke up to today’s to-do list and felt a wave of tiredness come over you, you’re not alone.
For many, once fulfilling roles and engaging teams morphed into a crowded inbox, devoid of inspiration and purpose.
The reason is often lack of meaning. Meaning stems from a belief that our work matters to someone.
It’s hard to feel inspired when you’re just checking the boxes.
The ability to create shared belief is a hallmark of top-tier organisations, be it a company, a family, or a community.
When the hearts and minds are aligned towards a higher purpose, it drives effort, engagement, and innovation.
The qualitative things we believe in today are directly linked, in fact predictive, of the quantitative results we will experience in the future.
Creating shared belief isn’t the job of the chief executive, human resources or marketing team.
The onus is on each of us to bring belief to our workplaces. Here are three strategies you can use to make the mundane meaningful.
Get clear (really clear) about your impact
We often answer the question: “What do you do?” with our job title.
It’s factual, but rarely tugs at our heart strings.
Instead, challenge yourself. When you get more specific about the impact you have on clients or your team, the more engaging your daily tasks will become.
One way to articulate your impact is to examine what would happen if you didn’t do your job.
If you and your team failed to deliver, what would happen? Who will be affected?
See beyond the moment
How will what you’re doing improve life for people months, even years down the road?
A vision of what could be helps us see beyond the crisis of the day and gives our minds something to look forward to.
Talking about the future and the impact you can have on the world keeps the energy high.
Humanise your clients (even if you never meet them)
This is particularly crucial when you work in a backstage role.
Use clients’ real names when you can, hang up a couple of photos in your home office, and tether yourself back to improving their condition.
Having a vivid mental picture of the individuals and organisations who are counting on you and your skills will ignite your frontal lobes, making you more creative and a better strategic thinker.
Consider this excerpt from the second edition of Selling with Noble Purpose.
Wharton Business School Professor, Adam Grant’s now-famous study of call centre workers illustrates the financial impact of infusing a team with purpose.
Grant studied paid employees at a public university’s call centre whose job was to phone potential donors and ask for money.
As you might imagine, it’s not a fun job.
The employees don’t get paid much and suffer frequent rejections from people unhappy about getting calls during dinner.
It’s hardly the kind of work that inspires passion. Turnover was high, and morale was often low.
In the 2007 study, Grant and a team of researchers arranged for one group of call centre workers to interact with a scholarship student who benefited from their fundraising efforts.
It was a quick five-minute conversation where call centre workers were able to ask about the student’s studies.
However, it had a huge impact on the team’s sense of purpose.
Over the course of the next month, callers who had met with a student spent more than twice as long on the phone and reeled in a donation average of $503 compared to the previous average of $186.
Put a few 000s on those numbers and apply them to a team.
These studies reveal that illustrating collective purpose and the impact of the work is easy to implement and produces better results.
Leaders, both formal and informal, who are able to humanise daily tasks and link those tasks to a collective, high-impact purpose, are the people who will sustain motivation through major challenge and change.
*Lisa Earle McLeod is the leadership expert best known for creating the popular business concept Noble Purpose. She is the author of Selling with Noble Purpose and Leading with Noble Purpose. She can be contacted at mcleodandmore.com.
This article first appeared at mcleodandmore.com.
