Employees should be shown how life or business has benefited as a result of their work. Photo: US Chamber of Commerce.
While many job advertisements are filled with language about ”purpose” and ”meaning”, Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth Lotardo say the realities are often very different. They suggest ways of keeping the original inspiration alive.
Today, recruitment ads are filled with language about purpose and meaning.
“Be part of something bigger than yourself” and “Come change the world with us” are tempting rallying cries.
Yet, most jobs have elements that are tedious, and dare we say it, even boring. When you have to make cold calls, fill in timesheets, or show your boss how to rotate a PDF, it can feel hard to maintain that connection to a larger purpose.
In our experience, one reason most organisations miss out on the full emotive and economic benefits of purpose is that employees are unable to make a connection between the stated corporate purpose and their individual roles.
This emotional disconnect doesn’t happen because the organisational purpose is inaccurate, or even the leadership doesn’t believe in it.
Keeping a feeling of higher purpose alive in the face of daily operations is challenging. Even the most inspiring purposes can be waylaid by an onslaught of tasks. It doesn’t happen by design; it happens by default.
Fortunately, this is a fixable problem. When individuals and leaders establish a clear line connecting individual jobs to an organisational purpose, it enables everyone to see their part in the larger whole.
In our work with more than 150 firms, we’ve developed three strategies to help employees maintain that connection to their organisation’s larger purpose.
The meaningful impact of work can get buried in an overflowing inbox.
If you’re in a support role, for example, your deliverables are often passed around, eventually escaping your field of vision.
Taking the time to help employees see how their efforts impact others (the ripple effect) can help sustain their motivation for less-than-inspiring tasks.
Ask people to think about the activities they do regularly. Maybe they brief people on a particular subject, crunch numbers, or manage the messaging that attracts new clients.
Help employees look beyond their tasks and reflect on prompts like: What happens as a result of my work? Who is impacted? What does that enable them to do? What would happen if, all of a sudden, I stopped?
If you’re struggling to see your own ripple effect, think about who receives your work, then start asking: And then what? And then what?
While it might feel a little awkward at first, you’ll likely see that the things you do every day are connected to a larger impact.
One reason purpose can feel abstract is that it’s (seemingly) not as concrete as the performance numbers so many organisations live by. Growth targets and deadlines are easy to understand.
Framing is a technique that enables you to wrap a bow of impact around a quantitative number.
It’s more emotive, more engaging, and only takes a couple of seconds to do.
During the annual meeting of a financial services firm, we helped the leaders frame their metrics with why they matter.
The organisation’s noble purpose is: “We fuel prosperity.” Describing things this way helped them connect each contributing role to the larger purpose of the organisation.
In our work with a major hotel chain, we taught leaders how to use framing in their team meetings.
Imagine you work in housekeeping for a resort property. Which of these leadership messages would be more inspiring to you?
We need to improve our early check-in room availability. It’s only 50 per cent now.
Or, the more rooms we have available for early check-in, the more families start their vacation with a feeling of joy. They’re not fending off cranky toddlers in the lobby or wandering around staring at the clock, waiting — they unpack and hit the beach immediately.
Right now, only half of the guests are having that joyful experience. The other half are waiting, potentially for hours. What can we do to make early check-in more reliable?
When leaders started framing the human impact of early check-in, team engagement improved almost immediately.
What we celebrate, as organisations, teams, and individuals, tells us what matters.
These celebratory moments have an outsized impact on what we believe about our jobs.
Your team knows what you value by what you celebrate.
In most organisations, celebrations are internally focused on what the team or an individual accomplished.
While this feels good in the moment, it rarely has a lasting impact. You can make celebrations more meaningful and create a sense of shared purpose by connecting internal achievement to external impact.
Without a sightline to external impact, an organisational celebration can quickly descend into an echo chamber of meaningless jargon.
Instead, make the connection between why an internal ”win” mattered to someone outside of the organisation. Whose life or business is better as the result of your work?
Each task, each role, and each team plays an important part in delivering on an organisation’s noble purpose.
Without intentional connective tissue, our work can become isolated and eventually detached from the deeper meaning behind the tasks.
By articulating the ripple effect, framing metrics, and celebrating your external impact, you can help your team (and yourself) connect more deeply to your organisation’s purpose.
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. Elizabeth Lotardo is a researcher and consultant who helps organisations drive revenue and engagement.
