Practical interventions from the ground up can help organisations and teams to clarify, align and act on their purpose, write Saïd Business School's Steve Mostyn and Marc Ventresca.
At Saïd Business School, we believe that organisational purpose drives superior performance.
First, having a strong sense of purpose contributes to the wellbeing and happiness of our people. In addition, individuals who align their personal purpose with that of their organisation are considerably more productive than those who experience the absence of, or disconnection from, purpose.
Our extensive research has enabled us to develop interventions that help organisations and teams to clarify, align and act on their purpose.
A straightforward way to start is through a three-step facilitated workshop to engage and create an energised feedback loop with our own teams and learn more about our peoples’ purposes. Part of this could be extended into an organisation-wide cascade initiative.
Test your organisation’s espoused purpose, with no prompting or pre-reading. Ask the team to describe the essence of your purpose on sticky notes. This provides feedback on alignment of stated purpose and what teams really think.
Ask team members to outline their personal purpose. The late American academic Clayton Christensen said that “asking students to take time to figure out life purpose is the most important thing they will have discovered”.
This is a simple written exercise, but allow 30 minutes. Share outcomes and reflect on how many of the individual purpose statements reflect the firm’s purpose.
Ask each team member to rate how (on a scale of 0-100) their own purpose aligns with the firm’s. This step will reveal what the firm needs to do to create greater purpose.
For organisations that have moved past this stage, more advanced interventions help them to turn their purpose into strategy, and into operating principles, that leverage the energy and alignment that comes from shared understanding and meaning at all levels.