The most important part of running a business is the people in your corner. If your team lacks drive, everything else falls apart. We spend the majority of our days in the office so we have to make sure we’re filling them with purpose.
That’s the key word here, folks: purpose. This is how we keep employees interested, engaged, and happy. If your team is more engaged, they will be more productive workers and be more likely to positively promote the company. They become more invested in long term grown both within and for the organization.
With that being said, creating this type of environment is easier said than done, but it is possible. Let’s break down three behavioral shifts from Forbes.com that help with instilling purpose into your team.
- “Lead with WHY.” First you have to find your own purpose. What is your company’s mission statement? How can you expect your team to engage more fully if you don’t have strong values at the core of your company? And after you’ve established that, you can help your team create their own motivations. They need to evaluate their goals and define success. That way you can help create an environment that will help achieve those goals. Leading with why will help you engage and, more importantly, retain good employees.
- “Take purpose off its pedestal.” Purpose means a lot of things to a lot of people. And having different purposes does not make one better than the other. It’s all perspective, really. If you look to society to measure your purpose and success, you will never live up to that it. It’s up to you, the individual person to dictate what your sense of purpose is and to find fulfillment from it.
- “Uplevel expectations.” As a general rule, you should never settle for mediocrity or a life without purpose. We have to raise our expectations if we hope to succeed long term. This applies to both the individual and the employer. It’s up to the employer to create a culture with value, drive, and benefits and it’s up to the individual to strive for greatness. We should never feel stuck with the lot we’ve been dealt. If you’re unhappy, make a change– first within yourself, and then at a greater level with your organization.
- Don’t forget to have a true conversation. This isn’t part of the Forbes article, but certainly bears stating none the less. Your employees constantly feel spoken “at” and not “with”. This is especially true with larger teams where it is impossible to have a 1:1 conversation with 100’s or even 1,000’s of employees. The good news is that there are very cool new enterprise-ready tools that allow you to safely (read “anonymously) source the truth from your team on specific subjects from the success potential of a specific strategy to the potential roadblocks of your next product launch.
Of course, nothing is ever easy, but if you’re willing to put in the work, you can do amazing things for yourself, for your team, and for your company.
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