To Make the Most Impact, Align Your Company with Its Purpose
To Make the Most Impact, Align Your Company with Its Purpose
The following is adapted from The Problem Isn’t Their Paycheck.
Countless articles and studies have touted the importance of purpose. A Deloitte study found that, in the United States, 87.7 percent of employees are not working up to their full potential. In the survey, the 12.3 percent who were working up to their potential had one important thing in common: they had a purpose.
If you want your employees to perform at their best, they must feel as if their work matters, as if it has a purpose. You can give that to them.
But for a purpose to be effective, it can’t simply be words on a website. It must be something that is woven into your company’s culture—something your employees live and breathe.
In this article, I will share how you can do exactly that by giving your employees freedom and affirmations in a way that is aligned with and reinforces your company’s purpose.
Align Freedom with Your Company’s Purpose
Unifying your team around your company’s purpose starts with giving them freedoms that allow them to better serve that purpose.
I run a mortgage, insurance, and investment management company. I don’t care how much my staff is on their phones, playing video games, taking breaks, or going on vacation—as long as they are completing our company’s purpose: loving people through finances. As the leader, you can see, “If I give them this freedom, it helps them pursue our unified purpose better.”
To selflessly and genuinely serve people, you have to sacrifice—a lot. It can wear on you and your team. My team serves people, which means they have to be ready to talk to people at almost every hour of the day, every day of the week. My advisors answer phone calls, emails, and text messages, engaging in conversations with customers, even on nights and weekends sometimes. Why? Because that’s the best way to serve the customer.
I give my team the freedom to manage their workday because I know that there are rare occasions when they’re answering their phones at nine o’clock on Saturday night when a client calls them. Why do I do that? Because that’s the best way to serve my team, who is serving our clients, pursuing our unified purpose, and making a difference in our community. Giving them this freedom helps them serve selflessly.
I give that extra amount of freedom so they can love people better.
To give your team the freedom they need, you have to understand your company’s purpose and how it will be met. If you run a retail store or coffee shop, you can’t really let your team come and go as they please. But because you know what your unified purpose is, that gives you a baseline to draw from and determine the types of freedom you are able to give.
If you do run a coffee shop, for example, perhaps you give your employees the freedom to take breaks whenever they want. “But, Grant,” you may be asking, “what if they take a break when customers are coming in the door?”
Well, that wouldn’t be pursuing the unified purpose, which, for a coffee shop, likely has something to do with serving people. So if people need to be served in that moment, you don’t take a break then. But when there are moments people don’t need to be served, your employees can have some time to themselves. The freedom and purpose work together to give your team the self-management to be able to act without taking cues from you.
Align Affirmations with Your Company’s Purpose
To reinforce your company’s purpose, every time you affirm your team, every time you celebrate with them, point it toward your purpose. I often find myself saying, “Let’s celebrate together because we loved people through finances. We made a huge impact on people.” It’s not about, “Hey, let’s celebrate because we hit this number.” It’s always celebrating that we are living out our unified purpose.
This not only allows you to connect accomplishments and affirmation to work that matters on a big level, it also allows you to celebrate and affirm the smaller things too. I might say, for example, “You guys! Every single one of our reviews has been responded to by someone on our team. That means that each one of those people knows that their review has been seen and heard. That is loving. Well done!”
When you give affirmations in line with a unified purpose, you make it clear that your purpose is more than words. You show that pursuing and fulfilling the company’s purpose is rewarded. The things that are rewarded are the things that your employees will do, so by affirming in alignment with your purpose, you help weave your purpose into your company’s culture.
Point Everything toward Your Purpose
Every single task that you do should be aligned with your company’s unified purpose. At Stewardship, we can test every task by saying, “We do this because it leads to that, which then allows people to be loved.” By pointing everything toward your purpose, every single member of your team feels the importance of each task they complete and how it makes an impact on others.
When their tasks are connected to purpose, your employees will no longer come to work simply to get a paycheck. They will be excited to come in, because they genuinely care about their work, which is the key to unlocking their full potential.
For more advice on aligning your company to a unified purpose, you can find The Problem Isn’t Their Paycheck on Amazon.
Grant Botma is the founder of Stewardship and the leader of its nationally ranked team of top producers. Thanks to a thriving company culture, Grant’s team has won numerous awards, including national performance rankings like “Top 1%” and “Top 100.” Grant’s leadership has also grown Stewardship to be an Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company In America. He lives in Arizona with his wife, Jodie and their three children, Cambria, Parker, and Ellenie. To learn more about Stewardship, visit moneywellrooted.com.
