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Engaging with a Sense of Purpose: Find Your Sweet Spot – A Guide for Individuals and Organizations with Dan Pontefract, Chief Envisioner, TELUS
What is the purpose effect? Quite frankly, it’s the intersection between personal purpose, organizational purpose and role purpose. And when that happens it’s the sweet spot. The sweet spot for you, the organization and ultimately society.
Personal Purpose
Famous Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote to be that self which one truly is, is something to first think about when you’re trying to figure out our own personal purpose. So the three questions I want you to think about are as follows. What are you about? What are the attributes, the values, the likes, the dislikes? Get it on a piece of paper and say what am I about? What do I want to be about? The second one is who am I? Who am I trying to be? Who are those people I aspire to? Who are those things in myself that I want to change? And then the last question is how. How am I going to show up each and every day in this life of mine?
But it actually has to for me start with a definition statement. I call it the declaration of purpose. And so for example mine has been since 1995 we’re not here to see through each other. We’re here to see each other through. And that north star if you will has carried me through careers and K-12 education, higher education and the corporate world for the past 15 years. That to me not just that statement but for you to develop that, that can become your arbiter of whether or not you’re on the right journey, that pathway to bliss, that pathway to purpose. Once you do that anything, anything is achievable.
Organizational Purpose
There are far too many organizations sadly that are employing what I might refer to as bad deeds. And that is they’re only serving the interests of shareholders. I’d like to see a higher purpose for the organization. And to do so I actually call it the good deeds. And the DEEDS is an acronym and it’s as follows. How do we delight our customers? We’ve got to remember the only reason we’re in business or in the case of not for profit or public sector, why are we in business with the citizens is to serve the citizens or to serve the customer. So let us always remember we should delight the customer. The second part to DEEDS is E is engage your employees. We know all too well that levels of disengagement and not engage is at an all-time high, almost 70 percent in America, 87 percent globally. We know as well there’s a causal relationship between engagement and business results. So if an organization isn’t engaging with its employees it’s not going to have a higher purpose that’s for sure.
The third component is E, ethical. Be ethical at all times. I mean it goes without saying but there’s far too many reports again where the ethics of the organization comes into question because they’re either trying to uphold profitability or shareholder return. Or in some cases power. Power for title. Power for bureaucracy. Power for – fill in the blank. The fourth component is D and that is to deliver fair practices in your organization. Those are things like why do we have the annual performance review. Grading everybody on a number of some sort where it looks like it’s grade 12 report cards again. Shouldn’t feedback and performance be continuous on a weekly, daily basis? That’s to me a fair practice. And then the last one I think perhaps is the most important of the good deeds and that’s serve all stakeholders. You see when a company or an organization decides that they’re going to just serve shareholders it’s missing the plot. We ought to be serving in no particular order however our customers, our employees and society.
And when we do serve those three, guess what? By extension we are actually serving the shareholders or the power holders of the organization because they win. When the organization says yes, we’ll serve employees, customers and society equally then the return will always be for those shareholders or those power holders. So that’s the good deeds.
Role-based Purpose
So once you’ve defined your sense of personal purpose. Once ideally you’re working at an organization that has a higher purpose hopefully you have a purpose mindset. We’ll come back to that. But when things aren’t in alignment, when you’re not in a sweet spot you will actually fall into one of two other mindsets. A job mindset or a career mindset. So here’s how that looks. A job mindset will just feel like a paycheck. It’s very transactional. You just punch it in. You’re punching out. And the reasons for falling into that job mindset usually come because you’re disengaged, you’re disenfranchised, you’re disillusioned with either yourself and/or the organization that has power mongers, hierarchical bureaucracy, they’re not listening to you, fill in the blank. That’s a job mindset. Very sad. Equally sad however is the career mindset. Now don’t think of career in this case as what people would call career development. Think of this as what I call girth.
So when people are in the career mindset they’re actually trying to extend girth. And girth comes in several forms such as title. People trying to climb the ladder for a fancier title. Pay. People pushing people out of the way so that they can get more pay, more remuneration. Budget. People actually hoarding ideas so that they can look good in front of their boss so that they get a higher budget for the next year. These types of trappings that are systemically found in the organization create lots of leaders who have that career mindset. So when you have a portion of the organization in the job mindset aided and abetted by those leaders who are aspiring to the career mindset then you have a lack of purpose. But if you have an alignment between your personal purpose, for example, one of higher purpose the organization’s good deeds – and you feel good about this. You’re being listened to, feel good in your life. It’s all working copacetically you’re now in the purpose mindset and you’re going above and beyond the call of duty in your role. You are a transparent individual in that role. You’re almost altruistic. It doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like it’s your life. So there’s this life-work integration. Not work-life balance when you’re in the purpose mindset. And ultimately both you and the organization are then in the sweet spot.