The importance of being Purpose Driven
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Why is it essential to have a purpose as company? How can we connect it to every day actions? A brief story about how we did it at Tienda Nube.
The first time I heard and started to pay attention to purpose in companies, was after I saw the Simon Sinek’s TED Talk, “How great leaders inspire action”. Here, Sinek introduces the concept of The Golden Circle, which I will explain very briefly, but feel free to watch the talk to have a deeper understanding.
The Golden Circle explains that every organization has a What, a How and a Why, but very few companies actually know the WHY part. This is the key to explain why some leaders or companies inspire action and others don’t. A company that knows its Why and communicates it in an inside out communication (first Why, then How, then What), is “talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do.”
Graham Kenny said: “If you’re crafting a purpose statement, my advice is this: To inspire your staff to do good work for you, find a way to express the organization’s impact on the lives of customers, clients, students, patients — whomever you’re trying to serve. Make them feel it.” And so, at Tienda Nube, we did that.
At Tienda Nube, we exist to empower people to pursue their dreams and live an entrepreneurial life.
It hasn’t been long since we established our purpose, our why, but it has certainly created a before and after in our daily work lives. Now, everybody at the company, knows why they’re doing what they’re doing and have a clear understanding of which actions contribute to our purpose and which don’t.
So, how do we transmit this purpose in our every day actions? It is not an easy task but we have come up with several initiatives that accomplish this, all of which have a common denominator: our community of entrepreneurs. I will describe some of them here.
Everyone Delivers Customer Happiness
As many companies do, we have a Customer Success & Happiness team. This team is responsible for giving customers support and clearing all of their doubts, as well as making sure that they know how to use the tools designed to help them improve their sales, thus, improving their experience and success rate.
Once a month, everyone in the company spends and afternoon working as part of this team. This activity provides everyone a close approach to our customers, allowing them to know first hand what the customers want and need. Since empathy is one of core values, this iniciative also contributes to close the breach that is usually found between engineers and sales people.
Meetings and Lunches with Customers
Every three or four weeks we invite some of the entrepreneurs in out community to our office for lunch. The idea here is to share an informal and relaxed space with them to meet them, ask them questions, hear their stories and also collect their feedback, for us to improve our work and enhance their experience.
Everyone in the company can take part in this. We find it so humanizing to finally put faces and names to the brands and know who we’re helping to grow, and it’s the same for the customers with us. They leave our office very happy and satisfied with the experience.
Customer Stories
Since we’re a remote company and not everyone can be at the office to take part of our meetings with customers, we also have their stories on video for everyone to watch! Which is also nice to save for the future :)
In addition, we use many others channels to share these stories, like a Gmail group, a channel on Slack and Whatsapp groups.
Thank You Wall
Every time we invite someone to the office (customers, partners, people from other startups, etc.) we invite them to leave a message in our Thank You Wall. We really love to see what people write and how we impact them, it’s a constant reminder of how we are changing lives.
As Emotive Brand explains, purpose brings many benefits to the table:
– Purpose-led leaders and managers work with greater passion and in a more aligned and coordinated fashion.
– Engaged and motivated employees work with greater levels of collaboration, self-initiative, and innovation.
– Customer relationships prosper from more energized and purposeful interactions with the brand and its people.
– Sales, marketing, and advertising becomes more effective as they align more to the many outcomes that flow from the brand as it actively pursues its purpose.
So, why postpone addressing the one thing that will bring all the benefits for your company? Why not use your purpose to inspire your employees and clients to follow you?
