How Organisational Purpose Will Make You Outperform Your Competition [Infographic]
Why does your business exist? What are you out to do?
These questions seem easy to answer. But working with different businesses all over Australia for almost a decade now, we’ve observed that not all businesses are aligned with their purpose.
In fact, we’ve put members of leadership teams on the spot and asked them to define their company purpose in 60 seconds — and each one would give a different answer and couldn’t get one word aligned.
If a company’s leaders aren’t united on the game they’re playing, then the rest of the team at the other levels are less likely to do the same. When the rest of your organisation don’t share the same purpose, you’ll risk running in circles, rehashing the same strategy, and never making a significant step change.
But what exactly is an organisational purpose? And what role does it play in your business?
Purpose Defined: It’s More than a Marketing Jargon
In today’s economy, it’s hard to start a business and ensure that it thrives. This is where wildly successful companies stand apart from the rest: they have a purpose that’s beyond making a profit, and this purpose is what drives their profit.
So this is how we define organisational purpose: It is your mission inspired by your beliefs.
Purpose guides your business strategy. Unlike goals, it’s big, aspirational, and for the long-term. It needs to be short, simple, and punchy so that people can easily embrace your brand’s purpose. It should have value for your staff, customers, and shareholders. Most of all, your purpose needs to be human. It’s crucial that it goes beyond business jargon and rhetoric; it needs to really connect with people.
Here are a few examples of purpose-driven brands:
- Unilever. To make sustainable living commonplaces
- Virgin Group. David slaying Goliaths wherever they sleep
- Zappos. To inspire the world by showing it’s possible to simultaneously deliver happiness to customers, employees, community, vendors and shareholders in a long-term, sustainable way
- Airbnb. To make people around the world feel like they could “belong anywhere
Purpose-Led Organisations Are Wildly Successful (Infographic)
It doesn’t matter if you’re a big brand, a challenger, or a startup — any business can benefit from having a clear purpose. In fact, in a study by Harvard and EY, purpose-led organisations do get results especially on three critical dimensions: staff, customers, and shareholders.
Read how purpose boosts staff retention, customer satisfaction, and shareholder buy-in here.
Originally published at the Step Change Blog.
