The Power of Personal Purpose
For heart-led businesses to make a positive difference, it’s vital to make the space for personal purpose and organisational purpose to find each other.
We all know that a strong and well-defined organisational purpose can transform a company’s fortunes. But how much attention do we really pay to the connection between what’s in our hearts and what we do every day at work?
At The House, we believe that a sense of personal purpose lurks in all of us, whether we consciously articulate it or not.
Personal purpose goes deeper than our job satisfaction, and is more dynamic and propulsive than our personal values. It’s what makes our eyes light up when certain projects and opportunities come on the horizon. It’s what keeps us yearning, searching for and finding ways to become the best version of ourselves.
It belongs to us and it comes from the heart. And when it gels with the mission of the places where we work, it’s what sparks those incredibly powerful moments when we truly stand up and say, “I’m in.”
We see it in leaders like Danone’s Emmanuel Faber, JoJo Maman Bebe’s Laura Tenison MBE and Patagonia’s Rose Marcario: people whose private stories and passions become the foundation and impetus for creating game-changing businesses. But we also see it in the thousands of employees who come in every day to work for them. Employees whose care and concern for people and planet finds an outlet, something to latch onto, in their work.
When you are employed to live your personal purpose, you are able to live your truth at work: to understand what the organisation you work for means, and to see your own story in it.
This unleashes an amazing energy. Not only will you lead genuinely, but you’ll also lead dynamically. The more that employees see, feel and act through a true alignment of personal purpose and company mission, the greater the discretionary energy, the commitment and the openness that is then freely given.
So what’s stopping you?
It sounds like a no-brainer. But that link and alignment between personal and organisational purpose isn’t as simple and straightforward as it looks. Neglect it, and even businesses with a strong sense of social mission can start to feel drifty, discombobulated or simply stuck.
It’s a classic “growing pain” for a business that has achieved early success and is now scaling up. The founder of a mission-led business will usually find a natural alignment between personal and organisational purpose — after all, that’s why they set the business up in the first place. The real challenge comes in then turning mid-level managers into purpose-driven leaders, and finding the pool of “purpose activists” within the organisation who will energise the company around purpose, and bring personal and organisational purpose together.
So as a business leader, how can you make purpose personal — for you, and for everyone else? Here are our tips:
#1 Co-create organisational purpose by connecting to the heart
Truly effective purpose doesn’t come just from leaders planting a flag and hoping that people will flock to it. Yes, your company’s purpose must inspire and unify, but a key part of that is making sure that people have an opportunity to see their story in it, and draw the connection between personal passion and collective endeavour.
After all, the relationship between my personal purpose and the organisation’s will not be the same as your personal purpose and the organisation’s. That’s OK! If there are 52 employees, there will be 52 kinds of truth, all united around one common intent, all living their purpose through the purpose of the organisation — that’s the magic.
#2 Create the space for stories to unfold
How do you create space within your business for these conversations?
There are many effective approaches to use. One of our favourites is to present individuals with provocations around “YOLO”: in other words, facing up to the fact that “you only live once”.
This can take the form of simple personal purpose interviews, curated walks through the countryside, or in some cases, deep immersion experiences that bring people face-to-face with the social issues that underpin a brand’s mission.
We’ve taken senior leaders from major brands into surprising new environments, introduced them to people who have told them powerful stories, and seen them grapple with their own pasts and emotional drivers — leading to incredible, heartfelt transformations in how they understand and live their personal purpose.
#3 Bring it all together
Once thoughts and feelings have begun to flow on an individual level, we bring leaders together to share their personal purpose reflections with each other. That’s where we start to find commonalities and emergent stories.
Through this, people can really connect to their personal passions and develop the relationship between those and the company’s mission. This can create moments of real magic, where people who have worked side by side for years reveal things they’ve never said before, and colleagues start to grasp the shared beliefs that bind them together.
#4 Make the space safe by leading with authenticity
For an employee to think and talk about personal purpose, they have to make themselves vulnerable. If they feel the leader or senior leadership team is inauthentic, they will be less willing to expose themselves by sharing personal stories.
Trust is key. So before you ask your team to share their stories, ask yourself: when’s the last time you told them yours?
This is why authentic storytelling has become such an important leadership skill. Building and sharing a story that’s true to you, that links to the organisational story, will create the trust to open up the space your employees need to discover and share their own stories.
#5 Ground yourself in your own personal purpose
Of course, none of the above works unless you, as a leader, can clearly grasp what is in your heart. We are all meaning makers, looking for something true within the ambitions of the organisation — and that goes for leaders, even founders, too. As your business grows, your relationship to it will change and evolve. It’s OK to check in from time to time, to look afresh at whether what matters to you is still aligned to the direction and mission of what you have built.
How we can help: introducing Mandy Chooi
We’re delighted to that Mandy Chooi, a world-class expert in leadership development, has joined The House as an associate to help us foster cultures of authentic leadership at mission-led businesses.
Below, Mandy explains how she worked with leading bank ING to create a culture of alignment between personal and organisational purpose.
Q. How did you develop purpose-driven leadership at ING?
At ING, we gave all of our leaders the opportunity to discover their personal purpose and create a life plan — a holistic, integrated plan that goes beyond work. Because if you want people to bring their whole selves to work, you in turn need to respect and support their whole lives, including all of their interests. Companies must start to embrace this — don’t just look at someone’s current role, help them develop holistically as a person.
Q. What do these life plans look like?
If you were to live your purpose for the next five years, what would that look like? Who would support you? What do you want to do more of, what do you want to do less of? What are the milestones in the years in between? That’s what the plan captures.
We’ve taken over 7000 people through a weeklong, offsite programme to develop their purpose and plan. And after that, we continue to support them with living that plan. The plan doesn’t just gather dust, we go back to it every couple of months, interspersing support, coaching, and establishing the expectation to revisit it within their own teams regularly, to keep it going.
Q. Do you ever encounter any resistance during this process?
Not in general. Although, there have been the small handful who struggle with the concept. If you’ve spent a long and successful career totally compartmentalising your life and your work, it can be a struggle to think and plan in terms of a single holistic purpose. And of course, since it’s an immersive, introspective process that you share with other people — this means that you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and trust people.
Q. How do you achieve this?
The environment and setting design helps us get over any initial reluctance. For the first hour or two you sense some hesitation in a few people, but very quickly, people drop their guard and feel safe.
The key is really to design learning experiences that are experiential. People have to really feel it.
The experience takes people from “realise”, to “confront”, to “reframe”, to “commit”. If you confront people with their own assumptions and beliefs, you can cause a real paradigm shift in which people commit to doing things differently. But people have to feel that shift, they have to feel that reframing.
All of these needs to be carefully nurtured and reinforced by putting the right practices and systems in place. In other words, how people work, make decisions, collaborate, receive recognition, etc. must all be tailored afresh to nudge and strengthen this new purpose-led way of being.
It might seem daunting to take everyone in your organisation through this kind of process, but it’s an investment that will increase the commitment and energy of every employee. And it’s also possible to train the capability for discovering and aligning personal purpose at the top, and then cascade the techniques and practices down throughout the organisation. To find out more, get in touch with us at www.thehouse.co.uk or email graham@thehouse.co.uk.
