Finding your Drive: How Identifying Job-Specific Motivators Can Lead to Greater Career Satisfaction

In our daily lives, professional or personal, we all do things in a certain way – we each have our own methods, processes, and practices. But we don't often take a minute to stop and think about why we do these things – the overarching purpose for our actions.

Companies often establish a purpose statement to provide a shared meaning for the organization's actions. From a personal perspective, defining your own purpose is a way to help connect your actions to a greater goal and motivate yourself.

So if you're asked, "Why do you do your job?" it's helpful to think about how you connect to your role and what motivates you to fulfil it every day.  Clarifying your purpose could help you feel more engaged, productive and ready to articulate factors that are important to you in your current – and future – job.  Inspired by the questions and ideas explored in Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek, I recommend finding a concise statement or tagline of deliberately chosen words to help you illustrate the ‘why’ factor.

For example, answering this question as Senior Vice President and Chief Auditor, my ‘tagline’ or purpose statement would be: “Working with a great team and providing insights into key risks around the corner.”   

Here is how I break that purpose down.

A great team.

What do I mean by a ‘great team’? At TD, we are part of a complex organization, with high ambitions and expectations and a history of achieving success. The people I work with are nothing less than great. 'Team', to me, represents collaboration, but not just any collaboration – it must be purposeful. In Audit, our team is inclusive and most importantly, its sum is greater than its individual parts, because of each individual working together cohesively.

Providing insight.

'Providing insight' is the unique value we bring across my team. We can offer information about what do we see and sometimes more importantly what do we not see. Connecting the dots is what matters. In Audit, we’re in a unique position because we have access to the entire bank. Very few teams if any have this unique perspective. And because of it, we’re able to see broad themes and offer rich insight.

The risk factor.

The word ‘risk’ can elicit a feeling of excitement or fear, depending on your perspective. Unless you manage risk properly, you won’t have sustainable growth.  We can’t spend our time on all possible risk – it would be insurmountable, and some risk is unavoidable. Our focus needs to be on identifying and providing insight on risks that really matter, which is why 'key' is part of my tagline too.

Looking ahead – and around the corner.

Last but not least, I include ‘around the corner’, which signifies looking forward. Telling your stakeholders there is a problem because of something that has already happened is easy (and also redundant).

Understanding what the incident can tell us about its root cause and why it happened, on the other hand, is more difficult and also more important. By understanding the cause, we can better understand what needs to be done to fix it and prevent a bigger issue from happening in the future.

My personal tagline will make sense to those who work in Audit – but what about you? It may take some time to think about your own purpose and by extension why each task is integral to your role and that of your team. But it's worth it. By defining your purpose, you’ll find clearer meaning in your day-to-day activities, connecting them to what matters, both to yourself, your organization and your team.

What is your role tagline? What components of your role best illustrate what you enjoy doing every day? Share your tagline in the comments below!