Leading Your Team Toward A Shared Sense of Purpose

You can’t create passion in others. You can, however, nurture it. A fulfilling career requires more than just a sense of purpose, meaning, and worth—it also requires leadership that fosters growth and encourages continued development with these principles in mind.?

A key challenge for leaders in this new world of work is how to instill this sense of purpose in your employees. Or rather, how to find a shared sense of purpose. By shared purpose, we refer to an employee’s inner drive to create results that align with the company’s stated mission.?

Recent findings suggest that the quit rate is at an all-time high , and our post-pandemic landscape is a significant contributor to employee disengagement. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index indicates that 40% of the global workforce considered leaving their employer this past year alone. The solution? “...aligning the practice of management with the new will of the world's workers," according to Gallup’s largest global study of the future of work.

When looking for ways to motivate staff, your aim as a leader is to align company values and goals with personal goals. Organizational purpose has been shown to strengthen employee engagement, encouraging employees to grow with the company. This strengths-based approach promotes higher productivity and, in turn, higher profitability at a 21% increase compared to companies with lower employee engagement.

You need to help your employees understand their part in the company’s story and how their work matters beyond the transactional element of work=pay. This meaningfulness is considered a fundamental psychological need that improves overall life experience.

When looking to define your team’s purpose, bring them on board to assist with the process. This will create a sense of togetherness and set the tone of organizational purpose right from the start. Be transparent and share company goals; team members will not only see how they fit into the bigger picture, but how they can improve the picture as a whole. This deeper understanding enables team members to feel more connected to the process and demonstrates how their role contributes to personal and corporate goals.

Transformational Leadership

A transformational leader motivates employees by encouraging them to develop their strengths at work. This management style builds upon organizational purpose and revolves around trusting your employees to do their jobs, enabling them to make decisions, and avoiding micromanaging. Done well, your staff will feel empowered to bring creative solutions to the group.

Autonomous decision-making creates a company culture in which employees are encouraged to work for the common good rather than working from a place of self-interest. This approach strikes a balance between coaching, mentoring, and allowing staff to take ownership of their work.?

Be Proximate to Impact

We have a saying on the Tracking Wonder Team: Make yourself proximate to impact. That means that each team member interacts with clients, program participants, and community members so they see how their work—from bookkeeping to design work to administrative assistance—makes a positive difference in people’s lives.

Adam Grant, Wharton’s management professor, studied people in a wide range of jobs and found that there was one constant in helping people find their purpose in all cases.?

“Employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t,” says Grant , “they are vastly more productive, too.”

By immersing people in situations that allow them to feel the impact of their work, you can help them experience more meaning in their work. And from that meaning-making will come purpose. Of course, it helps if you’re the sort of person who gets fired up by personal stories and inspired by the examples of success manifested in customer experiences; as a leader, you need to be authentic for this approach to work.

This approach of immersing people in the stories and experiences of their customers has been repeatedly used to help inspire employees to discover—or rediscover—their purpose.

In Australia, Microsoft used this approach to help the team develop better solutions and better connect with the end-users needs. Managers led their teams out into the field, where they spoke with people about the company’s products to learn firsthand the impact these products had on customers’ work and lives. And it worked—employees were found to have an increased sense of purpose.?

You don’t need company field trips for this approach to work. You just need to put a face to a story that motivates employees to feel meaning in their work.?

So how do you lead your team toward a shared sense of purpose? You don’t. You establish an environment that aligns personal goals with professional goals and connects the employee to the work they produce.