Purpose Focused Leadership
A common mistake for leaders is to conflate what motivates them with what motivates the individuals in their team. As a result, leaders can struggle to recruit, engage and retain their high performers.[i] For this reason, managers must be intensely curious about why their people chose their respective careers, why they do what they do and why they do it with this organization instead of any other. Dave Crawford, Executive of Ride Engineering for Disney Imagineers, continuously returns to these questions for his team, ‘Are you encouraged that you are on the right path? Am I developing you in the right manner and direction for that path?’ All manner of actions and development opportunities become clearer and personal based on the answers to those questions. Too many companies assume that an annual review or personal development plan is based solely on the person’s current role, time in role and assumed next role. But careers today are far less linear and predictable than they were even twenty-five years ago. To be curious about motivation and one’s paradigms about work-life, how people like to be managed or how they see their career progressing is to be attuned to motivation. And to be attuned to motivation is to facilitate an environment where innovation may thrive.
Do not assume that the answers you may receive to these types of ‘purpose’ questions are static either. They can and do change over time, and this is increasingly common. So it’s necessary to keep returning to asking, sense checking, and testing your assumptions if you truly understand your people today versus six months ago. I would even suggest beginning every review, development and feedback conversation with these types of questions because they provide very useful context for the manager to adapt and give rationale for why they may be giving this feedback or suggesting this development plan beyond the anodyne reason, ‘Well, the company says so.’
Any project you give to a direct report will be more engaging to them if you can explain how it fits within and develops their purpose. There are all manner of projects, shadowing, coaching, mentoring, secondments or international placements that all of a sudden become intriguing if you can create a golden thread between the activity and the individual’s purpose. Your approach is of course more human and personal, and you have also helped the person clearly to understand how their company helps them to achieve their dreams, and how doing what they do in turn contributes to the organisation’s mission. There is no greater engagement and retention tool that leaders have at their disposal.
Adam Kingl is an author, keynote speaker and educator. His books are Sparking Success (Kogan Page) and Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins). For more, please visit his website, www.adamkingl.com.
[i] For more on this theme, see my book Next Generation Leadership (New York: HarperCollins, 2020).
