What Is Your Purpose?
It is important to know the answer, because your purpose forms a beacon and source of stability in these uncertain times — not just for yourself but as a shared outlook on life also for your team and customers.
How do you answer this question, “What is your purpose?” or Simon Sinek’s version “Start with why”? It is a very hard one to answer and many struggle with it. You can try and weasel your way out of answering it by saying that it is above your pay grade and something your executive or senior leadership team is responsible for.
What if your leadership team can’t tell you the answer or it is a confusing answer or it is not inspiring, or you are part of the leadership team and others are looking to you for clarity? In that case, you’re back to square one and you’re still lost in a sea of disruption and uncertainty — perhaps just like your customers, unless your competitor does a better job of communicating why they’re there for them.
What are you fighting for?
This question of “what is your purpose or your why?” becomes easier to answer when you phrase it differently: “What are you fighting for?” Not against, but for. It is more visceral, easier to visualize and more inspiring. It is also a question that you can legitimately ask and answer when you are not an executive but a leader at a lower level in an organization, such as a head of a function or a team leader. Key then is to ensure that your fight is aligned with the organization’s.
Go one level of detail deeper and you start to realise that a fight for something is the result of a human experience, belief or value that has shifted towards a negative value in a particular context. It’s your customers’ desire to shift it back towards a positive value in order to live the life they aspire to. Your role as a leader — as an organisation or brand — is to guide them towards that aspirational life by means of the products or services you create for them. Nike’s ad with Colin Kaepernick is a remarkable example of a values-driven fight.
Or take Harley Davidson. Their customers, like many of us, are exposed on a daily basis to the many social demands to fit in, to conform, and to like what everyone else likes. But that is not what their customers want to feel. They don’t want to be sheep. They want to break free from it all. They want to be black sheep: to do their own unique thing and be themselves. Harley Davidson builds motorcycles for them to do and feel exactly that.
What human experience, belief or value gets your heart beating faster? What injustice or barrier to an improved life do you want to remove? What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning and passionate to fight for with or on behalf of your customers?
That’s your purpose.
