As a leader in the middle of an organization, it’s always a challenge to decide how much much leadership “stuff” you should really do. Do you need a vision? A mission statement? A charter? A manifesto? A set of values? The list isn’t infinite…but it’s close.
For me, I try to focus my teams on at least one key concept: a purpose. For me, a purpose is meant to be a shorter term focused statement that best encapsulates why the team matters and how it is meaningful to the organization. (Note: for me – and definitions vary – Vision statements are long-term focused and often aspirational outlining the future position of the team; Mission statements are medium term and are used to outline how the team will accomplish the shorter term purpose moving us towards the vision. Both are nice to have but not as immediately impactful as a purpose.)
Purpose statements have several key benefits. When done well they will:
- Enhance a team’s strategic alignment with broader organization, driving the organizational strategy
- Deepen the connection of each individual’s work with the other members of the team and the organization overall
- Guide team’s short term actions and performance measures
- Increase customer’s view/opinion of the service/product provided by a team (internal or external customers depending on the situation)
With all these potential benefits, the concept really takes off. Typically, purpose statements come in one of three varieties: competence based – clearly focusing on the team’s skill compared to the problem they solve, cause based – focusing on the overall cause the team is aligned around, or culture based – focusing on the team itself and shared values/norms. For my purposes, I nearly always default to competence based purpose statements, but be intentional when you chose your type of statement so it is aligned to your organization. The rest of the conversation will be around building a competence based purpose statement, just to be clear.
To build my team’s purpose statement, I ask the team members to answer three questions individually and then share the results. I’ve used an analogy of a meal entre to help explain how the questions come together to help build your purpose statement.
First: What characteristics define us as successful in our role as a team?
This question allows the team to reflect on what they individually see they need to be or do to create successful outcomes. Typically this will net a lot of descriptive words that are very insightful in building your purpose – kind of like the visual presentation and garnish of a meal which may or may not impact the taste but is a critical part of the experience.
Second: What do the customers of our function value the most from us?
The second question approaches success from the customer’s perspective, whether the customers are internal or external. The team internally may think X is important, but what do our customers truly value? This question often leads to the real meat of the purpose statement as it defines what customers value and thus what you want your short term focus to be aligned with. A purpose that serves the team but not your customers is worse than not having a purpose at all.
Third: What is it most imperative that we do for the organization? (or similarly – If we weren’t here, what would the organization miss most?)
This question is meant to uncover underappreciated foundational work that your team accomplishes that may not be the sexy thing the organization overtly values, but is critical to keep the proverbial lights on and/or excel at a broader level. In cases where your team does less headline-grabbing work, this question ensures you’ll capture the critical stuff that may not get the headlines/value statements but is nonetheless important. If question 2 is the meat of the purpose statement meal, this question provides all the side dishes.
With the responses to all three questions, you do some quick facilitated brain storming for themes and key concepts/words. From there you almost begin to “mad-lib” a comprehensive statement pulling in key components for all three parts. Currently I lead a forecasting and capacity planning team, and we landed on the following purpose for our team:
“To effectively provide planning insight enabling favorable outcomes for both our internal customers and GoDaddy’s 20+ million entrepreneurs.”
It was a combination of our key value proposition (providing planning as a service), our key characteristics (effective – think accurate, insight – think more than delivering numbers but also advising on strategic direction), and our impact on the broader organization (enabling favorable outcomes for our internal and external customers). It also checks the box on the 4 expected benefits: aligns with org strategy, connects individual work to something bigger (internal and external customer outcomes), guides our performance (effective = accurate), and enhances customer’s view of the team (insight = strategic partnership).
With this, the team has a cause to rally behind that they were crucial in building. I wouldn’t expect to see your team’s purpose on tshirts or bumper stickers, but if you build it together, everyone believes in it, and you intentionally revisit and remind folks of it regularly, it absolutely can help be a guide for all on the team in their day to day efforts – it really is a purpose.
View from the Middle 