Aligning your team

(upbeat music) - [Woman] Why are we here? Employees want to know why their work matters. If you want to create a collaborative, high performing creative team, you need to rally them around a common purpose and it needs to be something bigger than the task or just simply to make money or the job function. You need to tell your team, our work here matters to someone. And what that does, putting the impact you have on others at the center of the conversation, is it taps into two fundamental human needs belonging and significance. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and we want our contributions to matter to be impactful. So, you want to tap into that as a leader. Purpose is really a hot topic in leadership right now and there's been a lot of research for a good reason. One of my former Proctor and Gamble colleagues, Jim Stengel, did some research and he found that purpose driven organizations outperform the market by up to 350%. And EY has some cool data on that too around purpose driven organizations experiencing greater customer advocacy, more innovation and greater employee satisfaction. You know, this impacts organizations, but it also has a big impact on individuals. There's research that shows purpose driven individuals, people who are guided by this strong sense of purpose. They have more successful careers and have more happiness over time. And we see that in sales a lot where performance is really easy to quantify. There's some research from Michigan State that shows that salespeople who have a belief that they're making a difference, outperform salespeople who are just in it for the money over time. And it doesn't matter what department you're in. When you're a leader. It is your job to tease out the impact your team has, their purpose and put that at the center of the conversation. If your organization doesn't have a purpose statement, some people call it a mission statement. That's okay. You can create a sense of purpose for your team. To capture that purpose, you don't have to worry too much about the wordsmithing. It's not a marketing slogan, but what you want to do is identify the impact that you have on someone besides yourselves. So, let's run through just a few simple examples. PKM, an accounting firm here in Atlanta. Their purpose is we help clients seize opportunity and reduce risk, or Roche Pharma company, they rally behind the purpose doing now what patients need next. Someone else says Atlantic capital bank, and you're going to hear from one of their VPs later in this course about goal setting and their purposes, we fuel prosperity. And what's important here, again, is clarity of impact. You want to be able to rally your team around something that says, "This is why we matter. This is the difference we are making in the world." It doesn't have to be super catchy. It could be something simple, like we help small businesses be more successful or we create a better work experience, whatever it is, land on some language and this can be your shortcut for upping the meaning into your team. And you can bring that impact into meetings and one on ones and goal setting and brainstorms. Pretty much every team interaction can benefit from calibrating to a purpose, especially in challenging times. The most important thing you can do as a leader is be clear about the impact that your team and your organization has on others, and then point your people towards making a difference.