Read time: 3.41 mins
How To Align Your Purpose to Your Business Leadership
There’s a growing need for highly skilled leaders who can navigate complexities, empower their teams to succeed, and instil organisational purpose. “Many of us are realising that running companies for money isn’t enough,” says Andrew White, Guest Expert on the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme. “I think many of us are looking for something more, and that has an implication for leaders.”
Watch Andrew explore the importance of leadership with purpose in this video.
Transcript
So I want to paint a picture, and that picture is you. And I want you to imagine that you fold your laptop down, perhaps put them in your bag. You leave the building where you work. You get into your car or onto a train or a bus, and you go back to your home. You make yourself, maybe, a cup of tea or coffee, or maybe take a glass of wine, and you sit down. And at this point, you’ve just worked the last day you will ever work. And you start to sit with the realisation that maybe that time earned you a lot of money, built a retirement fund, but could have all been a bit soulless. Maybe you got to that point, or you’ll get to that point, and find that you never gave voice to your values; you never found your personal purpose as a leader; you never took on roles or worked in an organisation that really gave a chance for that to manifest.
And let me bring you back to today. I would suggest to you that you have a choice. And you have a choice in terms of whether or not you lead in a way that’s aligned with your purpose and values, or not. And that that will have consequences for you.
Why your purpose matters
So, let me take you through why this is important, and why I think so many people are asking this question.
Many of us are realising that simply running companies and running organisations for money isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for the world in which we operate; isn’t enough for regulators. It isn’t enough sometimes even for shareholders. It isn’t enough for employees. I think many of us are looking for something more, and that has an implication for those of us who lead.
We have a responsibility, I think, first and foremost, to go internal – to understand what our values are; to understand how those values manifest as a purpose; what it is that we bring; what we’re contributing in our roles as leaders. And from there, I think, there are almost, like, three roots of a tree that we have to think about. Three things that we as leaders do that either indicate we are aligned with that purpose or we’re not aligned with that purpose.
Three ways to create alignment
The first of those is what we communicate – what we say is important. As leaders, what we know is, our words matter. So what and how we communicate is really important.
The second is how we spend our time. If what we’re communicating and how we spend our time are misaligned, it very quickly breeds cynicism – that we don’t mean what we say, in the people who look to us for leadership. So thinking through how we spend our time is important.
And then, finally, I think the third leg of that tree is the decisions that we take, or in fact don’t take. Very quickly, if we espouse a purpose in a certain area, and don’t live that, we’re going to breed cynicism again in the stakeholders of our organisations and in our employees.
So, that’s just a small insight into you, an opportunity to do a reflective exercise, and then three concrete ways to think about how your purpose is manifest in practice – time, communication, and decisions.