Making Your Brand Promise Authentic: It Needs To Reflect Your Company Purpose and your People’s Aspirations
Firstly, it is important to state that every company has a purpose, just as every individual has a purpose. A purpose can be effectively embedded at any stage in a company’s existence but first it has to be discovered, then articulated in a way that resonates with your people and is clearly understood by everyone. If it isn’t, it will merely be window-dressing.
Purpose needs to be people driven. It has to be real, alive and something employees embrace and exhibit through the way they show up every day. While it may not be realistic that every employee actively lives the company’s purpose, it is fair to suggest that the most effective purpose driven organisations are those that demonstrate common good through collective input.
Discovering a company’s purpose, starts with engaging its people in the process, at every level of the organization and potentially including key external organizational stakeholders. At PurposeFused, we spend equal amounts of time working with people on individual purpose discovery as we firmly believe that in order to attain and sustain peak performance, employees need to be operating at the intersection of both.
So how do you discover company purpose?
Discovering purpose is similar to discovering brand purpose – like discovering most things below the surface – asking a series of open ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ questions to dig deep. Considering company purpose discovery, there clearly needs to be alignment between the company’s mission, vision, values, culture, operating priorities and people & performance management systems, in addition to of course brand purpose, so exploratory questions need to reflect this.
The PurposeFused company purpose discovery model below has been adapted from the Japanese concept of Ikigai which stands for ‘reason for being’, which was popularized in a book entitled Ikigai The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life (Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles 2017).
We start by asking the four headline questions, which frame the process of structured deeper questioning:
What do we love?
What impact do we want to leave in the world?
What drives our profit
What are we best at?
Company Purpose Discovery Model, PurposeFused 2020. Adapted from the Japanese concept of Ikigai
As the model demonstrates, there are three levels of intersecting circles but only in the last are all four components overlapping (let’s call this Level Three – the bullseye at the center of the model). Level Three therefore represents the company’s purpose, and it is here at the epicenter of experiences through which employees individually realize their potential, and collectively, the company attains peak performance and delivers meaningful social impact.
As it is helpful for designing your discovery questions, the other two levels of intersection are worth understanding further, too:
Level One (two intersecting circles): These reflect employees’ passion, the meaning they derive from their work, the company mission (what and how you do what you do) and the value you deliver to your clients or customers.
Level Two (three intersecting circles): At this level, the company is so close to determining their purpose and certainly demonstrate some valuable benefits to group including employees, shareholders, customers, or society. However, the company is not in a position to sustain that benefit or satisfy all its key stakeholders, because one element is missing. Here is our synopsis of the features of Level 3 intersections annotated by letters A – D in the model;
A – Company enjoys short term financial success, without delivering meaning or demonstrating long term impact due to lack of intent
B – Company experiences joy from meaningful work but impact is not sustainable due to lack of economic value
C – Company makes a difference but sustainability and impact are uncertain and unstable due to competitors being able to do it better
D – Company makes a difference for a while but never achieves peak performance due to lack intrinsic drive from employees
More specific questioning into these areas and engaging multiple levels of employees and a selection of key organizational stakeholders, should help determine the final elements of the proposed final company purpose.
Once you have discovered the magic and essence of your purpose, you will want to ensure it fits seamlessly within the organizational system and with your brand purpose.
We will explore this further in our next article “Integrate these 3 As for Your Brand to live with purpose and drive sustainable growth”.
About PurposeFused
At PurposeFused, we use purpose to unlock people’s potential to optimize their performance and impact. We act as Purpose Partners with organizations, individual leaders and teams to solve immediate challenges while driving long-term value. We do this by inspiring people and organizations to establish meaningful objectives fused with purpose, so they can be intentional about the positive impact they aspire to have on themselves, each other and society as a whole. Everything we do is at the intersection between people, purpose and performance, with the vision of making a meaningful contribution to a better world with purpose.
Did you miss PurposeFused at Agency Growth Events Season ONE?
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Watch📹 “The Personality of Purpose” by Mark Griffin and Neil Turnham, PurposeFused.
