Purpose can be a powerful motivator if it is the right purpose.
Active Knowledge Question:
Do you have a purpose for being in business that actually draws to the forefront the best everyone has to offer?
Reflection
And over the past few weeks and months, everyone of your customers, employees and suppliers have stepped away from your business of yesterday, and many will have reflected on their lives, work, family and businesses. As your business reengages with its market and all its participants, a re-energised purpose may make all the difference to the success of your business.
The right purpose will draw commitment from those who work within and with your business.
The right purpose will bond customers to your brand.
The right purpose will win community support.
The right purpose underpins the competitive fitness of your business and the profits that flow therefrom.
Purpose
Role
Purpose is the cornerstone and reference point for the existence of your business.
Purpose must deliver meaning and focus on customer need and value, and, therefore, direction. The right purpose can be powerful in underpinning the long-term success of your business. A focus on purpose can do this, as:
- It clearly defines the need you are seeking to meet in the community and, therefore, keeps everyone focused on the customer value you are competing to deliver.
- Through this focus, you can become the best of the best in delivering that value and outcompete anyone else in your chosen marketplace.
- The focus on customer need can become a source of innovation and growth. It will allow you to find new ways of meeting the existing, emerging and related needs that will fuel new opportunities and growth.
- It allows you to lead change and not chase it. You are focused on your purpose and need, and, therefore, readily appreciate the impact of change and step ahead of it.
- It prevents you from chasing every opportunity that appears before you. It supports emergent strategies and can serve to challenge paradigms as they take hold in a business.
Traits
Here is a series of points, which may assist you in understanding the character and traits of purpose:
- Purpose is ‘the sport of kings’. Unity of purpose equals power.
- Purpose is most effective when it draws on moral ideas that have stood the test of time.
- Purpose connects people, colleagues, leaders, and communities to plans.
- Purpose is the cement of trust between individuals. It builds relationships and understanding.
- Purpose is the primary source of motivation, performance, and achievement.
- Purpose is the reference guide for all decision-making.
- Purpose is not a tool. It is not mission, vision, values, brand, reputation, corporate social responsibility, codes or policies, corporate governance, or strategic thinking.
- Purpose is paradoxical – it will drive profits, but only if it is pursued for its own purpose.
- Purpose is why your business exists, and what needs it seeks to meet within the community it has chosen to serve.
Does your business have a purpose, that will deliver on all these outcomes?
The ‘Why’ to ‘A Purpose’
A manifesto which captures the spirit of purpose will ignite the energy required to lift the performance of your business to levels you never thought possible.
The Why:
Businesses must exist for something more than just making profit.
They should exist for a clear purpose, and that purpose must be to meet the needs of a community of customers.
If they do that well, profit will be a natural outcome.
About Profit:
Profit is critical to the continuing success of any business and its ability to meet the future needs of a community.
But a profit-first motive seeds self-interest, politics and short-termism.
We will not lead nor work for a business that seeks to profiteer.
To Compete:
Businesses are made to Compete. They compete around the value they deliver to their customers of today and tomorrow.
And to compete to their greatest potential, they lift their people to the forefront.
They are lead by worthy leaders. Leaders who place the community, their people, and their business all before themselves.
The Best At Their Best:
Businesses that know how to compete, create the products and markets of the future.
And are always taking the value delivered to their community of customers, to a new level.
These are businesses that attract the best, who work with the best, at their best.
As your business emerges from and reforms after this economic-pause, a new energy must be ignited throughout your entire business and every one whom it touches. That energy is sparked through the right purpose for your business.
An entirely new level of performance.
Want to become a part of the Entrepreneurs+ Community and learn how to make your business competitively fit? Join now.
All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
