Meaningful Starts with Why

Hi there! Miss me? Well, I missed you. I’ve been helping a team deal with a difficult challenge and there hasn’t been a lot of time for blogging these past five months. Someday I’ll talk more about that challenge, after gaining the important perspective that time provides.

Today we’re going to talk about Purpose. Purpose is the magic elixir behind any meaningful activity. Purpose is the powerful WHY that powers us to greatness. It’s the jet fuel for our rocket, the nitrous oxide for our dragster, the hot fudge on our sundae.

Purpose is the first thing I would tell my younger self to pay more attention to.

My first real encounter with the power of purpose started with a surprising problem that a friend related.

“I’m dealing with an unusual problem at work”, he said. “My employees have started getting tattoos of our company logo on their bodies and I’m not sure how to handle that in our employee handbook. Oh, and the really weird thing is that our customers are starting to tattoo our logo on their bodies too.”

Um, WTF! I wanted to know not just What TF, but HOW TF. What business could you be in to convince your customers and your employees to tattoo your logo on their bodies in permanent ink? My first thought was sex, drugs and rock and roll. A lot of it. For free.

Nope. My friend’s business sold banking software. No, I’m not kidding. What WHY could possibly be powerful enough to convince you to tattoo your banking software provider’s logo on your body? What’s the magic ingredient that drives that kind of engagement?

Yup, it’s chocolate. No, I’m kidding, of course it’s a powerful purpose. His company’s higher purpose was ancient: it was David and Goliath. His banking software helps small community banks compete with the big corporate banks. Everyone connects with the little guy in a meaningful way.

Since everyone needs more engagement with customers and employees, I took that lesson back to my office. And dang if it didn’t work. Okay, nobody started getting tattoos, but that’s a really high bar. We kept asking ourselves why our mission was important and then we started talking about it. I saw with my own eyes how a meaningful purpose can bring people together.

Being an engineer at heart, I started looking for data about why the WHY works. What’s the research behind the magic elixir? My first stop was my go-to for knowledge about organizational thriving: The Center for Positive Organizations (https://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/). And there’s no more knowledgeable and inspirational speaker about Purpose than Bob Quinn. As I mentioned in Practically Positive, Bob and his colleagues studied the heck out of purpose:

People who dedicate themselves to the realization of a higher purpose report higher levels of meaning in life and have higher scores on happiness, well-being, life satisfaction, life control, and work engagement; and lower scores on negative affect, depression, anxiety, being a workaholic, suicidal ideation, substance abuse, and the need for therapy.

One of my favorite thought leaders, Daniel Pink, describes how meaningful purpose is one of the three drivers of intrinsic motivation – what drives us to deliver greatness. I pulled one of my favorite quotes from his book Drive about the power of Why:

It’s in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now being revealed and expressed on a scale that is demographically unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable. The consequences could rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.

Another favorite thought leader, Simon Sinek, is famous in part because of his Golden Circle. In 2009, Simon Sinek introduced this concept in his TED talk, “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” Why is famously at the center of the Golden Circle. He connects Why with the limbic center of our brains which is responsible for feelings, behavior, decision making and emotional connection. A higher purpose connects scientifically with humans.

Well, now that I was truly aware of higher purpose, I started to see its magic everywhere.

In my last 20 years as CEO, we closed nine acquisitions and looked at nearly 100 possible deals. We beat the industry average for successful mergers by a good margin. As I thought back on that, the reason we did was because we kept the powerful Why at the center of every deal. If there wasn’t a powerful reason for combining, beyond money, we didn’t pursue the deal.

When we started Austin Together (www.austintogether.org), we kept purpose at the center. Austin Together enables sustained collaborations that strengthen the nonprofit community to create better outcomes for Central Texans. During our first two years, we made 27 grants to 40 organizations, helped explore 13 collaborations, and supported the implementation of four mergers.

Our process focuses first on jointly developing a powerful Why that provides the fuel for working through the more difficult What and How involved in successfully implementing any collaboration. A powerful why gives you the energy for the long haul.

Have you ever worked on a really complex project? Tried to bring a broad group of people together to solve a wicked problem or drive organizational change? How successful were you? How did you go about bringing people together to go all in?

Chartering is a critical tool of professional project management and often applied to difficult problems, projects and changes. One thing I love about the chartering process is that it begins with developing a compelling Why that will unite everyone around this project and its objectives.

Speaking of objectives, if you are a proponent of OKR, the goal-setting methodology pioneered by Andy Grove at Intel and adopted by Google among many others, then you know that every Objective must have a compelling why.

Theory about successful organizational change often centers around Why. Chip and Dan Heath’s excellent book Switch offers the analogy about the elephant, the rider and the path. No matter how hard the rider beats the elephant, it’s going where it wants to go. You have to reach the heart - you have to have a powerful Why - to motivate the elephant to go in the direction you want.

A mentor once told me: Don’t go to a meeting without your agenda. How often have you sat in a meeting and wondered “Why the heck am I here?” It happens everywhere, every day. We say that time is our most precious quantity, then we sit wondering why we’re wasting it. It shouldn’t matter if you’re being paid for your time – waste is waste.

An agenda should begin with the compelling reason why we’ve gathered so much talent in one place. What great things are we trying to achieve today? As a retired guy, I have the luxury now of not attending something that doesn’t have a compelling purpose. Can’t we all try to put a compelling why at the center of our attendance or at least consider not attending?

Having trouble finding a powerful why? The 5 Whys method is part of the Toyota Production System. Developed by Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese inventor and industrialist, the technique became an integral part of the Lean philosophy. While it works for solving efficiency problems, it also works for honing in on a powerful Why for whatever you’re endeavoring to do.

If you’ve read any of Practically Positive, you know where I’m going to finish up: Bringing it home.

What’s the purpose of your family? What guides how you live your family life? What’s at the center that will unite you as a unit when times get tough. (And they will inevitably get tough at some point.) What’s the why behind your partnership at home?

And finally, the most difficult question of all: Why am I here? What am I meant to do? Why did God put me on this earth? This is a life’s work, so I would tell my younger self to get going on it as soon as possible and don’t stop until you take your last breath.

A compelling purpose is the magic ingredient in everything that’s good – find it!