Understanding your why: knowing your purpose and rallying others to the cause
A clear and defined purpose provides clarity and power for fast-growth businesses. Here’s how to create yours.
The early and rapid growth phase of a new business can be a rollercoaster. As an entrepreneur and founder or part-owner, the white-knuckle ride could be viewed as the cost of building and growing a successful business. But how do you maintain your energy and drive through the cycle of dizzying highs and gut-wrenching lows? And how can you motivate others in the team to maintain their commitment and drive so that business runs itself?
The answer is one word: why. Your why is the reason you get out of bed in the morning. It’s the fundamental purpose that drives everything the business stands for, and it creates the context for every decision along the way. Understanding your why helps create certainty and clarity in the fast-paced growth phase and moves you away from the natural human reactions and emotions that drive decision making under pressure.
Creating a strong why is no easy task. It contains four key elements: purpose, culture, vision, and values. The elements are interconnected; there’s no skimping on one element and thinking you’ll get the same results.
Purpose: the reason your business exists
This is ground zero. Purpose is the reason your business exists. Making money is an outcome of a business fulfilling its purpose. A clear purpose gives people – clients, employees, investors – something to believe in. Consider the outdoors clothing and equipment company Patagonia. From a small business that made tools for rock climbers (and sold them out of the back of a van), it has grown to become synonymous with outdoor sports like rock climbing, trail running, surfing, fly fishing and so on, as well as being shorthand for environmental awareness and action.
Patagonia lives and breathes its purpose of challenging the culture of consumption to protect and preserve the planet for generations. What it then does, or how it fulfills its purpose, is creating high-quality products for the outdoors that do the least harm. Whether we personally agree on the approach, or their philosophy is a moot point: from a business perspective, it works. Patagonia is a successful global brand that is inseparable from its core purpose. Purpose, clear, well defined and agreed, also drives culture.
Culture: the behavioural foundation of your business
You could liken culture to a collective personality. The question people ask, “what’s it like to work for Company X?” is not about profitability or systems, it’s about culture. Culture is the reason talented people will work for you, stay loyal to you, and devote their skills and energy to creating wealth for you. Culture can make a business a fun and fulfilling place to work. Being known for your great culture helps carve out a market position, attracting more talent to your team, as well as more clients and generating more sales.
As a founder or owner, you might also wear the title of CEO. We have a different take and call the role Chief Energy Officer. It’s your job to build, nurture, and take full responsibility for the culture of your business. Supporting the culture, and flowing from the purpose, are your values.
Values: common principles that drive people
Values can be a tricky subject. Too often relegated to the department of fluff. Yet, values are the building blocks of your shared culture, and they support your purpose. They are the common principles that drive your business and all your people to success. A strong set of values that people understand, agree to, and live by are far more effective and valuable than price promotions or paying bonuses for building and leveraging client and employee relationships. Creating values that align people and what they do requires three steps:
1. Agree as a team: These are shared values and must reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the entire team
2. Make them real: Connect the values with defined behaviours so people can relate to them in action.
3. Consciously live your values: Engrain them. Make them visible, link activity back to them, and reward outcomes based on living them
Vision: a compelling and exciting direction
The fourth piece of the puzzle that helps create a compelling why, is vision. Vision provides impetus with a clear direction. Vision is too often lost in ambiguity or translated into a business goal. Returning to our Patagonia example, making the best (and most sustainable) down jacket is a nice objective, or mission, but it’s not the vision. The vision is the loftier, but more motivating, statement around being part of the solution for the environment. When Martin Luther King stood in front of a quarter of a million people in Washington Mall in August 1963, he did not say, “I have a plan”.
A great vision is compelling. People – your team and clients – can sign up to it and feel it. For the team, it’s about being able to see the vision and wonder what it would smell like and taste like to be there. If the vision is powerful enough and relevant enough to them, once they have experienced it, they will want to get there and enthusiastically work towards that goal. Like values, the vision must be shared by all and relevant to them, not something handed down from management or the CEO.
Purpose, culture, values, and vision; the four ingredients to create a powerful why. The end game is the why, fuelled by the purpose, culture, values, and vision, create a powerfully motivated team who drive the business. At some point, you can step off the rollercoaster and watch from afar as the business runs itself.