Empowering Our Services Part 3: Aligning Your Purpose
Our EXPERIENCES are meaningful and help us deliver our PURPOSE motivating our people every day. So how do you ensure that the experiences you deliver are aligned to your purpose? You need to clearly understand the purpose that you have and what that purpose means. Read more here.
Our EXPERIENCES are meaningful and help us deliver our PURPOSE motivating our people every day
We hear a lot about purpose and, sometimes, you feel like it gets a lot of hype. But it gets a lot of hype because it is important. Having a clear purpose helps everyone to understand why we exist. And why we are doing the things that we do. It anchors and grounds people and helps keep us motivated.
It’s more than just buzzwords. It actually works. As such, we need to be congruent with our purpose, what we do every day and the experiences that we create.
These created experiences can be customer experiences and/or they can be employee experiences. Both are meaningful and both need to align with your purpose.
If alignment is not achieved, friction is created. This disconnect exists because people don’t believe in the message and it’s intent because it is not being carried out in the way the organisation is working. The misalignment fosters a lack of authenticity between your people, your process and your organisation.
So how do you ensure that the experiences you deliver are aligned to your purpose?
You need to clearly understand the purpose that you have and what that purpose means.
What are you trying to achieve? How is that purpose then reflected in the values of the organisation? How do you want your people to behave every day? How do you want your customers to feel?
At Three6 we are passionate about practising what we preach. Our purpose is:
“To connect and enable people and organisations to thrive and excel in an ever-changing world.”
So when I asked myself and our team these questions, this is what we came back with:
What are we trying to achieve? We really want to connect people. We want to help solve problems. We don’t just want to do things, but we want to help people and provide them with new knowledge. We want to leave the environments that we are in better than when we started.
How is the purpose reflected in our values of the organisation?
Like many organisations, we have values that we created as a team. But more importantly, we also reflect on what those values mean to us individually. We are all unique and how we interpret them and act or behave is what is important to us. We really want to harness who we are to help us live our purpose in the work that we do.
| Our values | What we say |
| Our work is excellent | We are hardworking
No pressure, no diamonds We are the wow factor We have determination |
| You see what you get | We will always be authentic
We have empathy We are open and honest We nurture We are vulnerable We trust |
| We are always learning | We will keep growing
We will challenge what we do and how we do it |
| We enable others and ourselves to make great decisions | We will be present
We make data-driven decisions We empower others |
How do we want our people to behave?
We live these values in our principles and every couple of months, as a team, we get together and talk about how we are going against living those principles, both internally and with our customers.
This is such an important step – it’s not just about having the values or the principles, but really assessing how we are going at getting there.
How do we want our customers to feel?
We want them to feel like we do – empowered, happy, fulfilled and successful.
With that in mind, we know who we are and why we exist. When mapping out your customer journey, we can overlay this with the feelings and behaviours that we are trying to achieve. You can design this into the process from the start.
This is easier when designing from the beginning, but the same ideas can be used if you are improving your process. Look back at your purpose that drives your values, and then into the experiences you want to create. Do this by analysing what experiences you have today and how they make people feel. Then assess where the gaps are and reflect on how you can improve.
Here are some key purpose statements below from some well-known companies:
LinkedIn: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
LinkedIn’s experiences should feel welcoming and they should be looking to generate opportunities..…
Disney: To entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company.
Disney’s experiences should create an environment of fantasy and, as such, their team needs to display happiness and be good storytellers. As such, Disney needs to provide employees with an environment that enables that.
Determine your purpose statement and ensure that the experience you create aligns with this purpose. What can you change? What small thing can you do today to make a difference?