Depth and integrity create a personal connect
This post is part of a series about how to communicate corporate purpose - Navigate the series from the first post
Tip #4 Make it about me - This is the core of humanising your purpose. After all the effort to develop and share a corporate purpose, successfully embedding it often boils downs the quality of connection you create to the purpose. Culture is formed through conversation. By encouraging people to talk and share stories to connect on an emotional level with purpose you can get well beyond basic awareness.
You can repeat your purpose statement until you are blue in the face. But it needs depth and integrity to become something people can connect with on a personal level. Depth by getting granular and relating to day to day challenges with real life examples and integrity by matching words with actions.
Depth- An individual can hear what other people think and say about purpose; leaders, peers, friends and family, but in the end does it mean something to them on a personal and individual level? Do they see how they and others contribute towards that purpose?
“A well-known story from Nasa illustrates this: ‘President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA headquarters for the first time in 1961. While touring the facility, he introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA. “I’m helping put a man on the moon!”’. That is real connection to the frontline and on an individual level. ”
Humans are always seeking patterns and working out how we fit it, it gives us purpose; our own purpose. It actually ignites something in us that is a natural and important need; to have a clear purpose ourselves and to check if other elements in our life match up with those internal drivers.
Integrity- Of course, company-wide communication needs to take a centralised approach and seeks to appeal to a diverse audience across the whole organisation but that can quickly become meaningless if it remains a central message. So, bring it to a personal level.
Share stories about personal connection to purpose and encourage more stories to be told. The key to understanding what people think and how they connect is to listen to them. Listening is one of the least used skills in business. Be intentional about every opportunity to communicate and look for the ways that you can listen better, deeper and more authentically.
I am sorry but I am going to quote Yoda; “Do or do not. There is no try”.
“Here are some of the types of questions to ask:
- Reflect on why you do the work you do?
- Who benefits from your efforts and how?
- What do you believe in?
- How are you able to put that into practice doing the work that you do?”
Either we want to hear the authentic voices of people who come to work for us every day, or we don’t. Either we are open to listening to their thoughts, inspirations and ideas or we are not. The conversations are happening anyway so you can hear them or not.
Last year an employee shared this comment with me …“I got clarity about the need to change focus from a purely commercial objective to one of responsible, caring & energy sustainable objective. It provided an opportunity to crystallize my thoughts on the inner drive behind why I come to work.”
Powerful comments like this help drive real business success!
If your organisation doesn’t articulate your purpose in a way that people I can relate to their own purpose, then they might just be off to another company, one that does!
If you need help to get create personal connections in your business, reach out to see how you can work with Humanly.
Check out the whole series on Communicating Purpose
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