Aligning Purposes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

The other day, I participated in a webinar about personal leadership given by David Bernard-Stevens (another member of the Leaders’ Cafe Foundation). One of the central messages of the webinar was that at the core of personal leadership lies your dream or purpose. You cannot lead your life, lead yourself, without first having a vision of where you want to go. To truly feel alive and important to this world, you need to find your purpose and direct your actions and energy towards it. According to David, without alignment between your life and the purpose found within yourself, you will never feel satisfied with your accomplishments.

After the webinar, I started to think about David’s purpose-life alignment message in relation to team leadership. It soon became clear to me that if misalignment between life and inner purpose brings frustration, then misalignment between team’s purpose and team member’s purpose must also brings problems. If purposes are not aligned, then the team will drive its members in a direction that will take them away from their dreams, from their purpose. The team will ask its members to spend time and energy away from their purpose which will inevitably lead to frustration and lower performance levels.

To achieve maximum team performance, team members’ purposes must somehow align with the team’s purpose. Purposes will differ slightly between team members and these differences should direct the distribution of roles within the team. It is the team leader’s role to discover team members’ purpose and align roles with purposes. The team leader also needs to align everyone’s purpose to the purpose of the team. Only then can he achieve great team performance! The best team leaders will always find a way to get to this alignment between team’s purpose and team members’ purposes. It is vital to team performance.

As a team leader, make sure that you hire people who have purposes aligned to your team’s purpose. If you don’t pay attention to this criterion as you hire people, then you will constantly have to fight an uphill battle. The “misaligned” employees will never feel motivated to work, will hardly endure setbacks, and will rarely come up with innovative ideas. The performance of the team will suffer greatly.

On the other end, if all your employees are well aligned with the team’s purpose, you will find them highly motivated, resilient, and innovative. They will help you lead the team in collaboration. You will feel comfortable delegating important tasks to your team members because you know they also have an interest in succeeding.

I believe that defining the purpose of a team and ensuring that everyone on the team aligns with that purpose is one of the most crucial tasks of every team leader. It is a fantastic motivator and insurance to success!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.