Book Excerpt: The Purpose Linked Organization

In an excerpt from their new book, The Purpose Linked Organization, Alaina Love and Marc Cugnon challenge businesses to leverage individuals' sense of purpose

By Alaina Love and Marc Cugnon

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What if we could take the concept of purpose statements further by applying it to the single greatest asset of any organization—its people? What if we began to explore and understand what purpose means for the individual rather than merely for the organization? What if businesses could learn to leverage individual purpose and multiply the power of its impact on motivation, creativity, and results in a way that would make a meaningful difference to both employees and organizational results?

Accessing individual purpose would release a new kind of energy for fueling success. We call it "purpose power," and it's the energy that is generated when the finely tuned corporate engine is working at its best. So just imagine the potential purpose power of an organization like Ford Motor Company, which had 300,000 employees worldwide in 2007. Imagine its impact on the generation of ideas, the development of products, the resolution of market challenges, and the quality of service provided to its customers. Imagine the difference that might have made in the destiny of this 105-year-old industry icon. What CEOs wouldn't want an exponential increase in the power of the corporate engine at their fingertips and the ability to harness and apply that power to the business of growing the business?

The remarkable fact is that this kind of energy is easily within the grasp of every business leader, but it is rarely adequately accessed. Too often, the focus of the organization creates an inhospitable culture in which employee potential cannot be fully realized and purpose power becomes stifled. Both the organization and the workers become trapped by the linearity of metrics and processes in which a prescribed input should produce a predictable outcome. These systems, devoid of the connection to individual purpose, forfeit the benefits that would be obtained from unleashing the passions of employees and the creative seeds those passions contain. If organizations could unleash these passions, they would allow a new type of input that would produce refreshingly new outputs—like groundbreaking designs, innovative approaches to the market, and radically transformed customer experiences. Leaders don't need to look externally for the seemingly elusive magic that will grow a company's bottom line. It already exists, internally, within the cadre of talent that comprises the organization.

The New Competitive Edge

Why are so many organizations failing to capitalize on this vital source of success? The reason is that many are simply unaware of the potential that exists in leveraging purpose and passion. Some companies wrestle with these seemingly esoteric concepts and wonder how to make effective use of them for the business, while others believe they are already spending large sums of money on the development of their people and connote dollar amounts with expected results.

While many companies are spending millions of dollars on employee training and development programs, most are doing so without understanding the purpose and passions of the individuals that make the corporate engine hum. Their programs focus on skills or competencies, without delving further into what might provide an outlet for capitalizing on the whole that each individual brings to the business.

Most contemporary leadership models on which these programs are based dictate that when skills and competencies are combined with all the right circumstances, the mix should lead to the kind of outstanding leaders the organization is seeking. The concept may seem sound, but reality doesn't support it. Clearly skills and competencies are important, but they address only a part of the whole of each employee.

Organizations must remember that even if employees cannot put it into words, their need to express their individual purpose flows as an undercurrent in all that they do. As we saw with Karen, there are certain moments in people's careers when the need for an outlet for that purpose becomes all-consuming.

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