Generations of your leaders have never experienced a recession in their professional lives. Are you ready?
When will the recession begin? How bad will it be? The answers to these three questions are anyone’s guess.
What we do know is that a recession is coming – the current geopolitical conditions foretell the future: rapid inflation, spiking interest rates, political unrest, and resulting supply chain issues, as well as the ongoing challenge of a highly contagious virus that will most likely never go away.
The writing is on the wall. At some point, the economic cycle will turn, and the economy will begin to decline or continue to stall.
Recessions happen all the time, it's a normal part of the economic cycle. However, what’s particularly interesting about this environment is that it will likely be the first recession that members of Gen-Z and most Millennials have ever experienced – that is, aside from the initial shock of Covid-19 pandemic. Any Covid-induced economic shrinkage was more of a disruption than a true recession. This type of downturn can be described as “V-shaped,” or characterized by a short duration and swift recovery (for example, Western economies’ post-pandemic growth, driven by lower interest rates, constrained supply, and government stimulus).
Under the current economic conditions, the recession ahead is classic both in the sense that companies are cutting costs and delaying investment in anticipation, and that its causes can be attributed to external factors. Younger leaders are facing a new, but not entirely unfamiliar, challenge.
Over the past few years, Millennial and Gen-Z leaders have risen through the ranks, taking on significant leadership roles across all industries. During the pandemic, these leaders leveraged their tech savviness to weather the challenges of working from home and the shift to a hybrid-virtual environment. Now, new generations of managers and leaders will experience this set of recessionary economic conditions for the first time, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen.
What we do know is that a recession can change many things, from the obvious to the less obvious. Let’s start with the obvious. Companies will quickly look for ways to conserve cash and protect margins, which often means slowing spending, layoffs, and restructuring to cut costs. Tech companies that boomed during the pandemic have started to reduce spending and announcing hiring freezes, signaling for companies in other industries to do the same. Jobs will be at risk. If you cannot prove a good ROI, your project is at risk. There are no longer unlimited resources to try out new ideas, and emphasis shifts from growth to profitability at all costs. An increase in uncertainty will make companies more conservative and tentative. All these are well-known dynamics.
Less obvious is the impact of increased uncertainty on people. Coupled with rising fear in general, volatility is the name of the game. Your investments just lost a lot of value. High inflation means that your purchasing power, and the new house that you stretched for, are declining in value. You’re worrying about your job, or are not getting the bonus you banked on.
The combination of fear and an increase in messy information escalates your “cognitive load,” or the need to tap into your cortex. Responses triggered by fear force you to call on more ancient and less intelligent parts of your brain, effectively reducing your IQ and decreasing the thoughtfulness of your decision making. The solution? While your brain is triggered to respond with its most animalistic “fight or flight” parts, you need to be smarter about navigating your new work and home life.
What are the implications of this on organizations? For one, fear responses may decrease teamwork and collaboration while increasing peoples’ self-interest (aka – the burning need to keep their job). At a time when teamwork and tapping into everyone’s intelligence is more important than ever, external stresses will likely drive your team to be less than their best.
Given this understanding, as a leader, what are you doing to build resilience in your teams? How will you help them tackle this uncertainty and thrive? Resilience can be built on both an individual and team level through intentional coaching and practice. Cultivating these behaviors not only builds a better workplace culture — it also gives your people the tools to bounce back.
You may also need to develop a recession playbook that helps you map out how you’ll support your people while also driving the business forward. It’s no easy feat, but remains critical as you move forward during this challenging period.
One practice we know helps build team and organizational resilience is something we call Future Storming. Future Storming is the process of preparing your business leaders from the “future-back” rather than “today-forward.” This means anticipating trends that have yet to occur and envisioning how they might intersect in surprising ways. This exercise, which can be practiced by leaders at all levels, helps them build the capacity to navigate uncertainty, strengthen collaboration with diverse stakeholders, and bolster your business’ capability to manage risk and uncertainty.
For example, you can run Future Storming exercises where your team thinks holistically across business silos about where the industry, customer trends, technology, and competition will be three, five, or ten years in the future. As your team evaluates the intersection of these trends, they build the capacity to mitigate risk and uncover insights that provide opportunities for innovation. The focus on opportunities is essential, as recessions can be rocket fuel for disruptive ideas and startups. Furthermore, customer buying criteria changes during recessions, and can upend traditional relationships.
A good example of this disruption is Airbnb, which was born during the 2009 subprime mortgage crisis. In a time when many were strapped for cash, but had a few extra rooms to spare, it offered people the opportunity to gain an extra source of income by renting out their extra rooms or vacation homes. By injecting a new supply of affordable short-term rentals into the market, Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry and drove down hotel costs. The hospitality industry was already primed for disruption; the recession was just the multiplier.
In the next recession, which new, disruptive companies will thrive, and why?
Lastly, how can you empower the new generation of leaders to drive the cost and cash flow initiatives needed in your organization? Your team needs to be capable of contributing to improved cash flow ahead of time or just in time. This requires strong business and financial acumen to understand how their decisions will need to change in tighter times to free up cash and realize better margins or returns, while simultaneously continue innovating and testing out new ideas to drive the business forward.
Are your young leaders ready and capable of doing this? Have you developed them to be effective in such a scenario? Up until now, Gen-Z and Millennial leaders have focused almost exclusively on growth. Moving forward, they need to focus on margin, cost, asset utilization, and cash flow. While in growth mode, investment dollars for innovation were plentiful, but now disciplined innovation is the name of the game. These leaders need to be prepared to fail fast and cheap, and move with agility towards the better innovations and investments.
In good times, leaders may not be aware of how the decisions they make every day at work impact margins, but in a recession, leaders need to be hyperaware of how they spend time and resources. Furthermore, funding is easy to come by in the name of growth, but in a recession? Not anymore.
Learned future preparation, resilience, and the financial proficiency and confidence to drive cashflow are critical for success in this new environment. By providing tools, expectations, and discipline now, you can inspire your young leaders to take control of the future. Instead of acting rashly when the increase in uncertainty tricks brains into inaction, acting ahead empowers your leaders to drive the improvements required to be successful.
It’s time to get ready. It’s time to prepare your leaders to flourish in tough times. Prepare your team to storm the future by building the resilience and confidence necessary to make good business decisions when they are in the eye of the storm, all in the name of managing through this recession. Better yet, give them the skills to innovate new products, services, and business models to propel your organization forward, and do it all while using the smart part of your brains.
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Most CEOs are revising downward their forecasts for business, though they remain reluctant for the moment to declare a recession is at hand. Within the current administration, and in congress, there is broad disagreement about what to do to head it off. This uncertainty is wreaking havoc on business planning. Chief Executive reported in June that 300 CEOs downgraded business forecasts for the next 12 months to 5.6 out of 10. CEOs are telling their people to prepare recession plans.
At the start of the 2020 pandemic, we also lacked foresight to imagine the dramatic swings in the fortunes of companies. There were big winners like technology, retail, financial services, and home entertainment; there were big losers like travel and tourism, hospitality, and energy. The massive shifts in the global business landscape rendered strategic plans out of date and useless.
So, what now? How do we navigate the next big, bad thing?
In 20 years of advising CEOs and senior executives on strategy execution, we’ve learned that during crisis, some teams rise to the occasion, while others are less resilient and more susceptible to doubt, which prompts reaction in the moment and can foster a chaotic sense of doom. While there are winners and losers in industry sectors, it is also true that some defy the odds, look around corners, seize opportunities, and keep steady hands at the wheel.
What kind of leaders weather tough times?
Through a review of our data on leaders and teams, we’ve discovered that inevitably there are qualities of both that drive growth and innovation, even in the most challenging times. These qualities are not always intuitive. In fact, in shorter supply your team is stretched thin, exhausted, and too busy to stop the whack-a-mole game to think clearly and provide direction to others. What do these leaders and their teams do right?
They tap into the stabilizing power of composure and restraint
Leaders who demonstrate a high level of composure and restraint in challenging times create an environment where it is safe to make mistakes, and to tell others when things are not working. Leaders are then able to foster discussion in a calm environment and resolve small issues before they become bigger ones. These leaders get a read on the fast-changing environment and quickly problem-solve with colleagues.
They dial up their antennae of awareness and concern
Awareness and concern are two additional qualities that go hand-in-hand in times of change and uncertainty. As people struggle to navigate the pressures and volatility, it’s more important than ever to know what your team is thinking and feeling, and to be aware of the pulse of the organization. If a downturn is ahead, you may be glad that not every position post-Pandemic is filled. However, the reality for most companies is that their best talent is most at risk and likely to leave. Staying aware helps you shore up your best defense against threats to growth.
They ramp up their curiosity and interactivity
These are two leadership qualities that work together beautifully when you need to solve problems. During challenging times, many leaders turn inward to try to shoulder the burden of solving problems with a ready-fire-aim approach. They hear about an issue and move immediately into action. They may ask for input, but not in group settings. Thus, they put spokes in wheels and their best people are talking only to them; not to one another.
It may feel counterintuitive, but when you can be intentionally curious and convene smart people, you learn that they can solve the problem better and faster than you can. Because they’ve authored the solution, they claim ownership of it and put all their energy behind it. As you move through uncertainty, they begin to feel more confident of their own agency in managing turbulence. As Ken Blanchard once said, “All of us are smarter than any of us.”
They focus on unleashing the capabilities of their interdependent, interconnected teams
Virtual and hybrid work have already laid bare the hidden, destructive issues that can derail relationships and teams. Teams that had less face time and more conflict found the challenge of misunderstanding and unresolved conflict even greater. It isn’t only each team but your network of teams, and how they operate together, that makes your organization resilient.
The performance of teams is vastly more important to the future of work than individual performance. Teams are really the new heroes of organizations. When you see unresolved conflict between teams, you can diagnose, with absolute certainty, the role that the friction is playing in creating drag. As you try to pivot in a recession, it’s time to prioritize how teams in your organization are actively engaging with one another, aligning on the goals, and working with enterprise focus.
Our research on teams has found that in challenging times, trust, support, candor, and curiosity lay the foundation of team culture. Make it a priority to bring people together and resolve trust issues by encouraging candor and looking for solutions. Do this by first being curious yourself, and then encouraging others on your team to seek to understand. Take the time now to ensure that your teams are performing at their best, and you’ll reap the rewards today and well beyond any recession or downturn.
What now?
I remember a CEO that I know telling the story of the commitment he made to retain all of his employees during a downturn, even though he predicted a 20% revenue loss in the first year. That decision, while risky, turned out to be fortuitous, as the economy pivoted and demand soared long before expected. Competitors who had let go of employees struggled, while this company recovered quickly and remains above capacity today.
The decision he made was informed by the values and qualities of leadership that defined this company’s culture. The CEO led by example, demonstrating composure and restraint that others modeled. They spent time talking with their employees about the decisions that they were making and why. They demonstrated concern for their well-being when demand picked up and they were under pressure to deliver.
Take a lesson from this CEO and what we’ve learned about leadership and teams. Keep these three approaches in mind as you move forward:
- Stay focused on what works – good leadership will get you through.
- Double down on your people and your teams – listen, learn, respond, and invest to make sure they have the knowledge, support, and tools to do their best.
- Bring your leaders and teams together to navigate the uncertainty together – forget being a hero and instead draw in your organization to collaborate, cooperate, and invent the future – you will all be stronger as a result.
As the next months unfold, we can all prepare to be better leaders by reflecting on what we already know about leading in uncertain times. Think about what worked and didn’t work over the last two years. Ask yourself: what is the lesson and how can we apply it now?
During turmoil, the business community tends to focus on continuity — emphasizing efficiency in turn. Both are critical. If you were to take any lessons away from the financial crisis of 2008, however, it might be wiser to think about how resiliency is key to long-term success.
Even in the depths of that recession, resilient companies showed a 25-point higher EBITDA than “nonresilient” counterparts and enjoyed markedly better recovery. A large part of this was due to business preparedness, as “resilients” took measures to reduce nonperforming assets, strengthen balance sheets, cut costs and prioritize customer-focused investments.
However, building a successful company involves more than business-oriented resilience (think cutting costs or shifting processes). It also involves organizational resilience: the strength of your people and how they’ll manage and lead moving forward.
4 Tactics for building organizational resilience
Covid-19 reinvigorated the need for both business and organizational resilience. Those at the helm of a business need to not only find ways to lead through uncertainty and anticipate change, but also foster companywide resilience. If you’re looking to do so, focus on these areas:
1. Leadership
Crises often hit companies in many areas at once, whether that’s with teams, communication, or operations. Without the right mindset, leaders struggle to find true north to help everyone see past the present moment. Immersing leaders into similar experiences (through simulations and scenario-planning) can help provide insights into how to ameliorate crises, set clear objectives, and take action holistically — which research suggests has become increasingly important for leaders. Besides this, leadership groups can also encourage an open exchange of ideas and establish new networks.
2. Individuals
Even with Covid-19 out of the equation, there’s no shortage of stressors in employees’ lives. Three-quarters of people admit to experiencing job burnout, with 40% connecting it to Covid-19. Similarly, more than one-third of workers have clocked longer hours recently. To support overall organizational resiliency, companies must start from the ground level by ensuring their employees are fit to work.
With this in mind, offer opportunities to connect with professional coaches. Provide access to platforms or apps (such as TaskHuman) that allow for diverse personalized support. You could also introduce mindfulness training and equip managers with the skills to help them better engage in personal conversations.
3. Teams
Shifting from a hierarchical to a flat structure has been beneficial in many organizations. Zappos adopted a holacracy back in 2014, for instance, and its team members decided to manage themselves as internal “small businesses.” You don’t need to reorganize as radically as Zappos, but it helps to rethink the corporate structure to encourage teamwork. Additionally, invest in collaborative tools like Slack or Yammer, and encourage employees to reach out to colleagues they normally wouldn’t to bring more knowledge into the mix.
4. Talent
Covid-19 brought talent management and business continuity into sharper focus as employees “left the building” — many for good. One CEO at a leading Chinese insurance company utilized a Business Continuity Planning Software and took steps to address job dissatisfaction by investing in employee training and development, reasoning that continued learning will boost growth once the pandemic subsides. This is a solid starting point, but take things a step further and make cultural changes that generate, engage, and empower talent. Focus on solidifying talent in employees in their day-to-day lives — not just through periodic training.
Organizational resilience is a critical component to ensuring success through crisis, and it can only be accomplished by focusing on your most important asset: people. Invest in the right tools, provide the necessary support, and make talent development a priority. Your operations are only as resilient as your leadership.
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.