Everyone knows the famous story about President John F. Kennedy’s visit to the NASA Space Center in 1962. As lore has it, JFK stopped a man carrying a broom, introduced himself, and asked the worker what he was doing. The janitor’s next words would be repeated for years to come: “I’m helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”
The story is a favorite among motivational speakers, TED Talk hosts, and, yes, bloggers because it illustrates the importance of purpose so well. When workers don’t understand the greater significance of their job, they lose a sense of purpose. Without this, they’re not oriented toward the overarching mission of their organization, and they’re bound to be less satisfied with and engaged in their work.
The multifaceted mission
The man stopped by President Kennedy possessed a keen sense of his employer’s mission. His efforts as a janitor were helping put a man on the moon as much as the work from engineers and mathematicians.
It’s important workers have a sense of mission in other ways, too. They need to feel that their work connects to their personal passion — it motivates them, and it impacts the bottom line. For example, employees who feel that their day-to-day tasks relate to their interests and strengths are happier and more productive. Happy employees are linked to higher customer satisfaction. And according to MIT research, organizations offering a top-quartile employee experience “achieve twice the innovation, double the customer satisfaction, and 25 percent higher profits than organizations with a bottom-quartile employee experience.”
Unite purpose with possibility
There’s another way to think about purpose and mission in the workplace. Companies that teach workers to understand their skills as scalable are in a much better position to retain talent. When workers see how their current job prepares them for another position — one that also furthers the company mission and their own passion — they’ll dig into their work and stay.
This strategy requires a thorough understanding of a worker’s skills and interests. Your moonshot challenge is to make darn sure you know what each person on your team or in your company is passionate about. Your next mission is to help them take that passion into the vision and objective you are trying to achieve.
I’ll leave you with a scene from Alice and Wonderland:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
Our job is to ignite the passion to help them find their path with purpose! To find out how PeopleBest can help you discover what makes your workers tick, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.
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