Last week, we spoke with Lisa Earle McLeod – former VP of Sales, sales consultant, and author of Selling with Noble Purpose and Leading with Noble Purpose.
Check out the videos below for some golden insights that we thought we’d share!
What is your Noble Purpose?
Lisa explained it best during our webinar: Humans are driven by meaning. Work without meaning is mundane, unrewarding, and inevitably leads to burnout. The more you focus on money, the more you focus on yourself internally. The more you focus on improving the lives of others, the more innovation, competitive differentiation, and emotional attachment you will feel in your work. Noble Purpose comes down to the impact that your work has on others. Using this makes for a more fulfilling, positive human experience of work.
What do we see at SupportingLines? Our research backs this up. The High-Performance Index™️ question about mission and vision is one of the most highly correlated questions with both High-Performance Culture and a positive human experience of work.
Is the company's mission and vision the same as purpose?
At the end of the day, what matters most is alignment and clarity on how your organization makes a difference in people’s lives. Your mission and vision should be centred on the customer. Lisa stated, “Purpose is the difference you’re trying to make in the world with your customers. Mission is how you do it. Vision is how you see the world when you’re done.” These are technical differences, but words only mean what we think they mean. These words need to be embedded into the very fabric that holds your organization together, understood across all levels, and held in all decision-making processes. If the customer is at the top of the mind in all of these, it doesn’t matter what you call it – noble purpose, mission, or vision – you are on the right path.
What do we see at SupportingLines? We completely agree. While alignment around a clear mission or purpose is critical, it is even more important to collaborate and achieve results. By helping teams establish agreement for cross-functional commitments of support we help teams achieve their most meaningful goals. This is even more important when cultivating a high-performance culture when people are working remotely.
Who is responsible for upholding the Noble Purpose?
The organization’s leaders are the ones who set the Noble Purpose of the organization. The Noble Purpose of organizations is often customer-focused – how do we make a difference in the lives of our customers? By making the Noble Purpose part of the everyday language at an organization – from the top executive’s meeting to the daily interactions between colleagues, it becomes ingrained in the culture and identity of the organization. Through this normalization, it becomes something that is lived, and not just written as words on a website.
Individuals are the ones who set their own Noble Purpose, and can choose to latch onto that of their workplace. Beyond the mission and vision set in the workplace, Lisa encourages everyone to identify how their work makes a difference. Looking for and identifying your personal impact on others – your customers, colleagues, organization – this is how we are able to find happiness and joy in our work. There is autonomy in Noble Purpose, and that is how you can improve the human experience of work.
What do we see at SupportingLines? In high-performance cultures, employees are inspired to take the purpose and run with it. This requires deliberate action by leaders. We have had great success weaving purpose into leadership principles that form the core of regular performance conversations. This helps teams live their purpose, which is at the heart of a high-performance culture.
Tianna Tso
Tianna is the Marketing & Program Coordinator at SupportingLines and specializes in producing all of our online, visual, and written content.