What is it?
It begins with the understanding and alignment of the values that are inherent to the organisation and provides all stakeholders with a common and meaningful approach to achieve their goals.
Why is it important?
This shared purpose allows for stakeholders to intuitively and instinctively know what the right and wrong things to do are, and will guide them through the challenges in their professional lives. This approach results in the empowerment of a purposeful institution, and the formation of commonly accepted norms and expectations.
Shared values and goals act as a glue to bind leadership and employees in the organisation together, to achieve their common goals. When there is high congruence between organisational entities then there is a higher chance of succeeding in the fulfillment of the shared purpose of the organisation. Aligning purpose with values is the building block for successful strategy implementation and reactions to, and dealing with, developing crises.
The challenge
This is not a simple, straight forward process though, as employees within the organisation will vary greatly in what their values are, that is, what is most important to them in their lives. Additional to that, most organisations do not fully understand what their organisational values should be to be purpose aligned or, in many cases, how their espoused values are understood and interpreted by their employees and external stakeholders.
The outcome
Understanding this then leads to the understanding that developing a purpose driven culture is a continuous loop of analysing, understanding, developing, implementation, failure, re-visiting of the purposed goals and re-aligning with changing directions.
This is a long-term process that is built on the inclusion of all stakeholders and if done successfully, builds trust and commitment and the use of meaningful communication, where all people speak the same language, understand the common goals and develop the motivation for the actions required to achieve these goals.
Developing shared values and with those, a shared purpose, provides for the opportunity of all employees to influence the successful implementation of a firm’s strategies and mission. All stakeholders become involved if they understand and commit to the common purpose of their organisation.
Help is here
If you want to find out more how employees’ and organisational values need to align to build a purposeful organisation, contact us to arrange a meeting.