Crush uncertainty with the power of leadership purpose
Would you like a practical approach to creating certainty? An approach that makes decisions easier, boundaries clearer, and enables better choices around how you spend your energy? Are you intrigued by the idea of Purpose Driven Leadership?
Zowie! Being in leadership can be demanding, with slippery slopes and crazy moments of turbulence. There are chronic challenges and acute stressors coming at you from every direction. Having certainty and a sense of balance to combat this chaos can be a stabilizing force that lowers your stress and helps you master your energy. Discovering your leadership purpose, is the path to certainty and a sense of balance no matter the chaos around you.
Uncovering your leadership purpose is like your first taste of freedom when you got your driver’s license. Do you remember how it felt? You practiced driving with a permit, just like you have been developing your leadership skills and techniques in each leadership position you have held. Going through the driver’s license test helped you know the rules of the road, just as expanding your self-awareness helps you know yourself as a leader.
Don’t worry. You didn’t miss the memo on the importance of leadership purpose. According to Harvard Business Review’s article on ‘From Purpose to Impact’, “fewer than 20% of leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose.”
What might it look like if you were one of very few leaders who knew, with certainty, your purpose? Leading without purpose is like trying to drive in a foreign city, not knowing how to interpret the lights, the stop signs, brake lights, rush hour, round abouts, or speed limits. Your brain is pummeled with chaos and challenging decisions from which you don’t have a foundation to operate.
You can use leadership purpose to clarify your actions, boundaries, and desired focus!
What is leadership purpose?
It’s like a mini-mission statement that summarizes your greatest attributes as a leader and inspires expansion of your leadership. It is what people count on you for, but it’s unlikely that you, or anyone else, has ever put it into words. It is the unique core of who you are as a leader.
Why is purpose important?
Discovering your leadership purpose is about bringing awareness to your intentions. When you are aware, act intentionally, and know why you are doing something, you experience certainty. Having this form of certainty, in your leadership purpose, helps balance the uncertainties you face in leadership. As a result, leadership purpose can make decision making easier, boundary setting cleaner, quell general feelings of overwhelm, and help you feel prepared and grounded in nearly any situation.
Knowing your leadership purpose inspires focus and effective outcomes.
Purpose driven leadership can guide decision making. You can also use it to determine where you want to spend your time and energy. This in turn, can help you set better boundaries. You can also look to your leadership purpose when navigating new territory or unknown situations; just do what you do best and work your way through it.
In other words, leadership purpose can give you a solid framework to lead, with certainty, from within.
How do you uncover your purpose?
Several articles on purpose quote Nick Craig and Scott Snook who recommend these three questions to help you find your leadership purpose:
- “What did you especially love as a child, before you realised the world is full of ‘shoulds and shouldn’ts’?
- Describe two of your most challenging life experiences. How have they shaped you?
- What do you enjoy doing in your life now that helps you sing your song?”
When guiding others through this process, we needed a little deeper dive. If you need more, you might try these questions too:
- Reflecting on your last 2-3 jobs, what were your most meaningful outcomes and/or your favorite approach or actions that lead to these positive impacts?
- What do your closest friends or family members count on you for (that you LOVE to do)?
Next step: Look across all your answers for categories or themes. You might also look at whether certain people or activities are the theme. I have seen some purpose statements that really focus on impacting the lives of children, while others are focused on adults or just a single gender. Some purpose statements are broad or global while others are specific.
If you get stuck:
Reach out to trusted friends, family, coworkers, or a professional development coach who can help you see inside yourself. You are looking for something that you do so innately, that you aren’t totally aware that you do it.
You can do this. Don’t give up on yourself, it is worth the time to give yourself this gift of certainty and clarity.
Final thoughts:
Whatever leadership purpose you uncover, sit with it for a bit. Let it breathe. Be okay with it morphing and evolving as your awareness of what you innately do expands. Also, try not to judge what you have uncovered. We live in a world of comparison and you may find yourself wishing your unique leadership purpose were something different. But the universe needs YOU. We all need each other, and we all have a special gift to offer to each other. It is our individuality that makes life interesting and brings humanity together.
Your leadership sparkles from the inside. Knowing your leadership purpose is the secret to certainty in this complex world.