Manage-Wise

Discover your purpose and communicate it to others

Working with purpose and passion brings joy to our lives. With a goal and a purpose, we have a far more fulfilling career. If we have a vision for our company, team, or organization, and we know exactly how we are personally aligned with it, time flies —we are completely absorbed by activities that take us in that direction. Thus, if purpose is the secret to fulfillment in our work, then we need to understand how to tap into the energy and thinking that fuels it. We need to use a process that helps us to find our purpose and communicate it to others.

Here we will look at how leaders like you have found purpose and how that purpose has defined their careers. If you are looking to discover or rekindle your mission and purpose, I hope that these leaders’ stories will inspire you. None of us is born with purpose; we discover it. You don’t wait for it; you find it.

The question is how you unlock the interests that allow you to define purpose. It isn’t as great a challenge as you might think—it is a natural evolution, not a moment in time. You may wake up one morning and say, “I have got it!” but the process is more of a journey than an epiphany. Later I will provide some questions that you can ask yourself as you seek to define or redefine your purpose.

Discovering purpose

For most of us, work is a significant expression of who we are in the world. It is not, however, all that we are, but instead, it is one significant way we discover ourselves, create value, and even leave a legacy. Purpose in our work allows us to create and fulfill a vision for our lives.

Purpose makes work exciting and rewarding. If you don’t feel that sense of purpose, going through the process these leaders have used may help you to reconnect with your current work or find something that does fulfill you. Either way, this is a conscious process. Learning about your own interests will motivate you and allow you to grow as a person and a leader.

The process of discovering purpose is a journey. Vikki Pryor, president and CEO of SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance Company, grew up in humble circumstances. Married at age 19 with no college education, she took a job selling coats at minimum wage. “I had zero money,” she says. Pryor struggled to make ends meet, and lacking a plan, she had no idea how she would improve her financial situation. However, those tough times taught her a most valuable lesson: If she wanted a prosperous life, she would have to carve it out for herself.

Pryor was so determined to increase her paycheck that at the end of every workday, she stopped into the company’s human resources department to ask for a job that paid more. Each day, the staff there told her the same thing: “No other jobs are available.” Then, one day, Pryor stopped in on her lunch hour, and another woman was already there, standing at the receptionist’s desk requesting a job application.

While Pryor stood there, the receptionist told the woman that there were a number of good positions open.

When it was her turn, Pryor asked the receptionist to call the woman from human resources who had claimed that there were no jobs. Suspecting now that the company may have been discriminating against her because of her race, she decided to quietly confront the woman and ask to see a list of available positions. After the human resources representative blushed, she brought out the list and then offered Pryor a job that doubled her pay over-night! But this isn’t the end of the story. Pryor went in and tackled a six-month backlog of work in two weeks, getting her noticed by a new boss. When she decided that she must then go to college to move ahead faster, the boss enthusiastically not only agreed to give her time off to go to school but also “offered to pay (her)...40 hours for 30 hours of work during that time because he said (she)…was doing 60 hours worth of work anyway.”

Pryor eventually earned a law degree and an MBA and also became a CPA. Today, as the president and CEO of SBLI, she feels a strong connection to the company’s mission to “empower people to improve their finances so they can have a stronger, better, and more prosperous life.” Pryor had led expansion of the company from a single base in New York to 49 states with more than 330,000 people insured, $1.5 billion in assets, and $16 billion of insurance in force.

“I realized back then that there was a direct connection between resources, education, and freedom of expression of my talents,” she says. This is why she took the job at SBLI. Pryor maintains that alignment with purpose and passion is “very fundamental to success.” She says, “So many leaders aren’t aligned with what drives them. You need to take your skill and ability and translate it into something that works for you. What drives me is that if you have financial freedom, it frees you to do the things you are here in this life to do.”

The driving force

Over a lifetime, if we are fortunate, most of us will discover a purpose that drives us, some of us several times. When you are paying attention, you may feel that you are going down a path that really excites you. Not every interest will become a driving purpose, but some can take your career in an exciting direction. Many leaders say that they didn’t go out to “find” a purpose so much as they stumbled onto it, paid attention, and then pursued it with vigor.

CEO Howard Schultz discovered a passion for coffee that drove him to build the iconic Starbucks brand. Where did his journey begin? An executive in New York City for another firm, he stumbled onto dark roast coffee in a small shop in Seattle and fell in love. It wasn’t in his career plan; he discovered this passion by accident, and then he pursued it. His personal journey immersed him in the world of coffee until he felt certain that his mission was to bring great coffee to the United States. Under his leadership, the tiny Seattle waterfront operation expanded into 1,600 cafes nationwide.

Why is it important to follow your interests this way? Because you don’t know until you pursue them what the possibilities are. If you feel a tingle of intellectual and emotional connection, it will drive you and help you to find your way. Of course, once you discover your mission, your purpose and passion become contagious. As you pursue your passion, you become a very powerful person in your sphere of influence.

Excerpt from ‘Motivate Like A CEO’ by Suzanne Bates. Reproduced with permission © 2009, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 550. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com