Why teams need purpose

How many times have you joined a team and been able to actually define its purpose? Most of the time, you join a team, and a lot of what you get is, ‘this is us’, ‘this is what we do’, or ‘this is how we do things/how we’ve always done it’. All too often leaders fail to take the opportunity to reflect on their team’s purpose and to pivot accordingly.

While we often reflect and change direction on tons of things in life, be it diets or commutes, we lack the same impulse when it comes to the purpose of teams or companies.

A purpose that was defined 3 years ago is unlikely to be fit for purpose today, particularly given how we as people have much higher expectations these days (as employees and as customers). Technology has evolved rapidly, and data is more accessible than ever before. The world is our oyster.

Google is a great example of a company that’s constantly evolved.

Here’s how their purpose has pivoted rightly so over the years to stay relevant:

This week I was fortunate enough to be offsite with the team, a brand new team may I add, shaping our purpose and getting to know each other on all levels. For me, this is a super important thing to do, because if you’re just a team at work doing your thing and you don’t know or respect each other properly, how can you trust each other and be honest?

We got to know more about each other and celebrated recent things that had happened; kids starting their GCSEs, marriages, awards, first houses along with things we would never have known about each other. I now know who can’t click their fingers and who took part in a triathlon.

Amongst all of this, we got under the skin of our purpose, the guiding principles that underpin everything.

Here’s just a few examples of companies that I believe genuinely live up to their mission:

A company that did have a clear purpose was Facebook. In recent years it started to lose its purpose, particularly around the time the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal came to light, but this year the company got back on track by sharing their story, open and honestly.

Likewise, the Starbucks that we know and (most of us) love, went through times of trouble just over a decade ago. They had lost their way and focused on expansion over customers. They forgot why they existed. In March 2008, they aimed to turn their previous ways around and obsess over their customers. They started with ‘My Starbucks Idea’ which opened up their ideas pipeline to customers — a lot of what we experience from Starbucks these days (in and out of their stores) came from customers.

And then there are companies that didn’t have a clear purpose or lost it, and they became irrelevant.

It is not just entire companies that should have a purpose; teams should too.

All teams need clarity. Clarity must be at the heart: clarity of your purpose, clarity of your plan, and clarity of who’s responsible for what.

When people come together to make a team, there’s a varied mix of skills, clear accountability, a common purpose and set goals.

Teams don’t just blossom overnight. Especially as teams are increasingly located across multiple locations and flexible working is on the up, the proliferation of tools they need to build relationships and common visions are essential.

Teams can either be up for taking risks or risk-averse — my preference is definitely the former. Of course, these should be calculated risks that don’t cost millions, are back up by data and solid desk research and can result in trailing things in a quick and dirty fashion to validate it early on.

The culture of a team determines if it takes risks and believes in each other and the ideas. This goes back to my point about making sure you’re all on a level where you trust one another and share the same goals.

There’s a handful of questions to ask yourself and your team when thinking about purpose:

When you’ve answered these questions, you can ask the most important one: how do you make sure you come up with something that’s clear, actionable and embedded into the team?

Principles are a great way to delve a little deeper and give the team a series of guiding statements to reflect on in everything they do.

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