Every business claims to have a purpose – but how many organizations are actually using this to align leadership, motivate their people and drive business growth?
In the healthcare sector, altruistic intentions often play a part in attracting talent and keeping them there, striving for bigger and better results. So, as an organization, how do you ensure your team is aligned on a single, unifying purpose that helps the business achieve its goals?
Your purpose needs to connect what your business does with the what the world needs in a meaningful way.
It should inspire, challenge, and enable you to build long-term value.
Trickle-down purpose
In order to have a strong purpose which resonates with your entire workforce, you need to work from the top down. The whole executive team must be engaged in discussion and debate around the value the business delivers and its future direction; the team needs to buy into the purpose in order for it to be embedded effectively. A robust, collaborative process enables leadership alignment around a singular purpose that is dynamic, limitless, far-reaching, and participative, ultimately enabling you to act with clarity and decisiveness.
Purpose is far from being lofty and theoretical. A powerful purpose is as inspirational as it is practical. CEOs can use purpose to take a critical look at strategic planning, organizational policies, commercial footprint and future vision, confirming where these are ‘on purpose,’ or where there might be incongruence.
Alongside the CEO, CPOs and CHROs are increasingly serving in a high-level strategic capacity to define and lead the purpose. Research undertaken in 2022 shows there is nearly a five-fold increase in the number of CEOs who believe CPOs should be responsible for defining purpose (versus 2021). HR is shifting from being an operationally focused function to one that is strategically involved in shaping the direction and outcome of the business. In short, CPOs and CHROs are increasingly leading the purpose ‘charge.’
Purpose to the people
Although CEOs and their executive teams are responsible for aligning around and upholding their organization's purpose, purpose must also resonate and come alive within each employee.
Over the last eight years, Brandpie has run live, collaborative sessions with over 30,000 employees across numerous organizations and multiple industries. Whilst salary and benefits will always be important to every employee, the insights reveal that employees want to work for organizations with a clear purpose and have a role where they can make a meaningful contribution.
The key to ensuring that purpose is a powerful motivator of your people lies in finding the connection between it and the individual role of any single employee, regardless of where they sit within the organization.
Equipped with a clear purpose, CPOs and CHROs can then connect their people to the purpose in a meaningful way that drives growth and change in the business. Although purpose stems from a high-level, inspiring idea – an organization’s limitless, emotive why – its power lies in its actionable role in employees’ every day, making it deeply relatable.
In this sense, purpose can exist at both 50,000 feet and five feet and sends a clear signal to your people that every contribution, small and large, is valuable and connects to something bigger than themselves. Add culture – an organization’s who and how (ie. the lived values and behaviors that fulfil purpose) – and purpose comes to life in tangible, on-the-ground, everyday ways.
When purpose and culture are woven together into the employee experience (EX), they act as both a powerful driver to attract the best candidates (talent acquisition) and become a beacon of meaning for existing employees (talent management or growth). This ensures that healthcare organizations can attract and retain like-minded and like-hearted talent that share the same vision.
Healthcare with purpose
Purpose is universally motivating across the healthcare industry. Ultimately, all healthcare organisations want to improve patients’ lives. However, this common desire can make it challenging for an organization to find distinction. This is where seeking the support of an external partner can help.
Equipped with a distinctive and powerful idea, purpose serves as a lens through which to assess the strategic decisions and actions your company takes or does not take. Ensuring that the purpose is aspirational and inspirational, yet grounded in the reality of what the organization does and how it operates, provides a clear direction that everyone across the entire organization can work towards together.
