How a unifying purpose brings teams together

Hi, it’s Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week I’m coming to you from Green Bay, Wisconsin. I’ve been contemplating, as I flew here today, this whole concept of unifying purpose, and kind of what it means to drive individuals and teams, whether they’re church groups, families, or businesses. What does it mean to have a unifying purpose that drives them forward? In the absence of unifying purpose, you get really bad outcomes: you get silo mentalities, you get discord, you get fights, you get competing priorities that cannot be sorted out without, you know, fist fights. So, this video is about how we get unifying purpose. But before we get there, why we need it?

As international public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. So, there was this wonderful study some years ago done by Google about what made really effective teams. Amongst a myriad of criteria that they identified, one really important one was this idea of unifying purpose. Unifying purpose was really just this sense that we have a mission that’s about how we interact as people together. That’s different than the mission of the business itself.

The mission of the business itself might be to produce X, Y, or Zed product, and get it out the door and be profitable, or if you’re the US military, if you’re the Army, it’s to fight and win the nation’s wars, clear mission. Very clear mission. You’re explicit about how you’re going to measure success as to whether or not the US Army is doing its job. But that doesn’t give them a unifying purpose in terms of how the people accomplish that mission, see the distinction?

In the absence of a good unifying purpose that brings people together, you can get all kinds of unwarranted, unwanted, negative impacts in terms of the way we manage. And when the leadership isn’t clear about the purpose that we have as a collective group of human beings, you get toxic leadership, you get silo mentality, you get all kinds of ego competitions. You get a lack of clarity, especially as it goes down further and further into the hierarchy, where the frontline person really can’t decide on their own what to do now in a set of circumstances because there is no North Star. There’s just this vague idea that we’re going to win the nation’s wars. Well, when I’m not fighting a war, and even when I’m fighting a war, that doesn’t provide clarity about how I behave as a human.

So, the unifying purpose is the piece that draws humans together with some kind of north star that says we go that way. And for the military, it might be that it’s all about the bond of soldiers one to another. Because when the battle gets tight, it’s not going to be the training that is the reflex way that necessarily leads us to successful outcomes, it’s the commitment we have to one another. It’s literally, to be overly dramatic perhaps but not untrue, it’s the reason why we might fight to our death. We’re not going to fight for death for God and Country because when we’re actually in the battle, those kind of philosophical concerns fade into the background. What we are actually fighting for is the men and women on either side of us, to my right and my left. Have I got them covered, and have they got me covered, do I trust them? So, the unifying purpose becomes different than the mission, it becomes about the bond we share together.

There might be different ways that we could describe that unifying purpose, but we could also look at unifying purpose for more regular businesses like, imagining a trucking company. It might want to be the company of choice for moving agricultural products, full stop. That’s the mission, they’re clear about who they want to be in the world. But is that going to unify the way that humans interact with that in that company to achieve that outcome? Maybe, when the leadership of the organization really investigates what drives people to help them complete that mission, it may be professionalism, it may be safety.

The mission, the unifying purpose, is to bring everyone home safely every single night. And once you’ve got that unifying purpose, then we orchestrate the organization behind that leadership ethic that says this is the most important thing. It’s the North Star. Trust me, we’ve seen over and over again where safety can be the thing that leads to more professionalism in terms of the way people conduct themselves. Safety can be the thing that creates more efficient, effective, and safe work procedures. Simply, this clarion call that says, “what are we all about as we relate to one another as humans?”

I think this concept applies in all kinds of other places. Have we ever been in a church that has ethical lapses, or heard about them? I mean, it’s all the time. Or we’ve seen church groups that break apart and can’t be clear about what it is that’s important to an organization. That’s because they may have a mission about evangelical saving the world, but they have the absence of a unifying purpose that says, “here’s how we as humans do this together”. And I think these same concepts even apply in our families. It may be through love and support, we empower each person to live their best life.

I don’t know, something like that. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this kind of concept. I’ve been having fun playing with it today. Wishing you the very best, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching.