Finding Your Organisational Why
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With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to change the nature of business operations around the planet, there has never been a more significant time to discover, or re-discover, your organisational ‘why’.
On a fundamental level, all businesses operate on the back of three essential questions: What they do, how they do it and perhaps most importantly, why they do it.
While all companies know what they do, and most know how they do it, very few can genuinely articulate WHY they do it.
The ‘why’ is ‘the purpose, the cause, or the belief that drives every organisation and every person’s individual career’. Finding your organisational ‘why’ through creating a WHY statement is crucial to communicating your company’s purpose to the world.
Start With Why
In 2009, author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek gave an 18 minute long TED talk called ‘How Great Leaders Inspire Action’. With over 12 million views on YouTube to date, Sinek’s now infamous presentation inspired companies across the globe to ‘Start with Why’.
For every entity on the planet, be it an individual, team, or organisation, their ‘why’ is the fuel that powers everything they do, whether they are aware of it or not.
On an organisational level, the ‘why’ is the vision that sets you apart from your competition.
In Sinek’s book, Start With Why, he explains how the world’s greatest leaders and most successful companies use their ‘why’ to champion their cause, sell their products and inspire people to take action. They do this by clarifying, embodying and communicating their ‘why’ before anything else. They start with, sell with and lead with their ‘why’ in all their business interactions.
For companies to harness the power of ‘why’, they must first clearly and consciously take the time to define it, by constructing a WHY statement that they can then communicate to the world.
Finding Your Why
Your WHY statement is the most comprehensive and powerful tool you can use to articulate your ‘why’, to both your organisation and to the world at large.
Your WHY statement should be:
Straightforward and clear
Actionable
Focused on how you’ll contribute to creating positive change
Expressed in affirmative language that resonates with your leadership team
Your WHY statement should be able to encapsulate all of the above in a single sentence. It should also be ‘evergreen’, meaning that is can be applied to everything you do without exception. In this way, there is no separation between your personal and professional ‘why’.
As Sinek states in his more recent book, Find Your Why, your WHY statement should be ‘a statement of your value at work as much as it is the reason your friends love you. We don’t have a professional WHY and personal WHY. We are who we are wherever we are. Your contribution is not a product or a service. It’s the thing around which everything you do— the decisions you make, the tasks you perform, the products you sell— aligns to bring about the impact you envision.’
The WHY Statement Format
Sinek and his team provide a simple format to use to draft your WHY statement:
TO ____ SO THAT ____.
The first blank represents your contribution, what you want to contribute to the world and the lives of others. The second blank represents what you wish the impact of this contribution to be.
As simple as this seems, it can often be difficult to distil your why into such a simple, short statement. Sinek’s own WHY statement may provide some inspiration:
“To inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that, together, we can change our world.”
You can see here that the impact Sinek wants to have is for everyone to change the world, via his contribution of inspiring people.
Do you need help finding your Why? At Infinity HR, we work with organisations to help them define their purpose and leverage it for organisational success. Contact Iolanda on 0400 489 743 or email iolanda@infinityhr.com.au to learn more.
References:
A 12-Minute Summary of “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek