Servant Purpose Fosters Clarity, Growth, and Service
What are the cultural artifacts that indicate a healthy work culture?
In our book, Good Comes First, co-author Mark Babbitt and I look at four vital parts of living out desired values in organizations. These cornerstones help align people and practices to your organization’s standards.
The first cornerstone is, “Live Our Servant Purpose.” What is a “servant purpose”?
A servant purpose describes how or what your company does and how what it does improves the quality of life for employees, customers, and your communities.
This enables leaders, employees, contractors, and even customers to see that your company has a reason for being other than just making money.
That higher purpose shifts your organization’s primary focus from making a profit (or making red wagons, circuit boards, or sandwiches—none of which are innately inspiring to employees) to serving others: generating tangible benefit to your customers and your communities.
Good Comes First companies employ and promote leaders who are fully capable of embracing the servant purpose—and their people.
When a leader lives her servant purpose, she doesn’t just serve that servant purpose—she also acts daily in service to her people.
In a Good Comes First company, a leader must ensure she is not the only leader in the organization modeling its servant purpose.
Unfortunately, too many employees experience a crappy boss who is more concerned about compliance and conformity than creative work—a boss who doesn’t care about their people (respect), only about their bottom line (results). In today’s world of work, this is a significant reason far too many of our workplaces suck (and why many of those 48 million US workers voluntarily left their crappy jobs —and crappy bosses and crappy colleagues—in a single year recently).
Good Comes First companies employ and promote leaders who are fully capable of embracing the servant purpose—and their people. Moreover, those servant-first leaders genuinely care about personal and professional growth; they see each
- employee
- contractor
- vendor
- partner
as an integral part of that growth. Just as importantly, these leaders treat any sign of inequality and bias as if it was cancer in any workplace.
And they insist their fellow leaders do the same. Soon, the entire leadership team is focused on not just results but on making people’s lives better. That, in turn, inspires your team members to model the servant purpose, as well.
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