Be On Purpose

What reason does your team have to exist?

Many people associate their team’s purpose merely by the department label ie ‘marketing’ or ‘finance’. This is hardly a rallying call to arms. A team’s purpose is its raison d’etre. It defines why its members need to work together and illustrates how they can function better as a team rather than a group of individuals. 

This is crucial in today’s hybrid, fragmented working environment. When a team’s purpose is clear, shared, and genuinely interdependent, team members are motivated to contribute from wherever they are working. Their collective efforts visibly combine into outcomes that no single individual could deliver alone. Research on team purpose consistently links shared understanding of “what we’re here to achieve” with stronger coordination and team performance (van der Hoek et al., 2018).

How does a clear team purpose support individual team members exactly? The causal link between a team’s purpose and an individual’s contribution has been studied extensively throughout history. From Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) to contemporary well-being frameworks that emphasise personal meaning as a pillar of flourishing (Seligman, 2011), people do better work when they can connect what they do to at an individual level with something that matters to the group or the team.

Organisational research echoes this: meaningful work is reliably associated with higher engagement, commitment, job satisfaction, and performance-related outcomes (Allan et al., 2019). The practical implication is simple but often missed: it’s not enough to publish a purpose statement. Teams need to translate purpose into a defined set of outcomes showing how their work creates value for customers, colleagues, themselves and their wider stakeholders.