02/06/2024

Bridge the Gap to Succeed in the New Year

Instead of resolving to do better, try revisiting purpose

At the start of a new year, we focus on doing better -- better than last year, better than the competition, better than our best. We start out feeling resolved and tally a to-do list for ourselves. It's perfunctory -- we note habits we know we need to change or start and things we need to fix in our work, our leadership, and our lives. We pledge to do those things, then work to check off the list and change our ways. Given an added thought, it's a strange, counterintuitive approach: We decide to lead with things designed to follow.

Pause for a moment. Put down your resolutions list (if you can find it), and think about the poor logic of that pattern. When you want to start or redirect yourself -- or a new business or product line -- you don't start with tasks and to-dos. That comes, but you start bigger, with strategy. If you're smarter still, and if you're the kind of leader who hopes to be around for many new years, you begin with purpose. Purpose asks us to answer why we do what we do. Purpose frames. Used right, it also guides, it filters, it sounds a need for course correction, it makes us think and rethink, it unites. Why, then, wouldn't we check in with purpose at the start of each new year instead of stampeding to the doing part that is the to-do list? It's a good question. There's an even better one: Which purpose?

Recently, a wise former CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company made an interesting comment: "There are really two purposes out there, and for all the good they should guide us to, they often do us a lot of harm." Then he explained. "There's the aspirational purpose," the one we most commonly associate with the concept. This is purpose writ large, the extending-our-reach-beyond-our-grasp version. This form of purpose is meant to guide us, not just in a particular year, but over many years, across numerous business strategies and even multiple leaders. "Then there's the in-this-moment purpose," he continued. "The purpose we give the work we're doing right now, Tuesday, post-lunch -- in other words, purpose in the moment. It's the purpose found in finishing a project, delivering a new product, hitting the numbers." It was what he observed next that really resonated.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.