Shaping the Future – Shared Purpose

The second of 8 "key themes" for driving sustainable organisational performance identified in the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) report "Sustainable Organisational Performance: What Really Makes the Difference" is shared purpose.

The report defines an organisation's purpose as "its identity, the reason why it exists and the golden thread to which its strategy should be aligned."  From there it moves on to state that "shared purpose takes the connection with the organisational purpose one step further to a purpose that is shared by all employees." 

Once again you can hardly fault this. The report continues that shared purpose is stronger when:-

• Employees connect emotionally; 
• Integrated into targets and performance;  
• Leveraged through periods of uncertainty and change.

It then talks about the challenges and the need to:-

• Balance the achievement of core purpose with a focus on efficiencies; and
• Beware conflicting priorities and structural changes.  

Do you see anything new or profound here? I don't. This seems to be nothing more than another exercise is stating the obvious and a whole lot of motherhood statements. They do describe efforts of the sample organisations involved, but there is little to tell you how to go about this. 

Once again the Zealise model of creating employee ownership offers you the best way of creating and sustaining shared purpose. After all, how can you have greater employee engagement than when the employee owns a stake in the business? And what better way is there to ensure shared purpose than when the employee has a vested interested the organisational purpose?

So, if you really want to shape the future you need to introduce our new employee ownership model now to truly cement shared purpose.