Find Your Why: a practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team pdfdrive com

A team is not a group of people who
work together.
A team is a group of people who trust
each other.
Sometimes an organization prefers that all the participants be drawn from the
ranks of senior leaders. This approach can work as long as the leaders meet the
basic requirements: tenure and zeal. The majority of participants, regardless of
rank, should be people with substantial experience at the company who love
working there and care about the people and the culture. A Why Discovery with
senior staff must also represent a good cross section of job functions. The
process will not work otherwise. If you have an imbalance from engineering, for
example, you are more likely to end up finding the WHY of the engineering
department, not the WHY of the whole company. Balance is critical.

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Schedule Enough Time
A Tribe Why Discovery takes at least four hours, but organizations may try to
compress the session into a shorter timeframe. Resist! Having the full four hours
is crucial. Having five hours is even better. It’s like cooking a turkey. You can try
to speed things up by increasing the oven temperature, but even if the bird looks
brown on the outside, it’s not going to be cooked all the way through. To feel
good about their Why Statement and take ownership of it, the participants have
to go through the full intellectual and emotional journey. They have to bring the
WHY to life through the stories they share. We have done many discoveries
where we could have identified an organization’s WHY in under an hour—but
we wouldn’t have brought the group along with us, emotionally. People need to
make the discovery on their own, and, for a group, that takes time. It won’t
matter how wonderful the Why Statement sounds if no one in the organization
feels ownership of it or is inspired to bring it to life in their work.