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

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Keep the WHY Alive
Peter recently flew Southwest Airlines from St. Louis, Missouri, to Columbus, Ohio. The flight was
packed, and the overhead bins were full. As the final passengers boarded, they were instructed to leave
their carry-on bags in the forward galley for loading into the baggage hold. Peter could see the flight
attendant working hard to make sure each bag was properly labeled for transfer.
This is not an unusual scene on domestic flights. It’s what
happened next that was surprising. As Peter watched, the plane’s
captain peered around the flight-deck door and caught sight of the
flight attendant labeling bags and then carrying them onto the
Jetway for loading. Immediately, and without hesitation, the
captain climbed out of his seat and started to help. Peter was
amazed. There’s a pretty sharp line drawn between flight-deck
crew and cabin crew on airlines these days, yet here was a senior
captain crossing that line to help another member of the
Southwest team ensure that the passengers’ bags would make it to
where they had to go. By his actions, by his tone in speaking to
the flight attendant and by the way he handled the bags, this
captain demonstrated to everyone watching that he cared. Peter
looked up at the airline’s crest on the bulkhead, which bears the
outline of a heart at its center, and smiled. He had just witnessed
their WHY in action.
Southwest Airlines is a company that builds its business around a belief in caring for its employees,
who in turn care for their customers. In Start with Why, Simon cited the
airline
as an example of an
organization that thinks, acts and communicates by starting with WHY. As we write this book seven
years later, it seems that Southwest’s WHY remains alive and kicking.
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To keep the WHY alive over time, we must keep it
front and center, communicating it and committing
to living it—on purpose, with purpose—every day.
Otherwise, a WHY can fizzle, fade or be forgotten.
In an organization, when the WHY goes fuzzy,
we

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call this the “split.”
Every organization’s development, growth or results can be measured on two
axes. The first is time and the second is another metric, usually revenue. When
an organization is founded, what it does is inextricably linked with why it does
what it does, even if the company can’t express its WHY in words. As the
organization grows, its WHAT and WHY grow hand in hand. But as the business
scales over time and more and more people are hired, that’s when the split
becomes a real threat.
In the beginning, when an organization is small, the founder makes the initial
hires and directly shares their vision with the team. The entire tribe is often
working from the same office; if not, they generally are in daily contact.
Employees are inspired by the founder’s vision and excited to come to work.

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They give the organization everything they’ve got, even if the pay is low and the
hours are long. Under these circumstances, the WHY remains alive and well.
As the organization gets bigger, things begin to change. The original founder
assigns someone to hire and manage some of the staff. Eventually a management
structure is put in place to handle the growth. The person who was hired to hire
people now hires someone else to help with this task. After a while, those being
hired are further and further removed from the founder and the reason the
organization does what it does. The newer hires instinctively start to focus on the
more easily measurable WHAT and soon the WHY becomes fuzzy. The point at
which this occurs—when the WHY goes fuzzy and the focus shifts to the WHAT
—is the split.
Although we may not be able to articulate the change, we can all recognize when
our organization experiences the split. Symptoms include increased stress,
decreased passion and lower productivity, engagement and innovation. People
start saying things like “It used to feel like a family around here. Now it just
feels like a job.” Whereas people were formerly inspired to stay with the
organization, now executives and upper management must actively work to
retain them, using tactics such as salary increases, bonuses tied to delivery and
share options available only to individuals who’ll commit to five more years
with the organization. This kind of money-based manipulation can work in the
short term but inevitably fails in the long run. Eventually, employee trust and
loyalty break down, performance suffers, numbers drop, layoffs begin and the
entire culture of the organization begins to erode.
Any organization, even one with a great WHY-based culture, can find itself at
the split if it loses focus on the reason it does what it does. Being aware of the
problem, however, means that you, as an organization, can guard against it.
Ultimate Software offers a perfect example of how an organization can fend off
the split. It is not only experiencing explosive growth, but also has a thriving
“people first” culture. The company is a regular in Fortune’s 100 Best
Companies to Work For list. In 2017, it was number seven on that list and was
also voted number two in People magazine’s Companies That Care list.
In early 2014, they asked us to get involved—not because they were
experiencing the split but because they wanted to inoculate themselves against it.

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They asked us to help them design leadership training that would ensure their
leaders had everything they needed so they could always choose to do the right
thing.
The leadership team at Ultimate Software knows their WHY: To provide for
people so that they thrive and feel empowered to always do the right thing. They
use that WHY to shape the organization’s culture and they envision its future
through that lens. Their WHY is not just corporate wallpaper. They live it and
breathe it. And they are hypervigilant in protecting it. Ultimate Software
prevents the split from happening by consciously, continuously and relentlessly
aligning WHAT they do with WHY they do it—and they are succeeding
beautifully.
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Whether you are proactively protecting a thriving, long-lived WHY or need to
resuscitate a WHY that has been neglected or ignored, one of the most powerful
tools at your disposal is also the simplest: storytelling. This is true whether you
are an organization or an individual.
Storytelling is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for
millennia, since long before the invention of written language. Storytelling is