About the Team Purpose to Performance Program
This program is a culmination of over 30+ years of learning, testing, research, amazing client engagements, magic, and reflection. The visual distillation of insights will show you how to best ignite, accelerate, and elevate teams in a positive, energetic way that engages the hearts, minds, and souls of everyone in the Team Purpose to Performance™ process.
This pressure-tested approach is the catalyst for massive change and is used in Fortune 500 companies with profound effects. At Danone, the Purpose to Performance process helps the global operations team align to become “Best in Class,” elevating their Gartner ranking. At IBM, it helps their outsourcing division make “HR Easy.”
At CVS, it was the catalyst to help eliminate the sale of tobacco, representing over $1.5 billion of revenue. As a result of this landmark decision, in February of 2014, President Obama shared, “CVS Caremark sets a powerful example to advance . . . efforts to reduce tobacco-related deaths, cancer, and heart disease, as well as bring down healthcare costs – ultimately saving lives and protecting untold numbers of families from pain and heartbreak for years to come.”1 This kind of outcome is possible for you too.
Typically, this consultative process has been only afforded to executive leadership teams but can easily be employed by HR teams, marketing, product line managers and more. Now it is time to democratize team purpose — the more leaders and teams that know, and more importantly, use this process, the better the world will be . . .
The Team Purpose to Performance framework is simple and provides a profound and meaningful foundation for you to take and evolve for your unique business, culture, and needs. The process also surfaces and advances the REAL conversations in a psychologically safe way that aligns and engages all team members.
The ultimate goal of this program is to answer the question and create a plan for . . .
“What is the work that ONLY WE can do as a team that will make us proud?”
Leadership teams rarely ask this question. Instead, most teams simply inform each other of their individual function, rather than use their precious time together as a catalyst to see and leverage the world from multiple perspectives.
Where can the Team Purpose to Performance Process take your team? See below for some common problems teams face and the solutions the process provides:
| Problems Addressed | Solutions Provided |
|---|---|
| Team members represent their own function for report outs, remaining in silos, and only working at a modicum of their potential. | Defines the highest level of work that only the team can do together. |
| Leaders doing the work of their people because it is where they feel most knowledgable, comfortable and have been rewarded for. | Clarifies the work that leaders ARE meant to do, in other words, work at the highest strategic level possible. |
| Looking to the team leader for decisions, most likely unwittingly abdicating their own leadership responsibilities. | Each team member realizes their genius and becomes more decisive and effective. |
| The team being limited by the past, focusing on the old ways — static, fixed mindset, checking boxes, order taking… | Creates a future that will make the team proud and ignite possibility and excitement. |
Why create an illustrated guide for a process that catalyzes billions of dollars in revenue?
Pictures and simplicity increase clarity. While a picture book may seem childish, silly, or a waste of your precious time, the exact opposite is true. Visuals cause faster and stronger emotional reaction than words.2
Research suggests 65% of population are visual learners.3, 4 Pictures consistently yield much higher recall than words.5 In addition, visual information can improve decision quality as well as speed.6
Given that we are overloaded with data and desperately need white space to process it, this very different book design is intended to address these challenges directly.
Leonardo da Vinci once said,
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
The theoretical underpinning and roots for this process was inspired by Harvard Psychologist David McClelland’s motive research as well as David Burnham’s research into empirically understanding what differentiates a good leader from a great one over time.
Rather than citing research and academic sources throughout the book, I wanted the content to feel more approachable. That being said, I deeply value research and am more of the “trust and verify person” when it comes to ensuring the data supports the work. Therefore, in the appendix you will find the research, books, and data used as well as additional resources to help you advance your team’s purpose. Please don’t just trust me. Trust your own insights, data verification process, gut, and experience to validate what can and will be possible.
The heart of this work focuses on what great leaders feel and think about their work. Yes, feel. Emotions and feelings are addressed and woven throughout this book as well as using your body — a somatic approach to help guide you in your team journey. Our emotions play a critical role as a check-and-balance throughout this process. If you aren’t comfortable integrating emotions along the way, answer the questions provided to help advance the team.
If you only complete the exercises in the first half of the book and define your team’s purpose, you will be far ahead of most teams. However, to realize the more significant potential of the Team Purpose to Performance process, I encourage you to continue exploring the paradoxes and tensions your new purpose creates for you and your team. Seeing the process through to the end will enable you to surface the toughest topics objectively and strategically. This part of the work clearly defines the most critical, highest impact work that only your team can and should do. The final part of the process brings all the work together — resulting in your game plan!
Most teams create a strategic plan they rarely revisit. The opposite is true here — the elegantly simple game plan you’ll create through this process will be dynamic by design, ready to evolve alongside the changing world, customers, technology, insights, etc. When the team is given the time to have the important series of dialogues that are provided in this book, your resulting game plan will be foundational and most likely only needed to be tweaked regularly (vs. overhauled).
Once you have your game plan the team will have to contend with their own leadership paradoxes and assess new knowledge and skills that will be required to realize the Team Purpose to Performance️ game plan.
Celebration is key as well. Learning from what is working or failing is critical to this journey. Individual and team reflection time is essential. Ideally schedule a series of team check–ins over time to review what is working, check progress, celebrate, speak truthfully about what
is really happening, and revisit your game plan to ensure progress against the plan, and
adjust accordingly.
In the following pages you will learn how to engage beyond each individual’s area to bring together the hearts and minds of what binds you. And with that, may you enjoy this life-changing journey ahead! And remember, “suffering is optional; progress is powerful.” — the last chapter for multiple ways to receive additional support! And please share what gems of insights are coming from this process and how you are taking it to the next level and making it your own!