What is your purpose?

Today I find myself traveling across the country to meet with clients and potential business prospects, and the question is really why?  Why am I spending time away from family?  Why travel and be exposed to germs and being tired and an interruption to my life?  Why fly to meet strangers and try to "sell" them on what we do?

If you contemplate questions like this for what you do each day, that is a good thing.  Having purpose and perspective on why we do something is very important to being a leader, and leading a better life.  In order to be an influence on others, we must ensure that what we are doing has purpose.  Spending our time and resources, and sacrificing what is missed during that time, is not something that should be done lightly.  Each meeting, each trip, each decision we make impacts people.  Once done, it is done.  That time cannot be returned to you, so choose wisely. 

The purpose in my trip, and most trips, is to sell sure, yet really it is to help our clients.  See, if you only look at your outcome (selling an order, closing business, making money, or whatever it may be), then your purpose is not aligned with one for successful leadership.  The outcome may be that we sell an order on this trip, however, our purpose in going is to talk to clients about how we can offer them solutions to help them grow their business.  If they see value in what we bring, and it does help grow their business, they will sign up, buy our solutions and ultimately continue to do so.

This is really how you need to look at the methods, decisions, conversations and actions you do as a leader.  By understanding that your purpose is to help another achieve their goals, then you now have a purpose that matters.  It isn't a self gain situation, it is now leading for their cause and helping them WIN.  By aligning your purpose with the needs of others, even those that report to you, or your children, and even a peer or neighbor, you have now decided that you will allow others to be more important than you.

This may seem in conflict to you with setting a vision or with being the leader and making decisions that sets direction.  It certainly is from traditional thinking, from those that struggle for power and for how our society chases after and raises up the leaders to heights that cannot maintain.  Our culture of leadership has become one that is based on how much power, or money, or status you have.  The ability to get others to do what you want them to do and for the leader to make millions in doing so, has become commonplace.  Ultimately, however, this process and purpose for leading is rejected by followers, by employees, by children and by those that are forgotten in the wake and aftermath of those selfish decisions.

Next time you make a decision, you set a direction, you plan to "sell" something, or you just need to get your kids to listen, try a new approach.  Ask yourself "what is my purpose in making this, or doing this".  If you really are interested in helping the other person achieve their goals, you will find that the direction you set will increase their willingness to follow, and ultimately a desirable outcome will be achieved.