Align these ‘7i’s to your purpose and advance through the rocky seas

Purpose is all about people. Purpose comes to life through people, through their personalities, passions, impact, and interactions. In the context of a brand or organization, people are stakeholders – employees, consumers, clients, investors, community, causes.

So, for your brand promise to be realized and achieve the sustainable impact and performance you dream for it to have, you have to lead with purpose! If you don’t, all the effort you have put into building the brand promise is just window dressing. People will see through it, and you risk undermining all the potential value you would otherwise, have created. As we say at PurposeFused – “you have to live it to give it”.

This article follows on from a series related to building purpose-driven brands. The previous articles referred to:

• a model for purpose-driven stakeholder collaboration;
• where you sit on the Doing-Good, Doing-Well Impact matrix;
• Cause Fusion as the next frontier to Cause Marketing.

So, now the last and potentially most important piece of the puzzle…

To Lead with Purpose

Leading with purpose blends together the best of your organizational / brand and personal purpose. It’s at this intersection that purpose-driven leaders have the most impact.

In our experience, purpose-driven leaders who have been though a meaningful and intentional purpose discovery process, then bring it to life through the 7 traits below:

“You can use this “7I Lead with Purpose Framework” to give yourself a quick assessment and identify what you are doing well, or would like to improve. Simply score yourself out of 10. You’re aiming for >56.

1. Impact: purposeful leaders are clear about the impact they want to have across three dimensions – on themselves (me); those they surround themselves with the most (we – peers, colleagues, friends and family); and the bigger change and footprint they want to leave in the world (world).
2. Intention: purposeful leaders demonstrate their commitment to their purpose by applying discipline in their thoughts, words and actions towards operating with passion and delivering their intended impact at the me, we and world level.
3. Inspiration: purposeful leaders share and articulate their purpose, aspirational dream and impact to inspire others. They look to open opportunities for those they lead. They also serve, support and coach others in discovering and embedding their own individual purpose into their lives.
4. Inclusivity: Purposeful leaders are open minded and encourage interaction, ideas and contribution from a diverse range of people with different perspectives. They engage stakeholders with different experiences and embrace contrasting opinions to establish context for their decisions. Purposeful leaders are self and situationally aware, compassionate and always seek to provide opportunities for learning and growth.
5. Intuition: purposeful leaders possess the ability to rapidly understand, distill and communicate information without the need for conscious reasoning. While this may be an innate strength for some more than others, it is also a learned skill they amplify and accelerate by narrowing their focus and deepening their reps around experiences, people, and knowledge that advance their purpose and ambitions.
6. Implementation: purposeful leaders not only walk the talk, they encourage, coach and support others in applying and practicing their own individual purpose, in (and beyond) the workplace. The more people working with purpose, the more productive, engaged and fulfilled the workforce and thus, the more successful the leader is.
7. Integrity: purposeful leaders are open, transparent and true to their principles. They continuously review and refine their actions in relation to the 3As – so they are authentic to their purpose, aligned to their aspirations and impact, and advancing forward towards their ambitions.

How do you stack up? What areas are you good at and wanting to enrich further? What are some areas of improvement?

To learn more about how to live and lead with purpose, please get in touch as this a core component of our work.