Hopefully playing with the IDEO wheel has helped you think a little more deeply about your own (and your organization's) purpose. Let me dive a little deeper into why purpose is so important.

As I said earlier, to the extent that most legal professionals have done some deep work around drafting a mission statement, they often do it as part of their marketing efforts. And with good reason—good marketing professionals know that your customers what to know what you're for, both in terms of what problems you solve for and what you stand for.

Even if customers don't read your actual mission statement, a good marketer is going to help you infuse your mission in the other language that you use to communicate with your customers and prospects.

I agree that having a mission statement is important for attracting the right customers to your business, but a good mission goes way beyond that. I'd argue that it is every bit as important, if not more so, to have a purpose that inspires and engages your team as well.

I won't rehash the entire video above, but I will recommend its source material: The excellent book Drive; The sSurprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink (Powells Link, Amazon (affiliate) Link, Book Page). Or, if it is more your speed, you can get at least some of the lessons (and a bonus lawyer joke) from Pink's TED Talk.

The key takeaway: People are far more likely to respond well to intrinsic motivators than external ones, especially over the long term. Specifically, people respond to an internal sense of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, and they are most engaged when your organization's purpose closely matches their own.

The Role of Purpose in Agile Organizations

My focus on people and purpose isn't just for kicks. In my experience working with dozens of legal teams, the biggest obstacle to improved agility (which leads to improved productivity) is the overall culture of an organization. In fact, one of the leading barriers to agility in legal teams is our profession's affinity for highly structured process workflows and its infatuation with software tools to implement them. Here's the problem:

Agility does not happen through structure or tools; it happens through people.

Agile transformation expert Dr. Stefanie Puckett puts it this way, "the heart of agility lies simply in the way people in the organization think and act. What they pay attention to, how they prioritize, how they get stuff done, how well they plan by sight and keep their eyes on the customer." (See this article for more detail).

Dr. Puckett has identified three high-level requirements for building a more agile culture in any organization: transparency, engagement, and collaboration.* A purpose-driven mission statement goes a long way towards fostering all three.

* Not quite the same as Pink's autonomy, mastery, & purpose, but you can see where they overlap. Pink's triad is focused on the specific motivators of people whereas Puckett's speaks to organizations; both are important in their context.

Lesson 3: Why Purpose Outperforms Other Motivators

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