Today at our annual Learning Leadership Summit, a person at my table brought up Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009), saying how much she enjoyed it. A couple others of us concurred, and then we tried to name the three things that Pink says are of most importance to motivation for today’s workforce. We remembered the first two things–mastery and autonomy–but none of us could think of the third. After looking it up, we had to laugh at the irony. The third item is purpose, and here we were participating in a session on that very subject.
Talking about purpose is not a fad. As the coincidence between Pink’s work and Leider’s work shows, there is a growing body of research that identifies a link between having a purpose and being happy and healthy. And of course, there are countless examples of the difference in success between companies and projects with clear purposes vs. those without. Finally, we all know the mantra about effective communication: purpose, audience, and scope.
Check out more on the subject at these resources:
- John Wooden’s blog post about Drive in this blog