Helping Your Team Understand Its Clear Purpose

Last week at the 2025 Leadership Legacy Experience, I had the privilege of joining a panel discussion on how organizations can help their teams understand and live out a clear purpose. Here's some of what I shared, based on what we've done at Colman Engineering . . .

1. To start, you need to define your purpose. Make it short and sweet. At Colman, ours is straightforward: Engineering for a Better World.

2. You need to define exactly how this purpose should be lived out. That's where your values come in. If your purpose is a boat, your values are the oars. Here are ours:

   • Maintaining Open Lines of Communication

   • Treating Everyone with Respect

   • Considering the Big Picture

   • Doing Work We're Proud Of

   • Continually Growing and Learning

   • Acting with Integrity
     

3. For our team, steps 1 and 2 were a good start, but everything really clicked when we started discussing—as a team—what each value looks like in practice. The more granular we got, the more it started to feel tangible. And as we continually practice these things, we hone our technique and get even better at living out each value. (Like how a rower's technique helps them be more effective and efficient with their oars!)
   

Defining your (1) purpose and (2) values and (3) getting granular is a great start. But if you just present this once a year or once a quarter, it isn't going to provide the motivation, energy, and resources your team needs to actually move your purpose forward. So that's why, at Colman Engineering, we do five things to stay FOCUSed on our purpose and values, so everyone can keep rowing:

Feature our purpose and values (at least) weekly

Every Monday, we take about five minutes during our all-company meeting to discuss how we are putting our purpose and values into practice. It's a great opportunity to recognize people who have been living out a particular value in an extraordinary way.

Own our purpose and values visually

We post our purpose and values throughout the office—8.5 x 11 copies at each workstation and a poster-sized one in the conference room. They’re never far from view—and that’s by design.

Communicate our purpose and values publicly

We write about our purpose and values on our website and blog (like right now). This kind of broadcasting not only creates accountability, but it also helps our clients connect the dots. Many have experienced how we do things differently; this gives language and intention to what they’ve felt.

Use our purpose and values in employee evaluations

Our annual self-evaluation process invites each employee to reflect on how they’ve embodied our six values. Managers do the same, and then they talk about it together. It’s not about scoring—it’s about having meaningful conversations around alignment, growth, and consistency.

Select new hires that align with our purpose and values

We guard our purpose and values carefully, because they’re only as strong as the person who upholds them the least. So, during hiring, we look for people who already live our values in their personal and professional lives. Skills matter, but alignment matters more.

These are the things we're doing, but we're just getting started. We certainly haven't "arrived," but we're taking steps toward this vision one day at a time.

The next step is for us to help our employees identify what their unique purpose is for their own lives, and then tie that together with our organizational purpose. I'll share more about that when we've gone through that process!

The Leadership Legacy event was a day full of inspiration, practical wisdom, and connection. We were honored to be a part of it—and excited to keep rowing forward!