Why Common Purpose Matters
The company’s mission should be tangible, inspiring, and relevant to all levels. It is the glue connecting the team. In times of crisis, common purpose is critical. Just as military units need a clear mission to be effective under pressure, having a common purpose allows your group to be decisive in difficult situations. The purpose should provide meaningful guidance, not just be a bumper sticker. Ownership in the mission must trickle all the way down to frontline workers. Every individual on the team must feel a personal alignment with the group’s purpose.
Teams across an organization must have a clear "north star,” a collective understanding of where we are going, why we are going there, and how we are going to get there.
How It Works
Breaking Priority Paralysis: Leveraging Common Purpose
As a leader, you may find yourself shifting from leading to reacting to circumstances and urgency. How do you break that trend? It is time to ground your activity in your organization’s Common Purpose.
Unifying a Team and a Product Suite
McChrystal Group partnered with Intuit to help it develop and implement its “One Intuit” strategy, enabling them to not only maintain but strengthen its position in the market despite increased competition from start-ups and changing customer demands.
What Kind of Leader Can Lead a Team of Teams? The 6 Principles of Leading Like a Gardener
What does it mean to be a Team of Teams®, and more importantly, what does it take to lead one? With such a radical operating model, a different approach to leadership is needed. Neither a command-and-control style nor a laisse-faire style of leadership can successfully manage complex organizations. A Team of Teams® can only be led by a gardener.
Weekly Whiteboard: Unifying a Team and a Product Suite
Dive deep into a real-life example of how McChrystal Group partnered with a large, established tech company to help them cascade their strategy across the entirety of the organization and connect leaders through a company-wide forum to strengthen its common purpose.
Team of Teams® Framework
Common Purpose is a critical component of the Team of Teams® framework, which emphasizes four key capabilities for high-performing teams. Common Purpose is just one of the four in this model and without a committed effort to build and develop all four, it is all the more difficult to operate as a high-performing team.
Discover more about the four capabilities that comprise the Team of Teams® framework.
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