My Monday Email to Leaders in Reno County from 2/11/13 was entitled “Peter Piper Picked A Peck of Pickled PURPOSE”:
Good Morning. Here’s a review of where we’ve been for the past 3 weeks:
We’ve been looking at the KLC Civic Leadership Principles:
1) Leadership is an activity, not a position.
2) Anyone can lead, anytime, anywhere.
3) It starts with you and must engage others.
Today, we move to principle #4: “Your purpose must be clear.” Purpose should loom large in our acts of leadership. One exercise that has helped some of us get after purpose is that “Why, Why, Why” exercise. If you’re not familiar, we form a class into groups and encourage participants to think of an issue that they care about so deeply that they would be willing to give their time to be involved in it. Then, we have them explain their purpose by digging deeper and asking “Why?” What emerges is typically what is driving you to do what you do and often this purpose is shared between people with different issues they care about. This simple exercise helps, then, to inspire a collective purpose, energizing others, as well as helping each individual hold on to purpose, which might make their interventions more skillful.
As we think in this core principle, then, about how “our purpose must be clear,” we can begin to see that our engaging in acts of leadership—mobilizing people to difficult work—is helped by a clear purpose. A clear purpose doesn’t mean our acts of leadership will be easy, but it does remove some of the fog off of the windshield of our journey. A clear purpose helps everyone: it reminds us why we are doing what we’re doing and helps unite us with others so that progress can be made on issues we care about deeply.
So, today, focus. Have a clear purpose in what you do and see if it doesn’t affect our community for the better.
Have a great week…