Episode 36 How to Get Mission Minded Employees?
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Episode 36 How to Get Mission Minded Employees?

Uncategorized Mar 18, 2020

How do you go about getting employees that have a passion, are purpose minded, and are excited to be on mission? Particularly for administrative or task focused people, it can be difficult to get them passionate or focused on the larger mission at hand.  

By connecting the purpose or the why of your company, with the actions of those employees, you can transform them into mission minded workers. The best way to accomplish this, is through stories.  

Build Purpose Through Storytelling 

Mission, purpose, and passion. These are what you want all of your employees to be driven by, but it can be hard to instill in those admin workers that are doing the same thing day after day. To effectively communicate and develop this kind of motivation, you need to connect with your team on an emotional level.  

The first step is to have a united purpose for your company… which I have talked about in previous blogs and discussed with detail in my book. Then you need to make sure that all of the actions that each of your employees do, throughout your entire organization, connect with that unified purpose.  

Stories can help people engage on an emotional level, which will be necessary when trying to transform those mundane tasks into mission driven ones.  

When I need people to enter data into a CRM, that is a task that’s critical for by business. It’s an important job, because if those people aren’t taking notes, or performing consistently, our workflow just isn’t going to work well.  

When they were struggling, their issue was not seeing why detailed and consistent notes mattered. Encouraging them to take detailed notes well for bonuses or warning them of docked pay for multiple errors isn’t a solution that ever works, because it doesn’t address any true motivational factors.  

To have them do their role with passion and a mission mindset, I started telling them some stories.  

For commissioned salespeople, I would talk to them and bring up what their next vacation might be like. Imagine going away for a week or so with their family, and being able to shut off their cell phone, and not have to check their email for the entire time.  

For accounts and projects that might need some guidance or contextual attention during crucial periods, being able to rest easy and not take their phone on vacation is something these individuals would love to do. However, that can’t happen unless they consistently enter in detailed notes in the system, so when the rest of the team back in the office takes over, they can do so with confidence.  

That is a powerful story, that can inspire motivation, and connect a mission or overall goal with what that individual does on a daily basis.  

Another way for me to connect with one of our own missions at Stewardship, which is loving people through finances, is through stories that affect our customers.  

If one of my team members isn’t taking detailed notes about a customer when they’re on the phone, about their situation, and with information that gives context… then when that customer asks us a question, we can’t respond in a personal way. We can’t deliver that love and compassion. Which means we’re opening up that customer to find somewhere else.  

So, I tell my employees when they engage with the customer, we need notes from them. When they miss a note, we miss something about the customer. And when we lack context, we might handle their finances in the wrong way.  

Stories Make Actions Have Impact 

No matter what it is, at some level, any action that’s taken has the chance of positively affecting something else within the business down the line. That is why it’s so important to keep each of your employees’ mission and purposely motivated. By telling stories that help them connect the overall company goals to their own actions emotionally, you can ensure their performance stays consistent, which raises the chances for that future positive impact.  

This Week’s Take Away 

What is one thing you wish your team did with more passion? Once you have that figured out, create a story for your employees that helps them feel and understand why it’s a big deal. The ability to tell these stories is how you get employees to act with purpose and be mission minded.  

 

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