When most people think of leadership, they think of finding ways to make their company more efficient and boost the bottom line. This can be especially true when you have more of a “middle level” leadership position — meaning that while you lead people and projects, you don’t have the power to change your company’s structure, values or policies.
However, regardless of your leadership level within your organization, the best leaders consistently commit to causes that are bigger than the bottom line. By embracing a mindset that is bigger than your business’s financials, you can have a much wider impact than you would otherwise.
A Higher Purpose Brings Meaning to Your Team’s Work
Leaders who lift others and treat employees with kindness naturally gain an edge when it comes to driving motivation and productivity. But committing to a cause can bring an even bigger boost to what your team can accomplish.
A sense of purpose has become increasingly important to workers in recent years. Research published in Business Wire found that 84% of employees only wanted to work for a purpose-driven company. In addition, 35% said that the positive impact a company made on society was one of the “two most important attributes when deciding to stay or leave a job.”
Perhaps most notably for organizational leaders, the survey found that 75% of employees felt that their companies needed to change their behavior to align with their stated purpose, and 68% felt their organization needed to better define its purpose.
As a leader, truly committing to your company’s higher cause and embedding it in your organizational culture can dramatically transform how others perceive their work. Committing to a bigger cause ensures greater cultural alignment within the organization, which will improve employee satisfaction, retention and productivity.
Leaders should develop and clearly communicate a higher purpose for their company. Integrating this into all aspects of the work and regularly discussing your purpose will help it become fully engrained in your company culture.
Your Cause Can Drive Better Outcomes for Customers
Cause-focused leadership can also have a profound impact on the customers you serve.
As Jeff Rodgers, Chief Marketing Officer of Indra Energy explains, “Cause-focused leadership also considers how the company’s vision and values will affect its customers. You should strive to have an impact for good on the lives of customers, in conjunction with the cause you support. For example, our mission is to make renewable energy more accessible to all. Everything we do aims to fulfill this vision, including the kinds of services we offer. We look for ways to do this in a way that will best serve our customers and help them with their own sustainability goals. This creates a kind of synergy between us that helps drive the cause even further.”
Committing to a cause will naturally benefit customers by helping ensure that teams focus on customer needs, viewing them as people rather than numbers. Helping customers feel cared for and valued — and helping them see how what you do is an extension of your cause — can have a dramatic impact on retention and loyalty.
Notably, research by McKinsey found a shift in consumer spending toward products and services that made environmental, social or governance-related claims, with above-average growth compared to products that didn’t make such claims. In this instance, committing to a bigger cause actually ends up helping the company’s bottom line. Making customers a key part of your cause-related focus will significantly expand your impact.
In addition to providing top-quality service to your customers, make your cause a central part of your messaging to them. Your cause should become a key focus of your public-facing identity. This will rally like-minded customers to your brand.
A Cause Helps You Focus On the Long-Term
A bottom line emphasis tends to focus on the short-term — and this can cause leaders to overlook the things that truly matter.
As Lisa Earle McLeod writes, “When a board overemphasizes backward-looking metrics like quarterly earnings, margin and revenue, company leaders cascade that overemphasis downward, often with disastrous consequences. It’s been well documented that overemphasizing short-term metrics has a chilling effect on long-term strategy. Often referred to as strategy surrogation, when a metric (like new accounts added) overrides a larger strategy (like creating a differentiated customer experience) employees wind up caring more about the metric than they do the customer.”
It’s worth noting from this example that a cause doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to a charitable cause. Even the “cause” of creating a better customer experience is associated with something higher than money, because it looks at initiatives through the lens of what will best serve the customers. This focus is essential for delivering lasting value that has a more meaningful impact for everyone involved.
A long-term outlook leads to better decision-making and more mindful leadership. Most importantly, this approach will help you create goals that have a true global impact that encourages buy-in from employees and customers alike. Building this culture at your own level of the organization is an important step in this process.
To achieve this, make sure your team evaluates long-term outcomes when making decisions or revising its strategies. Center conversations about whether a particular decision will contribute to or detract from your long-term goals.
Find a Cause That Helps You Achieve More
In some organizations, senior leadership has a clear cause that they want the entire organization to support. They may provide the framework and resources that help you support that cause in your own leadership efforts.
This isn’t always the case — but that doesn’t have to keep you from implementing cause-oriented leadership. When you find a higher purpose in your work, and help those you lead to also find meaning in that cause, you can make your work much more impactful.