Finding your purpose: A less intimidating approach | Dan Cable | Big Think

I think that it's really typical for somebody to not know what their purpose is. I think that the idea of saying "find your purpose" is a very high challenge and I think it's probably too demanding in many ways, especially if you're talking about a relatively young person that's just entering the workforce.

So, I think that it's kind of interesting to remember that personalizing purpose doesn't mean that you have to find somebody that has a burning passion to serve. It also doesn't mean that the leader has to deliver purpose like handing it out, like playing cards. I think that the middle ground is to foster interest and to help people experience firsthand the end user of their work.

Let me give you an example of this. I work a little bit with Microsoft and in Vienna, there is a country manager there named Dorothy. One of the things that she does that I find really compelling is when they start up a new project, they go on-site with the client. They don't just take the senior leaders; they take the whole team. They might take as many as 15 people, including the programmer or the actual person that will be doing some code, up to the client representative who's kind of running the whole relationship and basically everybody in between—the logistics person, the person that will run the scheduling—they all go on-site.

They might go on-site, for example, to a hospital that's going paperless. They'll go on-site and just interview and try to understand where it would be hard to go paperless. They'll go to Tesla and they'll talk not only to the engineers at Tesla, they'll talk to the people in finance, they'll talk to the people in production, they'll talk to the people in operations.

Another example of this would be Xbox, where they'll go on-site and they'll talk about what kind of shipment and delivery issues are you facing right now. The way that Microsoft is approaching this is twofold. Number one is they're trying to move from a know-it-all culture where we sell software to a learn-it-all culture where we sell solutions.

That aligns really nicely with this idea that we need our teams to understand the customers' problems. What are the pinch points? What are the things that we can help with? Then what Dorothea is doing by taking her whole team, even some fairly low—you know, what I would call typically low-level workers—you know, they're not the senior managers; they're the folks that have just been hired within the last two years or so. They go on-site and you get to hear who it is they're solving for and what are those problems.

I think that that is one very small, inexpensive way to think about increasing the sense of purpose, the why of the work, in a way that doesn't demand you to call it your dying passion. It's not like you're going there because if I don't do this, I'll die. It's more saying, "Listen, either way, I'm a programmer, and I just need some money, but I happen to work for an organization that really lets me understand why I'm doing the programming."

I really understand who's going to use it. It allows me to understand that if I do a good job, those people at Xbox will be able to get their shipments on time and that sort of connects me to the why of the work.

Get smarter faster with new videos daily at 5 a.m. Eastern.