We recently spoke about the value of trust in business and leadership. Purpose is another essential element that must be present for organizations and leaders to achieve success. Its importance may seem obvious at first, but purpose provides both qualitative and quantitiative value that is often not fully considered.

Harvard Business Review blog, John Baldoni, executive coach and author of Lead With Purpose, Giving Your Organization a Reason to Believe in Itself talks about purpose and how leaders can instill purpose to achieve sustainable business results. He mentions the plethora of resources involved in helping individuals find purpose, but how the concept in business is often overlooked.

In writing Lead With Purpose, Baldoni researched ways businesses can find purpose and also utilize it to progress to the next level. His findings demonstrate that providing clarity allows individuals within the organization the freedom to create, engage, and innovate. Essentially, purpose is the foundation for creating vision.

Baldoni outlines four vital elements of success, each a direct result of purpose.

• Instill purpose in employees. Engaged employees are productive employees. Purpose allows employees to know that what they do is important to others.

• Provide clarity. Ambiguity is not a bad thing, but fearing ambiguity is. Embracing ambiguity with a sense of purpose opens the doors to other possibilities, exposing what otherwise might not have been seen, and thus showing employees what is expected of them by connecting the dots.

• Stimulate innovation. Having purpose permits employees to try new ways of doing things to achieve the organization's mission.

• Groom the next generation of leaders. Leaders at the top need to be sure of their own purpose before they can pass that on to their employees, some of whom will someday run the company.

Read Baldoni's full article on purpose at Harvard Business Review

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