How To Activate The Power Of Purpose To Drive Performance

During his summer at the University of Virginia, Malcolm Brogdon, the 2017 NBA Co-Rookie of the Year, came to Milwaukee to work out with Thrive3, the basketball training company I built out of my college apartment. He had an incredible work ethic. We worked on his individual skills for a couple of hours and left the gym drenched in sweat. I still remember the picture we took afterward. It looked like someone had sprayed us down with a garden hose. He was all about the work. Malcolm was one of the most focused and motivated players I had ever been around. There’s even a story that the student manager at The University of Virginia developed tendonitis in both hands because he rebounded for him so much. Talk about putting in the work!

After the workout, we decided to shower and grab some food at Bel Air, a Mexican restaurant in downtown Milwaukee. This was early in his college career. He had missed his freshman year due to foot surgery. At that point, his future in basketball was pretty uncertain. Was he going to be able to overcome this injury and have a solid career at Virginia, or was this going to throw a wrench into his basketball dreams? “Do you want to keep playing after you are done at Virginia?”

He looked me straight in the eyes and responded with a “yes” that was grounded in a sense of resolve, humility, and confidence. Malcolm shared a couple of stories about when he went to Africa for mission trips as a kid. When he was eleven, his parents took him and his brother on a three-week trip to Ghana instead of going on vacation. Instead of enjoying rides at Disney World, they worked in daycare and maternity centers. In the “off ” time, Malcolm played barefoot soccer with the kids in the neighborhood and realized how fortunate his family was compared to most people. And he grew up in inner-city Atlanta. He told me, “Even at eleven years old, this ignited a fire inside me. To do something bigger and create change.”

Then when he was fourteen, his grandparents took him on a mission trip to Malawi, where he said people were living in even more extreme poverty. In Malawi, young girls traded an education for traveling miles to gather water on a path where they were worried about being eaten by wild animals. This is a way of life for some kids in Africa. The situation is so dire that a child dies every ninety seconds because of a water-related disease. He couldn’t stop thinking about this.

After sharing these stories, he looked at me again and said, “So that’s my motivation to make it to the NBA.” It wasn’t about a shoe deal. It wasn’t about becoming an All-Star or signing multi-million-dollar contracts for the sake of money. It was about using those contracts and relationship capital from the NBA to start a nonprofit that provides access to clean water for rural villages in Africa.

Fast forward to today. Not only has Malcolm been named NBA Rookie of the Year and turned in five near All-Star level season performances, but he’s also launched the Brogdon Family Foundation to serve his mission. The one that he shared with me eight years ago, back when he was in college. Because he operated with purpose.

Despite what you see in the media, the NBA lifestyle can be grueling—the long road trips, the ice baths, the rehab, the time away from family. You have to endure a lot of adversity—just like in business. But often, the determining factor in our ability to stay focused, locked in, and perform at our highest level is maintaining our emotional connection to our purpose.

It’s also something the research shows will drive and sustain business growth:

1. 90% of global employees in purpose-driven companies are engaged (Korn Ferry, 2016) vs. 21% of the global workforce who are engaged (Gallup, 2021)
2. Purpose-driven companies outperform the market 15:1.
3. Purpose-driven leaders have employees who are 70% more satisfied, 56% more engaged and 100% more likely to stay with the organization (Harvard Business Review, 2014)

As leaders, uncovering your individual purpose—and how it connects to the organization’s purpose is the first step. It might even be a collaborative process with your entire senior leadership team to redefine this for the organization. You can do this by finding the commonalities of each individual’s purpose to collectively define the path forward for the organization in the new world. Regardless, this north star is crucial to navigating the inevitable adversity as a leader or organization challenging the status quo. Research shows having a clearly defined purpose improves focus, resilience, and motivation—all qualities leaders need to navigate change.

But here’s the hard part. We have to model it. Only then can we help our people uncover their individual purpose. That’s how we lead self-driven people who will take ownership of their work. Because the truth is this:

People don’t want to be motivated. They want to be inspired.

When leaders live their purpose, that’s exactly what they do. Inspire. This is how you tap into the power of intrinsic motivation that drives organizational excellence.

Now, purpose can be this big esoteric thing that might seem hard to grasp. One way we can get clarity on purpose is to tap into the power of legacy. It’s just like your personal brand. You will have one whether you are aware of it or not, but if you’re intentional about it, you can craft it. One way to get clarity on this is to start with the end in mind first and reverse engineer it. When I work with leaders in our coaching program or workshops, I have them write out their eulogies. I was introduced to this practice through reading one of Robin Sharma’s books in my mid-20s. One thing that surprises most people is that even when they do this exercise in the context of business leadership, none of the insights have to do with driving more revenue and growth. It’s about influence and impact. This might feel uncomfortable, but you and I both know that’s exactly where we grow.

This exercise has massive potential to help you get clarity on what you want and how you show up in the world.

When we can figure out what we want people to say about us when we’re gone, we can figure out how we want to live and lead every day.

And that becomes your legacy. The power of legacy is not what you get ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. The power is that it creates purpose in each moment.