Unlock the Power of Purpose in Your Work and Leadership

Gregg Vanourek:

Many people, when they’re doing a job search or contemplating a career change, don’t spend enough time vetting the place where they’re going. With the balance of power between workplace and worker, we tend to defer. We’re just trying to get a paycheck.

Richard, you talk about moving from paycheck to purpose in work. It really has to be a good fit—a values fit, a culture fit—where you can thrive and bring your gifts and your passions and your values to your work. It’s very powerful when it comes together. And it’s very much worth fighting for.

So, your formula is:

Gifts + Passions + Values = Calling (G+P+V=C)

I believe you use calling as a synonym for purpose. Can you say a bit more about the word calling? It’s an interesting word.

Richard Leider:

Well, calling is about work. Many of us spend 60% of our time working, and so that’s where we often find purpose, or we find our values.

I think about a cab driver I had in Boston. I was in his taxi on my way to give a speech. He asked me what I was going to talk about. I said, I’m going to talk about Whistle While You Work. He gave me a puzzled look. He said, I drive a cab to pay the bills. I said, Let me ask you three questions:

1. What are your gifts? 

2. What are your passions? 

3. What are your values?

I said, What are your gifts? On a scale of 1 to 10, to what extent do you use your gifts while you’re driving a cab? He said, one. In other words, no.

Then passions: Is there any part of the day where you lose track of time because you’re so deeply engaged? He turned around and smiled and said, I coach soccer at night. It’s not my livelihood, but it’s my passion. They have to kick me off the field because I love it.

He drives a cab to make a living, but at night, he does what he loves to do. That’s his passion.

Then I asked, What about values? He gave it a one at work but a ten at night. He said, I love helping older women. And he went into this whole conversation about how good he feels when he can help them with something.

I said, You have a calling. He said, No, only priests have callings. And I said, No, you have a calling: giving care to older women.

Read: How Great Leaders Bring Core Values to Life

Gregg:

I think it goes back to these myths about purpose and passion, the ones you hear in graduation speeches: Live your passion and everything will be great. What’s your one true passion?

Many people have multiple passions. And with purpose, not everybody has to be Mother Teresa or Alexei Navalny. There are multiple dimensions in our lives. There’s work, family, friendship, community, volunteering, there’s going back to school. There are different ways in which we can bring forth our purpose, passions, and values.

I talk about “authentic alignment,” where who we are is the way we actually show up and live in the world. One of the hard parts of life is that sometimes we get out of alignment with our purpose and values. Coming back to that alignment is very, very powerful.

Richard:

One of my favorite bookstores in the country, the Tattered Cover, is in your neighborhood, Gregg. I went there a while back and asked, Where’s the self-help section? The woman at the desk said, Well, if I tell you, won’t that defeat the whole purpose? And she said, People are looking for the answer. They’re buying your books because they’re looking for the how.

And I said, Yeah, but my whole work is about the why. Why lead? Why you lead determines how well you lead, and you have to figure that out. That’s called radical self-inquiry.

Gregg:

How is all this relevant to a business leader?

Richard:

Why I care about you becoming a better leader is because I want you to be a better human being. I believe that better humans make better leaders. That doesn’t mean you’re perfect, or that you’re somehow above the rest of us.

I’ve been alive for 4000-plus weeks. I have studied what we’re talking about here for a long time. Decades. What I’ve learned is that what’s essential is the why of leadership and, Why do I do what I do on a day-to-day basis? Because if you get up and do something you care about, if it fits that formula we talked about (C=G+P+V), you do better. And you live longer.

The ultimate leadership challenge is self-leadership. We have to make these decisions through our own reflections. It’s not going to come through just buying a book with a how-to-do-it type of thing.

Read: Hope is a Skill We All Need to Practice

Gregg:

My work is about helping people craft their lives intentionally, with purpose and passion, with their strengths and their values, their vision of the good life, and not falling into the common traps of living. I’m also a big believer in what you just said about the importance of leading self.

I think many leaders get caught up. They’re so focused on leading others or leading change or leading through crisis that they forget the foundation: they’re not leading themselves well anymore. As they get stressed, they’re off purpose. They’re off values. And they start making bad decisions.

Richard, you know my father, Bob Vanourek. We wrote our book, Triple Crown Leadership, about excellent, ethical and enduring organizations. One of the practices that we wrote about is unleashing people. Not just delegating, not just empowering, but unleashing.

Part of the unleashing equation is helping people be clear about their purpose and their values and their gifts and passions—and finding ways to connect that with their work. My word, if you do that, they’re going to be on fire. They’re unleashed. This has performance implications and bottom-line impacts as well.

Richard:

People say to me, Yeah, but if we help them discern their gifts, passions, and values, and it doesn’t fit, and they quit, what about that?

I respond, You want them to stay? Can you afford to have people who are on three cylinders instead of twelve?

I think what we need to do is to tell the truth. What I’ve done over my lifetime, I hope, is tell the truth. I care about helping you become a better leader, but I care more about helping you become who you are and do what you need to do. And if that’s not for you, then you shouldn’t be here. I think you and I are on the same page about that.

• “Does your work give you even a small opportunity to express your calling? Does it let you do what you most enjoy doing?
• While you are working, do you ever get the sense that you are in the right place doing the right thing? How often does this happen? When it happens, what are you doing?
• What is one thing—a little thing—you could do right now to express your calling at work? What is stopping you?”

- Richard Leider and David Shapiro, The Power of Purpose: To Grow and to Give for Life (4th edition, Berrett-Koehler, 2025)

This article was originally published on Gregg Vanourek's LinkedIn.

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