The Big P Purpose

Often teams within an organisation have joined the organisation because they are aligned to the organisations mission, vision or sense of purpose they’ve been attracted to this because it sits well with their own purpose, values even if they’ve not fully cognitised this. This is an organisations BIG P PURPOSE. The Purpose of an organisation, even if its not yet articulated as a purpose is a mixture of its past, present and future - much like our own personal purpose.

At its simplest level organisations want to make money, be the best and hopefully make a difference in the world to their employees, customers, consumers, shareholders, wider group of stakeholders. Ideally this purpose is beyond making money but an organisation needs to be financially viable and have a collective sense of self-worth and self-esteem and feeling like they are successful to be able to fully evolve to being able to also make a difference in the world. Just like a person struggling to meet their own basic needs, it would be very hard for an organisation who isn’t profitable or able to meet its own basic needs to be able to fully actualise to be its best self or have its biggest difference in the world. Although often organisations are profitable, they are great at what they do, but just like the people within the organisation they get stuck at having to make more money or be more successful to fulfil their sense of identity. Evolved organisations are realising that once a certain level of stability and capability exists in organisational life actually but focusing more on the outside of the balance sheet and on others and on the difference and impact they want to have beyond themselves - often makes them more successful and more revenue. As its true in nature - giving to others you often receive even more in return. *more on this in conscious capitalism field-book

So what about the small p*

Teams in the modern workplace are fluid - they change regularly - every time someone joins or leaves a team it impacts the dynamics of that team - the small p purpose is the reason why this team, this group of 10 or so people is together to lead the business and its people at this point in time. Often it's connected to the BIG P purpose but it has nuances - because this team is a unique group of individuals together at this moment in time. Each member of this leadership team has their own purpose and values and beliefs which they will want to bring to the party and to have their own personal and collective impact on the organisation.

In functional roles they are also likely to be part of another team - e.g. if I am Head of Finance for APAC, I’m both part of an APAC team but also part of the Global finance LT. Hopefully the organisations BIG P purpose helps me gain clarity on both my functional role in finance and my regional role in APAC - but this team in APAC has a purpose and mission for now…

• Why do my personal purpose and values matter at work?

• What happens if I realise my personal purpose doesn’t align with the organisations purpose? What do I do then?

• My personal purpose is for after office hours, why is that not OK?

Who you are, how you do and and what you do are inextribicably linked, you can’t take yourself out of your role or even your role out of yourself because you are one human, made up of many parts. The more integrated and connected all of your part are the more easeful, joyful and energised you feel. alignment, integrity to your truest version of yourself.

Oprah… “stress is the difference between who you are and who you have to be to do your role.” Much of peoples work stress lies in this space.

At its simplest level my view of organisation culture - culture is the collective of an organisations purpose, values, beliefs and behaviours and its leaders. How leaders show up and behave and what they believe give employees the indicators of how to live the culture of this organisation. Employees, like our children will do as they see us do - not what we tell them to do. As leaders its not whats writing on the posters on the walls of the office that matter - its the lived experiences of the people in the organisation that matters.

What people follow is the ‘who we are’ not the organisational t-shirt we have on. So the more we progress on our leadership journey the more we realise how our own stories, beliefs, behaviours follow us around. That’s good AND bad. Every now and then we need to stop and unpack our baggage and see if we still need all these beliefs and behaviours we’ve been carrying around any more - are they useful or are they outdated? Are they taking us forward or are they holding us back on our journeys to becoming the most real version of ourselves?

Do we want to add more things aligned to our purpose and vision and direction, or do we need to let go of some of the heaviness to free us up? Are we willing to do the work to change and level up or are we going to bury our heads in the sands, numb out, distract and avoid ourselves? Workaholism is an addition - through work we can avoid ourselves - it’s a dopamine hit to keep hitting those targets it takes really strength and work to slow down and meet ourselves. Sooner or later you will meet yourself or regret that you didn’t do it much later in life when you realise you’ve lived someone else’s version of life or spent your whole life numb

Often life events cross our path and our work to wake us up, divorce, job loss, grief, loss of loved ones, ill health, the journey into parenting, these things try to wake us up. If they don’t work then don’t worry you’ve got the modern midlife crisis of meaning that will kick in somewhere around your 40’s or 50’s that will have you stop and think or try to shake your life up for yourself.

Working on organisational culture ideally starts at the top with the most senior leaders coming together to do their personal and collective work. Who are you individually and collectively as a team? What’s THE work you are here to do as a team at this moment in time? What’s your purpose, vision, mission, values and how do you want to lead together? How is this group of people designed for your highest good and evolution? who triggers you in this team and why? What is this trying to teach you? Remember everything is happening for your highest good and evolution - its happening for you - not to you…

Working as a team is a journey into self, relationships with others and how you can show up to make an impact together.

It starts with Why… the Purpose… this can be BIG P Purpose* or little p purpose but we need to understand as a team why we have been brought together to lead this change and whats in it for each of us personally, collectively and for the highest good of all our stakeholders… (employees, shareholders, customers, consumers, suppliers, partners) .

Culture is both the collection of individual dynamics and the history of the dynamics in that organisational system. Heal the people you’ll heal the culture

Innovation and growth - change is constant, agility, polarities, ability to live with and handle the complexity is key - everyone wants to simplify and solve but somethings are just tensions or polarities to manage

Open hearted being truly yourself, saves energy, saves time, if people don’t like what you said or did, go back and clean up the mess but don’t adapt yourself so that you are an unrecognisable version of yourself just to make others happy

• Hi I’m Carla! My purpose is to create spaces for people to heal, grow and evolve so that they can live purposeful, working lives (myself included!) I believe many people crave more meaning, purpose in their work and life and often want to make a bigger impact and live a life more aligned with their true values and authentic selves.

• Sometimes our stories, our childhood or life experiences get in the way of us being able to truly bring purpose to life, sometimes it’s these very experiences that make us special, different and authentically us.

• I help leaders, teams and organisations find purpose, meaning and connection in their stories and become more aware and conscious and make a bigger difference and impact through being more themselves.

• I have been living and working in Singapore for 10+ years now and founded The Purpose Collective in 2020 after leaving BRIDGE, a global leadership and change consultancy, where I spent 9 years setting up and running our business across Asia. In this business I led our consulting teams, our global client projects and had a large P&L responsibility.

• Prior to moving to Asia I worked in various consulting and in house roles for organisations such as BT Global Services, PWC, Vodafone, SABMiller, Roche/Genentech

• I am an organisational psychologist at heart, with 22+ experience consulting experience in the business world helping leaders design and implement complex, yet meaningful change. I combine theory with practice and ongoing professional development is a key part of my own journey to always be learning and experimenting with my clients.

• I’m an active member of the British Psychological Society where I am a founding member of the Division of Coaching Psychology and I’m current fulfilling a life-long ambition of working towards my chartered Psychologist status. I’m also a trained Co- Active Coach, a holistic coaching philosophy and ICF member. I’m also an accredited Barrett Values Culture Consultant as well as Hogan Certified and Harthill LDF certified and can use a variety of tools and approaches in my work.

• Outside of work I’m single mum to two boys who are my best teachers and biggest sources of joy (& tiredness!)I have a complex life where I’m constantly navigating change and searching for my own meaning and authentic expression of myself. I can often be found reading or writing about psychology, relationships, mental health, work and wellbeing issues.

When I’m coaching leaders, I like to know their story and what are the important life events which have made then who they are.

These stories tell me a lot about what we are going to need to work on through our coaching journey and gives us a great starting point for self-exploration.

Sometimes leaders have never made the connection between their story and their leadership.

Whilst it feels like a therapists cliché… tell me about your childhood… so much of our past impacts our present and future. Unless we understand and are able to take charge of our story and begin a deeper journey into understanding ourselves, we keep repeating the patterns and finding ourselves in situations we are trying to avoid.

Many leaders I work with are becoming aware of this connection and consciously doing the repair work to understand their stories, patterns, life experiences and ‘do the work’ to be the best versions of themselves.

These leaders want to explore how their past trauma (big T or small t)* or life experiences can show up in their leadership and they want to be working through this because they know it could be showing up in how they live and lead and minimising the impact they want to have.

THE SEVEN INNER CHILD ARCHETYPES

As children we learned how to adapt to our environments to get what we needed be that safety, love, attention, care, belonging, self-worth.

What we learned, often then becomes part of our life’s work to integrate, resolve or recover from depending on our early experiences

These experiences then inform our life and leadership patterns.

They can be our biggest strengths, sources of purpose and also our biggest downfalls or achilles heel too!

Check out more detail on the 7 Inner Child Archetypes below which I’ve adapted to include impact on your leadership and how I see these showing up in peoples leadership. Which ones most resonate with you?

1. THE CARETAKER

As a child: Likely to have been the caretaker at home growing up having to care for siblings, parents. Gains their sense of self-worth through focussing on others and might believe the only way to receive love it to focus on others and ignore their own needs.

As a leader: Likely to take on others problems and try to solve, fix, care for others more than they need to and then feel overwhelmed, resentful and burned out.

2. THE HERO WORSHIPPER

As a child: Likely had a caretaker who they viewed as superhuman, without flaws, faults or weakness. As they grow up their own needs, desires, ideas and model themselves on others template

As a leader: Likely to need to have a person or guru to follow. Someone more senior who they idolise. Rejects own views and ideas if their don't match to their 'guru's' ideas. Can engage in not challenging status quo or want to become a Hero themselves.

3. THE OVERACHEIVER

As a child: Likely was praised and recognised more for their achievements than who they were as a person and thus learns that the only way to receive love is through achievement

As a leader: Likely to be hugely successful and focussed on success, achievement, goal oriented but never feeling like they can celebrate their own success

4. THE UNDERACHIEVER

As a child: May have experienced fear, criticism or shame about failure or told to not be too much or they were never going to amount to anything. Caretakers encouraged them to stay small, not aim, not grow.

As a leader: May not put themselves forward for things which are out of their comfort zone. Stays small and invisible, describes themselves as a great #2 and keeps themselves small, unseen and beneath their potential so they don't fail

5. THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

As a child: May have learned to only way to feel okay and receive love is to make sure everyone else around them is happy. Might have used comedy to save them, help them gain friends e.g. growing up in a boarding school environments

As a leader: Is always the happy, cheerful comedian who finds it hard to show who they really are, doesn't show weakness or vulnerability and may appear superficial or not able to dive beneath surface of complex issues

6. THE RESCUER / PROTECTOR

As a child: May have grown up in a high conflict family or one where they witnessed violence, sadness. Grows up trying to rescue others in order to heal their story

As a leader: May view others a helpless and set up dependent relationships. Feels more comfortable where they are in power and able to solve others problems for them. May try to rescue employees from perceived trouble, or set up / triangulate conflicts to be involved in or at times feel the victim of circumstance.

7. THE YES PERSON

As a child: May have had to sacrifice their own childhood, needs, wants in service of their parents wants and needs

As a leader: Likely to drop everything and neglects all their own needs in service of others. Works very hard and may believe the only way to receive love and recognition is to be good, selfless and of service to others

My belief and experience tells me there is absolutely no work you and home you – there is only one you. Sometimes your “work you” is taking a lot more energy to ‘be’ than your home you.

This is often because we are ‘performing’ at work or acting into our archetype versus truly being ourselves.

All of you is powerful, your true real self, past, present and future working together. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be aware of how your own baggage can get in the way of the impact you want to have in your life or work.

And… when we mess up with being our imperfect selves, which we all do because we are human, we say sorry, we clean up the mess, we seek the learning, we carry on. There is no perfect leader, like there is no perfect human.

Often through our journeys to having compassion and understanding for ourselves and our inner child is where we find our deepest sense of purpose, meaning and calling.

If you’d like to do more reading check out Dr. Nicole Le Pera - The Holistic Psychologist (check out her fabulous work on Instagram + her website and self-healers circle).

Her great book How to do the Work is an easy to understand introduction to starting this journey to understanding yourself and your story.

Which of these archetypes most relate to you?

I am a combination of Caretaker, Overachiever & Underachiever (depending on the situation) and the Yes person.

I’m work in progress as even as I wrote this I realise how far I have come, and how much further I have to go.

If you’d like to understand how your patterns show up in your work and life please do reach out and connect and let’s chat – I can help!