The Founder Cannot Delegate Purpose

In my previous article, I wrote about why I believe every company needs one common purpose. People inside the same organisation may have very different personal dreams and reasons for coming to work. The founder may want to build a very large business, while someone in the team may simply want to create a better life for their family. I don't think those dreams need to be the same. What does need to be common is some understanding of why everyone is working together and what the organisation is finally trying to achieve.

Once you accept that, the next question is quite natural. If purpose is supposed to bring everyone together, then who should define it? I feel this responsibility has to start with the founder and cannot simply be handed over to someone else.

When we start a company, one of the first things we usually do is create a company profile or presentation. Somewhere in that process, mission, vision and values also get written. There is nothing wrong with this. A founder should know where the company wants to go and what he wants to build over the next few years. But I see vision and purpose as slightly different things.

The vision may be about where the founder wants to take the company in the future. Maybe the ambition is to become the largest company in a category, expand across the country or build a thousand-crore business. That ambition is naturally very personal to the founder because it is his company, his risk and something he may have been thinking about long before anybody else joined.

An employee can understand that vision and contribute seriously towards it. Over time, he may become deeply involved in the company and care a lot about where it is going. But I don't think it is necessary to expect him to carry the founder's ambition in exactly the same way. Suppose someone joins the company as a Product Manager. The founder may have spent years thinking about the business, invested his own money and gone through difficult periods to build it. The Product Manager can play an important role in taking the company forward, but the founder's personal dream does not have to become his personal dream. He already has ambitions of his own.

This is where purpose becomes different for me. Purpose should be something that the founder and the employee can both understand and connect with. It should explain why the organisation exists, what we are trying to do for the people we serve and why the work being done across different teams matters. The founder may have a very large long-term vision, but someone who joined the company last month still needs to understand why the work they are doing today is important.

That is why purpose has to make sense across the organisation. It should make sense to the founder and leadership team, but it should also make sense to the salesperson, developer, designer, support executive and the most junior person who has just joined. Their responsibilities, salaries, career plans and personal dreams may all be completely different, but there should still be something common behind the work they are doing together.

This is also why I don't believe every department should create its own purpose. Sales can have targets, marketing can have goals, technology can have its own measurements and finance can have different priorities. That is normal because every function has a different job to do. But those are goals and responsibilities. If every department starts deciding for itself what the larger purpose is, then eventually you may have different teams working very hard but pulling the company in different directions.

If purpose has to remain common across the organisation, I think it has to begin with the founder. This is why I find it difficult to imagine a founder simply hiring someone and saying, "Please define the purpose of my company."

Suppose a consultant comes in, studies the business, speaks to employees, looks at competitors, understands the market and eventually comes back with a very well-written purpose statement. The statement may sound perfect in a presentation, but there is still a basic problem. It is the consultant's understanding of what the organisation should stand for, and now the founder has to adopt it and start believing in it.

For me, the process should work the other way around. When the final purpose is written, the founder should recognise himself in it. He should feel that this is something he has probably believed for a long time, even if he was never able to put it into clear words. The language may be new, but the thinking should feel familiar. It should feel like somebody has helped him express what was already there rather than given him a new belief to follow.

At the same time, I don't mean that the founder has to sit alone and figure everything out without help. In fact, I think an outside person can be very useful in this process. Many founders know what matters to them but have never really stopped to think about why. You can run a business for years, make hundreds of decisions based on instinct and still never put those patterns into words.

A good consultant can help by asking the right questions. Why did you really start the business? What problem do you care about solving? What do you want customers to consistently experience while dealing with the company? What kind of behaviour bothers you even when it produces good short-term numbers? What are the things you would not want to compromise on even as the business becomes much bigger?

Questions like these can bring out patterns that were already present in the company. Maybe the founder has repeatedly taken certain decisions even when they were not the most profitable option. Maybe there are some customer problems he gets personally involved in every time. Maybe there are things he has always refused to compromise on without ever thinking of them as part of the company's purpose.

An outside person can help notice these patterns, challenge the founder's assumptions and bring some structure to thoughts that are scattered. They can also help simplify the final wording so that the purpose can be understood by everyone in the company. I think that is useful support. But there is still a difference between helping the founder discover the purpose and creating the purpose on his behalf. The consultant can help find the answer and express it better, but the answer itself has to come from the founder.

There is another reason why I feel this is important. Once the purpose is defined, the founder has to be the first person to live by it. Employees will pay much more attention to what the founder does than to what is written on the website. If the company says customer experience is important but the founder repeatedly makes decisions that hurt customers because they generate more revenue, people will understand very quickly what actually matters.

The same thing applies if the company says people are important but behaves very differently towards employees the moment business becomes difficult. It does not matter how well the purpose statement is written because people decide whether they believe it by watching what happens around them.

This is why I don't think the founder can define the purpose and then simply hand it to HR to implement. HR can help communicate it, managers can reinforce it and leaders can bring it into hiring, training and performance discussions. All of that is useful. But if the founder himself does not behave according to it, people will eventually treat the purpose like another company statement that sounds good but does not really affect anything.

Of course, the founder cannot expect hundreds of people to think exactly like him. Everyone brings a different personality, experience and way of solving problems, and that is a good thing. The idea is not to make everybody think in the same way. What the founder can try to create is some common thinking behind important decisions.

A salesperson and a developer may face completely different situations and may reach very different answers, but the starting point can still be similar. If both understand what the company is really trying to achieve for the customer, that understanding can influence the way they think about their own decisions. This is where purpose becomes useful in day-to-day work rather than remaining something discussed only by leadership.

I also feel companies sometimes make the mistake of starting with the sentence instead of starting with the thinking. People sit in a room and say that they need a purpose statement, and then everyone begins suggesting words. I think the founder first needs to understand why the company exists beyond making money, what should become better because the company exists, what customers should consistently experience and what the organisation should not lose even if it becomes ten times bigger.

Once there is some clarity around those questions, finding the words becomes much easier. It may still take time to arrive at a simple statement, but at least you are trying to explain something that is already true about the organisation rather than inventing something because the website needs a purpose section.

There is nothing wrong with taking help during this process. Sometimes another person can ask questions you have never asked yourself, point out contradictions in your thinking or notice patterns that you cannot see because you are too close to the business. But that person's role should be to help the founder find the answer, not to replace the founder in finding it.

If everyone in the organisation is eventually expected to understand and work towards the same purpose, then the founder has to be the first person who genuinely believes in it. He can take help to discover it, challenge it, simplify it and put it into the right words, but the purpose itself has to come from his understanding of why the business exists and what he wants the organisation to consistently stand for.

In the next article, I want to go a little deeper into how a founder can actually discover that purpose. I don't think it should begin with a blank page and an attempt to write an impressive statement. A better place to start may be the decisions the founder has already made, the things he repeatedly cares about and the situations where he has refused to compromise.

Very often, the purpose may already be visible somewhere inside the business. The founder first has to recognise it and understand it clearly. Once that happens, the next job is simply to make it clear enough that everybody else in the organisation can understand what it means for the work they do every day.