Does my purpose need to be connected to the broader OUR purpose? A basic tenant of corporate leadership is the cascading of goals. Everyone’s individual goals should have some connection back to the overall corporate goals. Hopefully that overarching goal is clear and measurable. An example is an airline some years ago that created an overarching goal of on time gate departure. Everyone linked to that from the gate agents, baggage handlers, crew, maintenance engineers, etc. And everyone could see how their contributions helped or detracted from that goal.

My leadership development programs focus on helping create our individual purpose. However, like with corporate cascading goals, can I effectively define my why without knowing OUR why?

If not, then what is our why? I have to believe it is a long game starting with the big bang and evolving over eons and likely eons to come. That makes our individual role seem minor, but maybe not. Let’s say our purpose is to evolve to transcendence. If that’s the case, as individuals, we should be contributing to that. For starters, we need to maintain the evolution of our species through procreation and creating security for our future generations. Then we need to do the work to make incremental gains towards transcendence and teach future generations our progress so they can progress by standing on our shoulders.