When Team Priorities Need a Bigger Purpose
A recent article in The Economist, ‘Are you committed to your company or your team?’, explores how employees often identify more strongly with their immediate work group than with the wider organisation.
It is easy to see why. Work is experienced most immediately through the people around us, the objectives we share and the problems we solve together. The team is tangible in a way that the wider organisation often is not, making it a powerful source of identity and belonging.
But what is good for a team is not necessarily good for the organisation as a whole. The challenge for leaders is therefore not to weaken team loyalties, but to help people hold two identities at once: as members of their immediate team and of the wider organisation.
This is where purpose is critical. A clear, shared understanding of what the organisation exists to achieve can connect the two, creating a sense of collective identity that extends beyond the objectives and interests of any one team.
Strong teams inevitably develop their own priorities, assumptions and measures of success. That focus can be a source of strength, but it can also narrow perspective: what appears self-evidently right from within one team may look very different from elsewhere in the organisation.
When Team Priorities Start to Compete
The risk is that these different perspectives harden into competing interests, with people advocating for the success of their own team rather than considering what will best serve the organisation as a whole. A shared purpose allows those differences to coexist without becoming divisions.
The challenge becomes particularly acute when legitimate priorities come into conflict. Growth, efficiency, customer experience and long-term investment are all important, but different teams will inevitably attach different weight to them. The question is not simply which priority should prevail, but what should determine that choice.
Purpose does not automatically determine the answer. It can, however, provide a consistent framework for weighing competing priorities, shifting the question from ‘What is right for my team?’ to ‘What best serves what we are collectively here to achieve?’
But purpose only has influence if it is reflected in how an organisation actually operates. If leaders invoke it when setting out ambitions but abandon it when difficult trade-offs arise, employees quickly learn that the real priorities lie elsewhere.
When leaders explain not only what has been decided but why – how competing interests have been balanced and how the decision supports the organisation’s longer-term direction – purpose becomes part of how the business works rather than simply something it says.
The Role of Collective Leadership
Joan O’Connor describes leadership as “inherently collective”, rooted in “a shared understanding of organisational objectives”. This connection between collective leadership, shared purpose and belonging is central to 10Eighty’s work.
We explore how leaders can balance the needs of employees, customers, shareholders and communities while maintaining a clear sense of direction across an organisation.
For employees, shared purpose can make the wider organisation feel less remote from the team they experience every day. Organisational loyalty then does not have to compete with team identity: the connection between the two becomes clearer, with the team understood as part of a larger collective endeavour rather than a separate source of belonging.
Strong team identities are not, in themselves, the problem. A genuinely shared purpose can make them a source of organisational cohesion rather than competing loyalties.
