Rob Lion, PhD, co-owner of Black River Performance Management, has 20+ years helping leaders see their people clearly and lead with clarity.
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Do your people need to know their purpose in order to be committed?
Sit with that for a moment before you answer.
Recently, in a workshop with a room of CEOs, one claimed that people need to know their purpose because it fuels their commitment. Several heads nodded in agreement. I knew we had to unpack this further.
Here is what I told the room: Purpose is an important factor, and when we find it ourselves, it is often integrated with our identity. That is exactly why it becomes risky when leaders use it as a requirement or criterion for their staff. When purpose becomes the measuring stick, leaders fall into what I call champion bias: applying their own standards to someone else’s conditions.
I see this constantly with founders, CEOs, presidents and executive directors. Their purpose, identity and commitment to their organization are deeply aligned, which is often what makes them effective. But these same factors risk clouding their view of everyone else. When the organization is part of who you are, anything less in others reads as a deficit.
Purpose And The Hierarchy Of Needs
Most leaders know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter and safety sit at the base; belonging and esteem sit in the middle; and purpose lives near the top. A CEO earning $200,000 a year is not free of foundational needs, but many of them are secured. With those needs met, the organization can become the place where their purpose lives.
Now consider the employee earning $50,000 a year. They may not be struggling to survive, but the job is meeting different needs in their life. It funds stability, relationships and a life outside of work. That is a different relationship with the same work, and a legitimate one.
Think about it this way: An executive who lives on the hill walks in and asks a colleague whether they caught last night’s sunset, as it was stunning. The employee, living in a downtown apartment boxed in by concrete and high-rises, did not. This doesn’t mean they do not appreciate sunsets, but they do not have the resources to buy the view.
Why do smart, well-meaning leaders miss this? Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error, and the operative word is error. We pin someone’s behavior on who we believe they are (their effort, attitude or character) when the real cause sits in their situation. It feels like insight, but it is a misdiagnosis. Leaders are vulnerable to making this mistake. A 2022 study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found “that supervisors over-attribute lower levels of performance to employees’ internal factors,” and that the process is “fast and unconscious.” Left unchecked, those misattributions were linked to more abusive supervision.
So the employee who arrives on time, does good work and leaves on time gets labeled. Lazy. Uninterested. Disengaged. In reality, that person is simply focused on different things. Ask yourself how often you have heard one of those labels attached to someone meeting every expectation of the job.
What Motivation Has To Do With It
I want to be clear that this is not malice. It is a blind spot most leaders have never thought to check. A 2024 review in the Journal of Management says we still know surprisingly little about what reduces bias inside organizations. That makes a leader’s own deliberate check more important, not less.
Some people absolutely are disengaged, and I will not pretend otherwise. In my experience, though, the source of disengagement is often the same one affecting the employee who is committed but does not love it here. Self-determination theory, the leading body of research on motivation, identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy (choice in how you work), competence (the ability to do it well) and relatedness (genuine connection with others). As I explain it to leaders, these needs run underneath the whole pyramid, and when one goes unmet, it erodes the quality of intrinsic motivation.
So what does a purpose pitch do for someone whose psychological needs are going unmet? Very little. Purpose sits several rungs up the ladder, and the gap is on the rung where they are standing. Closing it takes a different kind of attention and a different set of interventions. Do we really believe that holding people accountable for not being engaged will drive them toward finding their purpose? The solution is more subtle.
Finding Alignment Instead
Purpose cannot be required. Motivation is not something you do to people. When purpose is imposed, it becomes one more expectation to perform, and the commitment it was meant to inspire moves further away. The risk is that people learn to say the right words about the mission while their motivation lives elsewhere.
The alternative is alignment. Instead of insisting that people adopt the organization’s purpose as their own, look for where the work connects to what each person already values. For one employee, that may be the mission. For another, it may be providing for their family, mastering their craft or the people they work beside. All of those are legitimate reasons to show up and do good work.
Before you decide someone is not committed, compare vantage points. What can you see from where you stand, and what can they see from where they stand? Are you measuring their commitment or how closely their priorities resemble yours? That person might very well be fully committed, enjoy the job and be a great teammate. They just do not bleed the colors of your organization’s brand, and that should be okay.
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