Tom Krieglstein explains how leaders boost team performance by connecting tasks to larger purpose. He shares Kennedy's janitor, who saw sweeping as part of sending a man to the moon. The key: clarify the why behind the work, build accountability through collaboration, and link individual goals to something bigger than ego.
Are you struggling to get something done in your team, your organization, or your community, or even for yourself? If so, I have a surprising answer to help you out. And it begins with the story of chocolate chips. Let me show you what I mean. Imagine you get home from work, you are exhausted, you have zero energy in the tank, and you also remember in the morning that you're going to go visit your niece. Now, there's one little twist here. You had promised your niece that you were going to bring with you some chocolate chip cookies. However, the store closes in 10 minutes and won't be open in the morning for you to get the chocolate chip cookies in the morning. So it's either now or never. What do you do? Do you go out, get those chocolate chips cookies so that you show up the next morning the hero that you promised her you would be? Or do you just call it quits and then show up the next day and try and explain to your young niece that you couldn't get the cookies because you were tired? My guess is that you would probably brush off those feet, go out that door, get those chocolate chip cookies, and show up at your niece's the hero that you are the next morning. Now, imagine you didn't tell your niece you were gonna get those chocolate chip cookies, and you came home and you were super exhausted, and the store is only open for 10 more minutes, and it wasn't going to be open in the morning. Would you still have the motivation to go get those chocolate chip cookies even though your niece didn't know you were going to bring them? My guess is that the motivation would probably drop drastically between that scenario and the first scenario. The reason for it actually has to do with an interesting mental trick that we can do where when we attach our goal to a bigger purpose, it helps us to achieve that goal. It's called ego. Ego minimization, where we don't make it all about ourselves, but we're a part of something bigger. There's this great story in 1962 about John F. Kennedy. He's walking through the NASA Space center to observe them launching a rocket to the moon, and he sees this janitor against the wall. So he says hello to him and asks him what he's up to and what he's doing. Now, the normal response you would expect back from that janitor would be, oh, I'm sweeping the floors. I gotta take care of the toilets. This pipe is le. Something like that. But this janitor to the president says, well, Mr. President, I'm helping send a man to the moon, ego minimization and attaching ourselves to a bigger purpose. If we do that, we're gonna find the motivation to get done the thing we need to get done. So now, coming back to you and your team and your organization, how can we create this ego minimization or attach our goals to a bigger purpose? Well, the first thing is, don't try and do it alone. Find a group of people to work with, build a team. Attach that goal that you're trying to achieve to a bigger purpose. Let them know how. Creating this poster right here is actually helping to increase the membership of the entire organization. Don't just say you're creating a poster or another option. Us humans are horrible at keeping ourselves accountable, but if we bring one other person into the fold, our accountability exponentially increases. So don't go it alone. Find someone to work on with that goal. If it's fitness, join a class, hire a coach, or have a workout buddy that goes with you all the time. And then lastly, have a clear why as to what we are doing. Simon Sinek is famous for his book Start with why. And he says in every organization, there is the how we do it, what we're doing, and why we're doing it. He says most organizations spend all of their time doing what we do and how to do it and almost no time on the why. But he says the best organizations, based on the research he did, is the best organization, spent the bulk of their time on the why and getting very crystal clear on why they do what they do. And then once they're crystal clear, then they go to the how and the what. So attach your what and your how to a why. Make sure you're very clear on it. Make sure your team's very clear on it. If we don't go it alone and we work with the team, we attach it to a bigger purpose, and we work in groups, we're gonna increase our chances of getting that thing done. My name's Tom. I'm here to help engage your people. I'll see you in the next video.
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