Understanding Your Role As CEO

As Peter Drucker says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is the experience of working at your company. Each of you are the chief cultural officers of your company, as I was. And so that's what is partly difficult about stepping into a position where the company is running itself is that the key relationships are held by you. Having a strong company purpose or mission statement, it can be interchangeable. In this case, the way that Jay described it, it's an interchangeable comment. But having that written gives the focus away from us as leaders and onto the mission of the company.

So that when an employee joins, they're joining an organization that's bigger than themselves or even bigger than the owner. Yes. Having a purpose statement elicits a lot of the heartfelt emotion that physical therapists connect to. And it's this marker that allows people to focus on so that they become a team and not someone who's looking to you to be the chief problem solving officer of their responsibilities. So we're going to do a two minute training on this just so that we can get clear as to really a purpose statement and a mission statement. What the difference is those things. When you're with Scott Fritz in your yearly training, he does go over a mission statement. He's using it in a very similar way to purpose statement. And there's really in the way he uses it. It's incredibly interchangeable. So what I'm going to do here is go over to my iPad and describe why company purposes are important and what they are. So let's take for example a company that we're all familiar with, Apple. So Apple Computers has a company purpose statement. And again, I'm using purpose and mission statement fairly interchangeably. So when we think about what Apple does, the first thing we think about is, is the service or product that it creates and that's the what. So Apple creates computers, watches and phones and some other stuff. So that's the what of the company. And where we get confused a lot of times is that our mission and our purpose actually doesn't have as much to do with the what. The next thing we think about in this other circle is how they do it. So how Apple makes their computers, their watches and their phones is that they're beautifully crafted and very easy to use. That's the differentiator in their selling is that the computers, watches and phones they make and sell are prettier and easier to use. Right. But even then, that's not the why they exist. The why is at the heart of everything they do. And that why.

Is to put a dink in the universe. That's the purpose of Apple Computers, according to Steve Jobs, is to put a dink in the universe, to make a dink in the universe. And so the reason that's so significant is because when he was early stages recruiting people to join his company, what do you guys think would be more engaging? Having someone say, yeah, come join our computer company, we make beautiful computers and more user friendly than our competitors. Or hey, come join our company, we want to make a dink in the universe. What we want to do is change the status quo globally in some way, shape or form through technology. Which of those messages would you rather connect with? Right. So the same goes true for recruiting when we develop a purpose statement, and it starts with us as leaders identifying heroes in our world to identify language that we can relate to. And then we can come back and go straight to this thing called defining our company's purpose. So rise rehab. Rise rehab. We were a physical therapy company, and at the end of the day, our purpose became to be the light and hope in the lives of others. And that phrasing came from my story of falling off a mountain and having a therapist change my life. She became the light and hope of my world, that kind of thing. The purpose statement, the wording almost doesn't matter. It just needs to be easy to remember and memorable and evoke emotion, at least from the owner. That's what a purpose statement is and why it's important. And for all of you, as you step into your leadership, I will tell you, there isn't a company that I talk to that's big and significant and successful who doesn't love to talk about this all the time. So what is your purpose? What's your company's purpose? As you're in the meeting today, I want you to scribble down little thoughts about what your company is all about. Because I promise, the more clear you get on that messaging, the easier it is to recruit, retain, grow, get new patients and everything else you want to achieve.