Your Team Has a Purpose. Does It Know Who It's For?

You have a talented team with capable people, clear accountability, and most likely an organizational purpose or mission statement guiding the work. And yet, you’ve noticed a pattern. The same conversations keep repeating, and decisions take longer than they should. Commitments that matter start to falter. To maximize your team’s impact, one of the most valuable exercises you can do is to clarify your team's purpose, distinct from the organizations.

If that pattern feels familiar, the issue is rarely the individuals on the team nor the interpersonal challenges. Where the clues to uncovering the source of issues often live is what the team believes its own purpose to be, distinct from the organization’s stated purpose, vision or mission. Your team’s purpose is not the company mission in smaller font. It is the unique reason this team exists — who it serves, what they need, and what only this team can deliver together.

Our panel of systemic team coaches — Shannon Barrows of Cardinal Directions Coaching, Andria Gillis of People Lab, Lucy Shenouda of FosterEssence Inc., Fenneke Tjallingii-Brocken of Fenneke Coaching & Training, and Dana Janzen of Janzen Leadership Inc. — work with leadership teams across Canada and globally. What follows is what they are consistently learning from the field: the patterns, tensions, and insights that surface when teams do the real work.

Their observations align closely with Peter Hawkins' Five Disciplines model of Systemic Team Coaching, which identifies this as the first and most foundational set of questions a leadership team can ask: "Who are we here to serve?" and "What do they actually need from us?" You can explore the full model here.

We’ve pulled together 5 questions to clarify your team’s purpose. 

Stalled conversations, slower decisions, and faltering commitments are all signs of
friction, but the cause is not usually rooted in the individuals or the interpersonal
dynamics of the team. We need to look beyond the team. Shannon Barrows of Cardinal Directions Coaching points to a pattern that runs through many leadership teams: "Leadership teams think their teams are there just to do the work. That leadership makes the decisions, and the team executes them." This way of working results in a group of capable people operating without a shared understanding of what they are actually trying to create together.

Andria Gillis of People Lab describes what follows: "Teams often define their purpose from the vantage point of their own function, their own history, their own internal logic. The result is a purpose that makes complete sense inside the organization while losing contact with the people and systems it was meant to serve."

Does your Team have it’s own Purpose?

Every panellist names this as the root of the problem.

Lucy Shenouda of FosterEssence Inc. describes it as: "Teams default when asked why their team exists to their organizational mission statement. They miss the mark on their team's specific core purpose: redefining their existence through the eyes of those they serve. It can be like building a house without checking the blueprint from the architect."

Fenneke Tjallingii-Brocken of Fenneke Coaching & Training is direct: "One thing leadership teams get wrong is adopting the organizational purpose for their leadership team." She asks her clients: "Is there anything in our current purpose that's more about our comfort than our contribution?"

One of the most valuable exercises a leadership team can do is clarify its own unique purpose — not simply adopt the organization’s mission, but define the specific value this team exists to create for the stakeholders it serves.

Is your team solving the right problem?

This is where the gap between a team’s initially stated purpose and real shared purpose becomes most visible.

Dana Janzen of Janzen Leadership Inc. describes a leadership team whose declared purpose was about customer delight, but whose decisions were driven almost entirely by internal engineering ambitions: "The team was answering to their own technical ambitions and internal culture, not to the customers named in their purpose. The shift came when they brought actual customer voices into their leadership conversations. When they talked directly to customers rather than just reviewing satisfaction stats, the team was uncomfortable, but they realised they needed to expand their internal process to align with their declared purpose. That's when things started to change."

Who is your team talking to?

All five panellists prescribe the same action: go have real conversations with the people your purpose is meant to serve. 

Dana Janzen is specific: "Have each team member interview one key stakeholder and bring back one thing they heard that surprised them. When a team has heard different people share what they need in their own words, something shifts. The purpose stops being an obligation that looks good on a slide and becomes a response to something real."

Shannon Barrows frames what that process builds: "Co-creating the team's why behind the purpose. The reason the team believes in that purpose, why it inspires them, and clarity on what the team is achieving with it. The co-creation will engage the team to collaborate on contributing values and provide clarity on the behaviours that will exemplify the purpose."

Andria Gillis describes what becomes possible when a team turns the lens outward and forward: "When we asked how their clients and partners experienced working with them and what they would need from this team in two to three years, the gap between intent and reality became visible in a way that internal data had never surfaced. The team moved from managing clients transactionally to genuinely partnering with them."

Purpose requires ongoing tending

Discovering a genuine team purpose is beyond a one-time event. It drifts without active maintenance, and the cost of letting it drift is misdirected effort, compounding friction, and a widening gap between what your team is capable of and what it is actually delivering.

Lucy Shenouda describes the orientation that makes this sustainable: "Revisiting your teams purpose, flips top-down org purpose, what we do, to outside-in, future-back. What unique value does only this team uniquely deliver to those craving it now, including the unacknowledged ones?"

Fenneke Tjallingii-Brocken offers the test that keeps it honest: "Are we serving the people we think we're serving, or the people who are easiest to serve?"

Where to start

Pick one person your team exists to serve and go have a conversation you haven't had yet. Ask them what they need from your team that they aren't getting enough of right now. Bring what you hear back to your next leadership meeting.

That single conversation is often where the real work begins, and it doesn't have to be complicated. But if you find your team is unsure where to start, resistant to what surfaces, or ready to go deeper than a single conversation can take you, the coaches in this panel work with teams through exactly this kind of work. Not to hand you a purpose statement, but to help your team find the one that's actually true. Reach out to any of them if you'd rather not navigate it alone.