Coaching practices for Find Your Why with My Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Find Your Why with My Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My team does the work but they’re just going through the motions, and I can feel they don’t see why any of it matters
  • I keep trying to dream up my purpose from scratch, like I have to invent it
  • When I tell my own stories I breeze right past the parts that light me up because they feel ordinary to me
  • If someone asked me right now why I do this
  • When I talk about what I do I just rattle off the tasks and the features, and people’s eyes glaze over

Practices that may help

  1. Find Your Why, Made Practical
    Simon Sinek’s method says people are moved by why you do something before what or how — so the work is to articulate the purpose, cause, or belief that drives you, captured in a single Why statement. The Golden Circle and the Why-statement format are practitioner frameworks: useful and intuitive, but largely anecdotal in their specifics, even though purpose itself does correlate with motivation in research.
  2. Articulate a compelling vision of why the work matters
    Connect the team’s daily work to a meaningful purpose they can believe in.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  3. Mine your defining stories
    Find your why in your past — recurring themes across the moments that shaped you.
    Find Your Why, Made Practical
  4. Do the discovery with a partner
    Have someone listen for the themes you can’t hear in your own stories.
    Find Your Why, Made Practical
  5. Articulate your personal "Why" as a leader
    A leader who cannot state their own purpose clearly cannot communicate it to anyone else.
    Start With Why: Leading Through Purpose
  6. Start with why (the Golden Circle)
    Lead with the purpose behind what you do, not the features of what you do.
    Find Your Why, Made Practical
  7. Use the Why as a decision filter
    A stated Why that doesn’t actually filter decisions is just branding — the Why has to determine the choices.
    Start With Why: Leading Through Purpose
  8. Believe — and make the why clear
    You cannot lead people toward a mission you do not understand or believe in yourself.
    Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
  9. Test your why against real decisions
    Validate the why by using it as a filter for choices, then refining where it doesn’t fit.
    Find Your Why, Made Practical
  10. Define your HOWs
    Translate the abstract why into a few concrete principles for how you operate.
    Find Your Why, Made Practical

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