Agency Purpose and Superpowers: How to Create Your Own Purpose

Agencies are filled with different roles with different, sometimes very extravagant, titles. Each title has its own description or a job profile which then describes what this person should be doing. The profile is predefined, and the person is found for the role. However, aren’t we all different even if we have a similar title? What if we could work in a role where we can get the most out of it with a smile on our face? The Finnish ice hockey juniors just won gold in the World Champions. Coach Jussi Ahokas created a team from scratch by thinking about their personalities, who plays well with who, who can best support the number one scorer etc. He built the team around each player’s personal strengths, ambitions and how they best fitted into the team. No room for lonely rock stars. The results were amazing. The team was united from the very first game.

It requires a deep knowledge of each personality to discover their superpowers.

The ideology of creating a perfect team in businesses needs to have a similar process. Each person is handpicked to take care of the role in the team, where they are known to have the most experience, ambition and skill. Sounds simple, but in a world of thousands of titles, this ideology falls behind into everyday routine. We started to really work on this dilemma last fall when we created our own agency purpose. It continued the work that we had done around our values, the core of the brand, our mission and vision. Basic stuff for our clients, but we had not done this exercise properly for ourselves. The whole purpose-tsunami that went across the marketing and advertising world last year set the scene for us too. What is really the purpose for us? As we are an integrated agency with a 20 strong core team and over 200 creative specialists working on demand, our job is mostly to create perfect teams for our clients based on the ambitions, skills and experiences that each person has.

The recipe is quite simple and eye opening. The work starts with yourself. What is relevant to yourself? Then we take the values of the company and start stirring. Add your business model and future plans into the soup and go back to yourself. There you have it. We were able to create our own purpose into one phrase which is relevant to our values, business model and to each person who is part of the Supersonians.

So, here's the recipe for finding your purpose: 

1. Discover yourself - what is important to you?

2. Look into your company values - what is important to us? 

3. What is unique to your own business model? 

4. What are your future plans? 

5. Reflect that back to yourself - is it relevant to me?

Through this exercise we found our own purpose: “We want to free people to create added value through their own superpowers and ambitions.”

The next phase is to discover all the superpowers within the organisation and start acting on them. The results will be amazing. I promise.

Samppa Vilkuna is co-founder and CEO at Superson in Helsinki, Finland
Source: thenetworkone