Anchor to Your Purpose

Euda Leadership Principle No. 4

By: Keegan Evans

You can feel it before you can name it. A team working hard in every direction but spinning wheels. A roadmap review where every feature sounds compelling in isolation but nobody can explain what they'd stop doing. The all-hands where a founder electrifies with a bold vision only for everyone to go back to their desks and keep drowning under the overwhelming backlog. The company isn't broken, the people aren't wrong, and the effort is real. But the effort is fragmenting across too many fronts, and the organization is running in place.

Simon Sinek made the case that great organizations start with why, and he’s right. But in the companies I coach, the problem is rarely a lack of why. Leaders can articulate a beautiful vision and have clear ideas on the many urgent opportunities they are poised to capture. The problem is that there are so many paths to achieve the why but no ruthless prioritization to focus what members of the team are doing on a Tuesday morning. Purpose without structure is just a poster on the wall.

The Invisible Cascade

I use the GRPI (Goals, Roles, Processes, Interpersonal relationships) framework with nearly every leadership team I work with to quickly reframe almost everything they think they know about their team's problems. How I describe it is that we attribute most problems in organizations to personality conflicts, to people not getting along or not being the right fit. That makes sense because it’s closest to us. In reality though, roughly eighty percent of those problems trace back to unclear or misaligned goals. Of the remaining twenty percent, eighty percent are about unclear or misaligned roles in service of those goals. By the time you get to relationship dynamics, you're working with a fraction of what you thought was a personal problem.

The question stops being "why can't these two get along" and becomes "were they set up for success in the first place?"

This matters more as organizations grow because the founders’ intuitive awareness of everything happening across the company degrades faster than they realize. At fifteen people you can sense what everyone is working on and course correct in real time. At a hundred, you're making commitments and adding priorities based on a version of the organization that's out of date, without understanding the cascading impact on teams three layers removed. And even leaders who genuinely internalize this will revert under stress. The instinct to blame personality rather than trace the problem back up to goals is tough to break.

Who Is This Meeting For?

When I was chief of staff for the QuickBooks Online Payroll team at Intuit, we inherited executive program reviews that perfectly illustrated purpose running in the wrong direction. Every mission team spent at least an hour a week in a preparation meeting where the program manager pulled together status slides, often with half the team in the room instead of doing actual work. Before that, engineering managers needed another one to three hours updating trackers and status systems. All of it flowed upward so that executive leadership could absorb information and receive a red-yellow-green on every initiative. The purpose of those meetings, whether anyone said it out loud or not, was to make executives comfortable.

We tore it down and built the Product and Design Review as a separate operating mechanism, deliberately new so it could have a fresh start in the minds and behaviors of the teams. Missions rotated on a biweekly cadence with forty-five minutes to an hour each and a guaranteed opportunity to escalate to executive leadership every two weeks. The template was lightweight: a quick status highlight, a deep dive into new functionality the team wanted to showcase (which also gave deeper team members a chance to present directly to leadership), and then a conversation about blockers and what they needed executives to do.

The most important thing we did was repeat, consistently and visibly, what the purpose of the PDR actually was: to accelerate and unblock the teams doing the work, not to give executives an update. If a session devolved into status absorption and red-yellow-green discussion, that was the signal the PDR was failing.

The resistance wasn't opposition so much as skepticism that anything would durably change. Teams had seen enough management initiatives to assume that executives would eventually want more polish, more detail, more upward information flow until the old behavioral momentum reasserted itself. It took at least a quarter of consistent commitment before people believed the change was real.

The moment I knew it had taken hold was when one of our most experienced product managers took what we said at face value. Instead of preparing a polished deck, he handwrote his status and roadmap on a piece of paper, took a photo, dropped it into a single slide, and briefed from that. Leadership didn't just tolerate it. They celebrated it, reinforced the behavior, and made it visible as an example of what the PDR was supposed to look like. Had they asked for more polish, the stated purpose would have been dead on arrival.

The Structure Underneath

The military builds this clarity with a rigor most civilian organizations are loath to try. We define the goals because each type of unit has a defined mission. A Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron has a defined mission: provide assault transport of combat troops in the initial assault waves and follow-on stages of amphibious operations. We understand how to achieve those goals because every role in a defined type of unit is defined within the hundreds of pages of tables of organization. Every skill is documented through training and readiness manuals. Every process through codified tactics, techniques, and procedures. Goals, roles, processes - all documented and aligned before the first interpersonal interaction ever becomes relevant.

That structure is what allowed me, at the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot, to skip straight to the interpersonal layer when some drill instructors were grinding against each other. The goals were defined, the roles were clear, the processes were established. I didn't need to untangle whether they disagreed about what they were trying to accomplish. I could go to how they were showing up with each other in pursuit of a shared mission, and I started the next training cycle by reminding them that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions, and that extending the same generosity to the people beside you is where the real work begins.

The Question Worth Asking

Pull up your calendar and look at the recurring meetings your team runs. For each one, ask: is this meeting designed to serve the people doing the work, or the people receiving the update? If the honest answer is that it's optimized for leadership comfort, you've found where purpose has drifted. That's where to start.