There's a moment I remember from my first year managing a night shift team. I was doing the rounds at about 2am — the floor was quiet, the kind of quiet you only get when people are deep in the rhythm of the work — and I stopped next to a guy called Dave.
Dave was good. Reliable. Fast. Always in, never complained. And that night he asked me something I wasn't expecting:
"Does any of this actually matter?"
He didn't mean it dramatically. He wasn't threatening to quit. He just wanted to know — genuinely — if what he was doing had any meaning beyond the numbers on the board.
I wasn't ready for the question. I gave him a decent answer, but not a great one. And I drove home thinking about it for the rest of the night.
Twenty years later, I think about Dave a lot.
Because what he was really asking — in the middle of a night shift in a fulfilment centre — was one of the most fundamental questions a human being can ask about their work:
Why does this matter?
And the honest truth is that most leaders can't answer it. Not because they don't care. But because nobody's ever asked them to think about it properly.
Connection to Purpose isn't about posters on a wall. It isn't about a values framework in an induction pack. It isn't even about the company mission statement — which most people on the floor couldn't tell you anyway.
It's about whether your team understands, in human terms, why their contribution matters.
Not the metric. Not the target. Not the shift pattern.
The reason.
And here's the thing: the reason doesn't have to be grand. It doesn't have to be world-changing. People don't need to believe they're curing cancer in a warehouse. But they do need to feel like their presence here, on this shift, doing this thing — means something.
Maybe that's the family who gets their order in time for a birthday. Maybe it's the team covering for a colleague going through something hard. Maybe it's the simple, underrated truth that the people around you are counting on you to show up.
Purpose isn't always written on a wall. Sometimes it's standing right next to you.
So how do you build it?
Not with a speech. Not with a briefing. With questions.
Ask your team what they think the work is for. Not what the business says — what they think. You'll be surprised what comes back. And if the answers are vague — if they shrug and say I don't know — that's not their failure. That's a conversation you haven't had yet.
Ask them what they'd want a new person on the team to understand about why this place matters. Ask them what they'd tell their family they do — not the job title, but what they actually do. Ask them what they'd miss if they left.
Purpose lives in those answers.
I didn't have a great answer for Dave that night. But the fact that he asked — the fact that I heard him ask — changed how I led from that point on.
The leaders people remember aren't the ones with the best systems. They're the ones who helped their team understand why the work was worth doing.
That's the first connection.
Check it.
If this resonates — if you've had your own Dave moment, or you're still searching for the answer — join the community at theseenprinciple.com. Honest thinking on leadership and the human side of AI. No spam. Just what matters.
The future of work is human. It always was.