Given that the life expectancy of organizations has precipitously declined over the past 20 years, this question isn’t just an academic one. In fact, more than 50 percent of new business in the United States now close their doors within four years. Employers need to find effective ways to help their organizations survive and for their employees to thrive in their roles at work. This is where purpose comes in. Simply put, having a sense of purpose in your job means that you feel that your work makes positive contributions to the world, beyond earning yourself a paycheck or improving your company’s bottom line—you feel a commitment to something bigger than yourself. A 2007 study published by the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology suggests that managers can effectively boost the work experience and well-being of their employees by helping them connect to a job-related higher purpose. What’s more, there is evidence that purpose is tied to positive financial performance for an entire organization: Deloitte’s 2013 Core Beliefs and Culture Survey revealed that 91 percent of respondents who believe that their company has a strong sense of purpose also say their company has a history of strong financial performance. By contrast, among those who report that their company doesn’t have a strong purpose, only 66 percent say it has a history of financial health. So how can organizations foster a sense of purpose among their employees or members? To answer that question, I turned to Niki Lustig, a leader of the Learning and Organizational Development team at Twitter. She is responsible for boosting organizational effectiveness by helping managers and employees grow in their roles and develop the skills they need to be successful. Lustig believes that a sense of purpose is crucial not only for Twitter as a whole, but also for the individual teams that comprise it. To tackle this challenge, she introduced an initiative at Twitter to help managers define the unique purposes of their teams. She facilitated this process by creating a scalable workshop focused on drafting team purpose statements. It has now been rolled out to 120 employees at the company but was first prototyped on Lustig’s own team. She started by creating an internal “Purpose Pre-Work Survey,” which had nine short questions. Each person on her team took 10 minutes—no more, no less—to respond to them. The first three questions engaged people at an individual level: