Here’s a management challenge to ponder as we begin a new year: How do executives and top managers create a strong and long-lasting sense of purpose in the workforce? How do they get a diverse group of people to focus on a shared goal?

The late, great management guru Peter Drucker wrote about this quite a bit, and in his view, “creating [a] unified vision in an organization of specialists” was one of the great challenges of any information-based organization. And Drucker believed, as I do, that while “management must have considerable authority, its job in the modern organization is not to command. It is to inspire.”

Inspiring people means getting workers to wholeheartedly buy in to the goals of the organization. This is what the big push for employee engagement is all about: getting workers to completely embrace the goals of the organization and give an extra measure of effort to help the team reach those goals.

Drucker points to the Manhattan Project, the code name for the U.S.’s World War II development of the atomic bomb, as a great example of how a team can be built with a strong sense of purpose. He also notes, with some irony, that this was incredibly surprising given that the Manhattan Project “was heavily staffed by university professors who, in their natural habitat, are remarkably resistant to change and notoriously slow to innovate.”

Of course, the university professors involved in the Manhattan Project had their teamwork and sense of purpose fueled by a very basic instinct—survival. They knew that the Nazis were working on a similar project and that future survival of the U.S. and its allies rested upon the ability of their team to develop the bomb before anyone else did.

You can see this basic instinct on display today as well. This week, a half-dozen passengers on Delta Airlines Flight 110, which was trying to land at Los Angeles International Airport, came to the aid of a flight attendant who was struggling with a man seemingly determined to open the plane’s rear emergency exit.

“I thought this guy was going to open the door. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to go down with the plane,’ ” passenger Chris Llewellyn told the Los Angeles Times. The story says that “along with half a dozen other passengers, Llewellyn ran down the aisle into the galley area and jumped on the man, pulling him away from the door. ‘He was struggling hard-core,’ Llewellyn said. ‘I was holding down his arm. Somebody had a foot on his head. Everyone was holding down a different body part. He was going nuts. I was telling him to chill because he’s not going any place.’ ”

Llewellyn and has fellow passengers subdued the man, who was arrested when the plane arrived in Los Angeles.

The incident points to a key lesson for any manager trying to get people to buy in to supporting a goal or project: Nothing motivates a sense of purpose better than the basic survival instinct. In other words, it’s easy to create a shared sense of purpose when the basic human need to live kicks in on a plane flying at 35,000 feet.

I know what you are thinking: How do we build that sense of teamwork in a workforce when the situation is not quite so dire?

There’s an easy answer today that we couldn’t draw on a year ago: You use the economy to motivate your workplace team to pull together, just like the passengers did on Delta Flight 110.

Your workplace situation is not comparable to what the Delta passengers were facing (I hope). But building a strong sense of purpose around your organization’s need for economic survival is something that just about every employee should be able to embrace. Your job—granted, not an easy one—is to create here on the ground that sense of mission that comes so instinctively to people who are challenged at 35,000 feet.

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