How to become a more purposeful leader

The gateway to becoming a purposeful leader is to have a thorough understanding of your core values. For leaders who want to find their purpose, a values elicitation exercise is often a good starting point as it helps ensure you have a clear understanding of your core values.

The exercise allows leaders to identify their top five to seven values by prompting them to think of the peaks and troughs in their lives. These are often events associated with when their values were either honoured or neglected.

Once a leader is clear about those values, they can tackle follow-up questions such as “what roles would honour these values?”; “what companies or sectors have these values?”; “what careers would you expect leaders with these values to pursue?”; and “to what extent does your current role honour these values?”

Adopting a new set of skills

Reflecting on these points is only the start of the journey because, in my experience, the biggest challenge leaders face is not identifying their purpose but transitioning successfully from a profit-driven role to a purpose-driven role. The reason for this is that being a successful purpose-driven leader requires different skills and attributes than are needed for a profit-driven mindset. These skills can be captured in a model I call ‘the UP, the IN and the OUT’ of purpose-driven leadership.

In the UP of a purpose-driven leadership role, you need to learn how to stay connected and committed to your purpose through the ups and downs of organisational life. You must also work out how to keep experiencing your purpose as a joy rather than for it to slowly become a heavy burden.

In the IN of a purpose-driven leadership role, you will find that you need new skills to look after your motivation, resilience and wellbeing. This is essential because purpose-driven teams are emotionally intense by their nature. Everything is a bit more personal and this can create a psychologically draining environment, particularly when things go wrong.

Finally, the OUT of the purpose-driven leadership role concerns the need to find new ways of engaging others to pursue the same purpose with equal conviction. Typically, this will challenge you to know when to forgive others and when there is a need to protect the team, or the mission. Not every battle needs to be fought and won, but issues that undermine team cohesion, or jeopardise the purpose itself, must be bravely addressed.

Becoming purpose-driven doesn’t happen overnight

Typically, leaders are strong on two dimensions of this model and weaker on the other. For example, using examples from recent political leadership in the UK, the former prime minister Boris Johnson was able to inspire a strong following (OUT) and had a clear vision for Brexit (UP) but was ultimately brought down by self-destructive personal behaviours (IN). New prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has a very different leadership character. While it is still early days in his leadership of the UK government, Starmer appears to have an intense desire to honour his personal value of service (UP) and is disciplined in managing his own behaviour, wellbeing and motivation (IN). It may be that the biggest challenge he has will be in ensuring he can take enough of his party and the country with him on the journey, particularly given the need for short-term pain (OUT).

In this way, we can see that someone does not become a purpose-driven leader overnight, it is a journey that can take months and even years before a leader fully adapts to a new role. Unfortunately, some leaders believe that standing for an inspiring purpose means that their job will get easier than when they stood for wealth creation alone. This is typically not the case and it can be a shock when a leader is unfairly criticised or harshly judged when they feel they are acting as a force for good. It’s therefore important to manage the expectations of anyone who wishes to become purpose-driven.

Despite these challenges, we know that the world needs more purpose-driven leaders if we are to solve some of the looming issues associated with climate change, AI, population growth, mental health, diversity and inclusion and inequality. Business is a powerful agent of societal change and must play its part in driving systemic change, alongside politicians, NGOs and the third sector in driving systemic change.

The rise of business communities, such as the B Corp, is hugely encouraging in this regard. In the UK, there are now over 2,000 businesses accredited by B Corp as a ‘force for good’. This number has grown by 50 per cent in the last 18 months and means that the UK is leading the world in the growth of its B Corp community. Every B Corp certified company needs a purpose-driven CEO, so this trend looks set to drive an increasing focus on purpose-driven leadership in the coming years.