The Need for Purposeful Leadership

These are challenging times for businesses everywhere and require leaders to adapt.

The situation:

- New ways of working and ongoing adaptation of living and working with COVID

- Economies everywhere struggling to recover

- Increasing concerns over climate change

The challenge:

For companies to successfully navigate permacrisis - serving shareholders while demonstrating responsibility to society.

The solution:

Recruiting leaders with the following skills:-

Forward leaning - able to look at the broader strategy and outcomes beyond the immediate task while mitigating risks and still managing to drive performance.

Bold and innovative - Brave enough to make decisions not based on traditional framework, or conventional business cases, or the usual data sources. To be pioneering and proactively influence positive change. To experiment, learn and share.

Commercial savvy and entrepreneurial spirit - Have resilience, a world view, able to identify where profitability and sustainability meet a social need. To explore new ways of thinking and working.

Inspiring and collaborative - Inspire rather than instruct. Able to bring together stakeholders with the wider society. Bring about alignment of employees and build a sense of purpose.

Best practice, set an example - Being the best version of themselves and enabling others to do the same - business today is less about hierarchy or transactional power and more about integrity and ethics. Also, possessing the humility to admit errors.

Empathy and compassion - develop trusting relationships that support individuals, teams and stakeholders. The ability to listen, engage and recognise an individual’s challenges and motivations. To create a culture that offers support, diversity, innovation, and cohesion.

In summary:

Sadly, there appears to be no end soon enough to the war in Ukraine, the US is officially in recession and both the UK and Europe are expected to follow soon, plus concerns are increasing over climate change - these are strong headwinds to be facing. Having leaders capable of transformation will shape how organisations evolve and perform in the months and years ahead.