People and purpose: Becoming the next business leader

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated ongoing changes in the way businesses are organized, led and viewed. Effective business leaders will need not just a strong set of cross-disciplinary “hard” skills, but also the emotional ability to motivate diverse, multi-generational, decentralized teams made up of increasingly empowered individuals who seek not only financial rewards but also personal fulfillment through socially responsible work.

At the organizational level, disruptive technologies and a data-driven economy are changing the way many jobs are performed, prioritizing cognitive skills over mechanical ones, favoring speed and connectivity, and requiring “whole-system thinking.” Teams may include both in-person and stay-at-home workers, which means leaders must effectively communicate their values even to physically distant employees if they want to keep them engaged.

And with medical advances promising improved health in our senior years, the workforce will span more generations than ever before, each with its own set of motivators: it could be loyalty for the older workers, goals for the baby boomers, work-life balance for Generation X, collaborative work for millennials, and social rewards for Generation Z. As entrepreneur and investor John Hampton notes, “this is the first time in modern history that there are five generations working side-by-side. That can be a challenge for leaders trying to bring their team together in accomplishing a shared goal.”

At a social level, consumers, investors, and employees are becoming much more concerned about the relationship between business and society, notes Alison Taylor, executive director of Ethical Systems. Authenticity and accountability are some of the non-negotiable qualities that employees now expect leaders to live by, as well as the feeling that their own core values align with the company’s.

Purposeful leadership

Guiding all these forces in the right direction can be a tall order if you don’t have a strong sense of where you are headed in the first place. Only leaders with a clear purpose can motivate others to work to their full potential and make a positive impact on the world.

In the words of Hubert Joly, recognized as one of the top 100 CEOs in the world by Harvard Business Review and author of the best-selling The Heart of Business, the traditional model of the authoritative leader-hero driven by money and power is no longer applicable in today’s environment. New leaders must abandon old paradigms to “lead with purpose and humanity.”

So what exactly is purposeful leadership, and how it is acquired?

Executive coach and speaker Tony Gambill says that “a leader’s purpose explains their ‘why’ of leadership and should be a North Star that provides clarity and direction when navigating the complex situations that come with leadership.” He suggests asking questions such as “What do you love to do as a leader?,” “What positive impact do you want to have in the world?” and “What has changed because of your leadership?”

Another critical question is whether your own purpose is aligned with your company’s. “It’s really important that we can match our individual purpose with the company purpose,” says Quique Huerta, Global Employee Experience Officer and former CEO for Spain at Liberty Mutual Insurance, a company with 45,000 employees. “It’s a discovery process. It’s not something that you wake up in the morning one day and say ‘Oh, I know already what my purpose is.’”For most of us, that kind of clarity is not a given but something that must be reached by pushing our own boundaries to discover our hidden potential. But finding that purpose could arguably be described as the single most important step in our career (and life).