As a leadership coach, I have had the privilege, many times, of having senior leadership of an organisation describe their mission and the strategies they employ to reach it. When asked, it almost always turns out to have been the aspiration that either the chief executive, or a few trusted senior managers, or the corporate strategy staff got together to craft. The remaining task, then, is to propagate the mission throughout the organization, asking people, who had nothing to do with building it, to first memorize it and then let it permeate their consciousness and their actions.
Nobody asked the baristas around the world whether their hope was to “inspire and nurture the human spirit” with their concoctions, or the factory workers in Vietnam, Indonesia and China whether their labours were bringing “inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”. And many (most?) refinery, petrochemicals and petrol pump workers had rarely heard of, and never paid attention to, their company’s values: Nation-first, Care, Innovation, Passion and Trust. They certainly hadn’t been asked if those were indeed the values they lived by.
Gallup’s 2026 Workplace Report had an interesting new insight, beyond the recurrent, depressingly low (and declining) proportion of engaged employees (19%). It also said that globally, leaders reported significantly higher engagement than their teams, stronger life satisfaction, a greater sense that what they were doing mattered. That is not a hurrah for the leadership. It tells us that leaders and the people they “lead” don’t live in the same organisation. It tells us that leadership failed.
Organisations are often described as machines, with structures, targets and reporting lines. They are, but those that are only that are invariably mediocre and fragile. Effective, inspired and resilient organisations make it a point to make their purpose reflect the sum of the purposes of its people.
I have often been asked how that is possible in a large organisation. How many people can you ask, many leaders I have coached ask. They arrive convinced that their organisation's problem is alignment, and that the remedy is a better plan, communicated more forcefully. When it fails, inevitably, in its objective of ensuring compliance (that is all it aspires to), the reason is always the fecklessness of the led.
In my coaching work I have come to see organisations as conversations: the sum of what people feel safe to say to one another, and what they have learned not to say. The leaders I have admired most understand this before they understand anything else. They engage with people in a way that constructs and illuminates shared purpose. And they inspire them to engage with their people in the same way, so that there is a vibrant movement, not just of information, but of purpose, up and down the organisation, right down to the last cog – that was just released from the life of a cog because it discovered that its purpose mattered. It produces, across the organisation, a coherence that displaces mindless compliance.
True organisational leadership is the stewardship of a shared purpose and of the conditions in which people can serve it. It means clarity about what matters and what will not be traded away. It means making it safe to bring bad news early and responding in a way that keeps it safe. It means developing others rather than becoming indispensable and holding standards without humiliating anyone.
The practice this demands is one of affection, listening and consistency. It involves spending time where the work actually happens, asking questions without already holding the answer, noticing the gap between what one says and what one rewards, and allowing one's own mistakes to be visible. Over time, people read a leader's behaviour as the true statement of the organisation's values. Good leaders work to make that reading a trustworthy one.