2 min read

Dec 19, 2024

Purpose driven leadership is a corporate leadership strategy that aims to help team members find greater personal meaning in their work. Successful purpose driven leadership helps to align personal and organisational goals and values among your employees to achieve greater quality of outcomes. As a coaching strategy, purpose driven leadership can help cultivate a more deeply committed and stable workforce, with greater levels of self-motivation, innovation, and creativity. At the core of purpose driven leadership is a willingness to challenge the status quo and lead by example, focusing on what truly matters to both the organisation and its employees.

For these reasons, purpose driven leadership is central to many high-performance team coaching strategies used by modern businesses, and is an effective way of developing your leadership styles for greater engagement and productivity.

Align Purpose And Direction

The primary goal of purpose driven leadership is to align individual goals with the team, and the team purpose with broader organisational objectives. This focus on alignment gives the strategy a unified direction, helping every colleague to better understand their role within the larger vision. For this to be successful, leaders must be capable of clearly articulating your organisation’s purpose and how teams and individuals contribute to these goals.

What sets purpose driven team leadership apart from other leadership approaches is that this common direction is based on more than solely financial criteria and KPIs. The ‘purpose’ that your teams should align around is more values-based, speaking to what your organisation stands for, what it wants to achieve, and tying in with ideals around diversity, sustainability, and long-term societal benefit. When team members can see the direct impact of their work on this purpose and direction, it can create a greater sense of belonging and shared purpose, as well as increasing productivity and value.

Encourage Engagement And Commitment

Purpose driven leadership goes hand in hand with authenticity. Authentic leadership can help create a team culture of transparency and trust, which is essential for building engagement and commitment. Many individuals are intrinsically cynical about the motivations and capabilities of their leaders.

A purpose driven leadership strategy consciously counteracts this by encouraging a transparent approach to decision-making, and an open dialogue for all team members, with a personal connection in which leaders take the time to understand their direct reports on an individual level. In purpose driven leadership, words and actions should be consistent, with leaders developing greater mindfulness of their actions and their impact.

Coach Your Leaders To Grow And Develop Their Teams

Ethical leadership at all levels of the organisation is crucial for building a purpose driven culture. Team development and coaching should focus on creating leaders that prioritise ethical considerations and personal integrity in all their actions and professional relationships.

Regular training sessions on ethical leadership, for example, can use real-world scenarios and real-play to help your leaders and managers navigate complex ethical situations, and emerging leaders can be paired with mentors and coaches known for their strong ethical standards, to disseminate high standards and behavioural patterns throughout your organisation.

Find Out More

For more information about developing your leadership styles and to discover the benefits of our leadership team development services, please get in touch with Centre for Teams today.