For years, purpose was a decorative chapter in corporate reports. Today it is the first question executives ask before listening to a project. Something profound has changed.
There is a question that has crept into almost every conversation we hold with executives, one that ten years ago barely came up: what for. Not how much, not where, not with which team. What for. Before discussing compensation or the scope of the role, today’s executive wants to understand what real transformation the project proposes and what mark their time in it will leave. Whoever lacks a good answer to that question loses the candidate in the first conversation.
It is worth clarifying what corporate purpose is not. It is not the mission statement framed in reception, nor the values manifesto nobody remembers, nor the sustainability report written for compliance. Executives — and increasingly, entire teams — can tell rhetoric from truth in minutes. An organisation’s purpose is read in its uncomfortable decisions: what it gives up when the easy thing would be not to, how it treats people when things go wrong, how consistent the executive committee’s words are with its actions.
That consistency has an old name: integrity. And it now has an economic translation nobody disputes. Organisations whose values are real retain better, attract candidates money alone would not move, and get through crises with teams that stay engaged. Those that wear values as ornament pay for it in turnover, in disaffection and in the impossibility of hiring the people they would truly want. Integrity has ceased to be a reputational matter and become a lever of competitiveness.
We see it clearly in search processes. The senior candidate no longer comes to the interview to sell themselves: they come to evaluate. They ask about the succession that never happened, the executive who left, the decision the company took during the pandemic. They research, cross-check and decide with that information. For companies this has an uncomfortable but healthy consequence: the employer brand is not built in communications, it is built in behaviour. And it is destroyed there too.
Our conviction, after years of guiding appointments at the highest level, is that values-based leadership is not the gentle version of leadership: it is the most demanding one. It requires holding the line on consistency when it costs money, giving explanations when staying silent would be more comfortable, and giving up short-term results in the name of something that takes years to show. That is precisely why it transforms: people do not follow a title, they follow someone they trust. And trust is only built through repeated deeds.
For organisations, the conclusion is twofold. First: articulate a real purpose, not one from a catalogue, because without it you no longer compete for the best talent. Second: bring in leaders capable of embodying it, because purpose is not communicated top-down, it spreads by example. When we help a company choose its next executive, that is, increasingly, the real question of the process. Not what they know how to do, but what they will do when nobody is watching.
