In the previous article, we explored how leaders can intentionally develop purposeful people leadership, an approach that transforms teams and organisations by aligning individual purpose with collective contribution.
While this aspiration is noble and deeply impactful, it is not without its complexities. In this post, we examine the challenges, paradoxes, and tensions that arise when we choose to lead people purposefully.
Cognitive Aspects
One of the first complexities arises from how people cognitively make sense of the notion of purposefulness. The concept of “purpose” is often misunderstood or conflated with goals. While goals are specific outcomes we strive to achieve, purpose is the deeper reason behind those goals, the “why” that gives them meaning. This distinction is not always clear, and many team members may struggle to grasp its relevance. Some may view purposefulness as abstract or philosophical, disconnected from the practical realities of work.
Moreover, individuals interpret purpose through the lens of their own experiences, beliefs, and values. What feels purposeful to one person may seem irrelevant or even threatening to another. Leaders must navigate these differences with sensitivity, helping people explore and articulate their own understanding of purpose without imposing a singular definition. This requires patience, dialogue, and a willingness to embrace ambiguity.
Purposeful leadership extends beyond the self. Once the leader becomes purposeful, the natural next step is to help others, team members, and teams become purposeful. This is not a directive process but a deeply human one, rooted in example, empathy, and engagement. In this article, we explore the second branch of purposeful leadership: leading people purposefully.
Purposefulness in people is transformative. It improves their personal lives, relationships, health, and peace of mind, and this inevitably enhances their effectiveness and contribution at work. The workplace becomes more than a place of transaction; it becomes a space of meaning. Families benefit too, as individuals carry their sense of purpose home, influencing their roles as parents, partners, and community members.
I have experienced this transformation personally. At the age of 27, I had climbed the corporate ladder rapidly to become a director of two subsidiaries of John Keells Holdings, Sri Lanka’s leading conglomerate. At the time, I was driven by ambition and the goal of professional success. I worked long hours, including weekends, and neglected many aspects of my life. I was overweight, frequently ill and hospitalised, disconnected from my young family, absent from church, and unaware of the importance of developing and empowering my team. I had no sense of purpose, only a relentless pursuit of achievement.
Everything changed when I discovered the notion of purposefulness and wrote the draft of my first purpose statement. I began going to the gym, spending quality time with my family, returning to church, reading, cutting excessive costs, investing the savings, and cultivating emotional maturity through meditation. This personal transformation awakened a desire to help my team grow. I began teaching them about purposefulness and supporting their development. As a result, my quality of life and work improved significantly. It was no longer a choice between work and life; it became a commitment to both work and life, harmoniously.
My doctoral research reinforces this understanding. As I wrote in my thesis:
“My research suggests that being purposeful helps understand life from a more holistic and altruistic manner, leads one to conduct life with decent human values, helps make choices beneficial to the flourishing of life, improves caring for the well-being of family and self, and choosing vocations which are aligned with an evolving life-purpose. Adjusting one’s lifestyle in this manner takes courage, determination, and self-discipline. However, persisting with such an aspiration leads to an improvement in the quality of life, generating happiness which, in turn, encourages persisting in being purposeful.” (De Silva, 2024)
I invite you to reflect on how you are leading people. Are you helping them become purposeful? Are you creating conditions for their flourishing? If not, what needs to change?
You may explore literature from my blog http://www.ranjandesilva.blog, my website http://www.ranjandesilva.com, and other sources. Speak with your trusted advisor. We will further explore the notion of purposeful leadership and methods of transformation in the upcoming blog posts.
In the next article of this series, we will explore how to develop purposeful people leadership, how leaders can intentionally cultivate purposefulness in others through structured development, coaching, and empowerment.
References
De Silva, R. L. G. (2024). Living Purposefully: An Inquiry into the Life of a Leadership Development Practitioner. (Doctoral dissertation, Hult Ashridge).
In the last post, we explored how to develop purposeful self-leadership by articulating a purpose statement and taking small, meaningful steps to live in alignment with it. While this process is deeply enriching, it is not without its challenges. In this post, we explore the complexities of attempting to enact purposeful self-leadership in our lives (De Silva, 2024).
Understanding the Notion of Self-Leadership
The idea of self-leadership is inspiring. It suggests that we can take charge of our lives, lead ourselves with clarity and conviction, and live in alignment with our purpose. However, understanding this notion deeply can be complex. Many mix purpose with goals when in fact it is not. A goal becomes more meaningful when it is based on a purpose. It requires us to accept responsibility for our thoughts, emotions, and actions—something that can feel both empowering and intimidating. The concept may seem abstract or idealistic, especially when life feels uncertain or overwhelming.
We explored the notion of Purposeful Self-leadership in the last post, part 3 of this series titled ‘Start with the Self’. Today we explore how to develop Purposeful Self-Leadership and in the next post, we can explore the complexities of such an aspiration. In the first two articles of this series, we explored the two key concepts of purposeful leadership: purposefulness and leadership, and the three branches of purposeful leadership: self, people, and organisations.
Developing Purposeful Self-Leadership starts with articulating a purpose statement depicting our sense of purpose at the current stage of life. The first version of the purpose statement is only a glimpse of our purpose as finding purpose is a lifelong journey. However, having a sense of purpose begins the quest and gives us the drive and desire to be purposeful. Being purposeful improves our clarity about our life purposes and helps us fine-tune our purpose statement, leading to us being more purposeful. This cyclical process not only improves our sense of purpose and purposefulness but also attracts abundance to succeed in vocations aligned with our life purpose, gives us happiness and peace of mind (De Silva, 2024).
Leadership – A poem by Spatula – Read by Mathew Coger
As you listen to this poem, reflect on your current attitude about leadership. Does this move you into thinking of doing what you are doing as a leader or to change your leadership approach? What baby steps would you take to reinforce your good leadership behaviours and/or transform.
A post-lunch keynote by Ranjan De Silva that kept an audience of almost a 1000 professionals entertain, energised and engaged at the National HR Conference of Sri Lanka, organised by the Institute of personal management (IPM). A real life testimony of how to engage the Fickle Mind.
As you watch this video, reflect on steps you can take to engage the fickle minds of your children, team members and yourself.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.
Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later
Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion
Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video
Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.
The place which developed thousands of boys to be men of stature for over 165 year, the place I had the good fortune of being nurtured, St Anthony’s Collage in Kandy, the hill capital of Sri Lanka. The picture speaks of the nurturing location on the banks of the Mahaweli river, the space provided for sports signifying the importance of the development of the body in addition to the mind. To write about the great men produced by St Anthony’s will take a few books. All I have is gratitude for my alma mater.
Robin Sharma – on the dangers of your devise and other non-value adding addictions on your success and how to gain monomaniacal focus, using practical and neurological information.
As you listen to this powerful speech by Robin Sharma, reflect on steps you can take to kill the distractions of your life, build purposeful habits and give life and energy to your special talent … to achieve mastery purposefully.
Can empathy be developed or Liberated? As you watch this video, reflect on this questions. Consider how important empathy is for leadership success. Is there an ideal amount of empathy? Could empathy be too much or two little? What steps would you take to liberate the ideal amount of empathy from within you for your leadership success.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.
Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later
Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion
Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video
Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.
Inspirational speeches and interviews by Jeff Bezos
As you listen to this compilation of speeches and interviews of Jeff Bezos reflect on what makes you passionate and what you can you do to allow passion find me?
Good Timber by Douglas Malloch – Read by Mark O’Keeffe
As you listen to this poem (words below), reflect on what your challenges and struggles have done for you?
The tree that never had to fight For sun and sky and air and light, But stood out in the open plain And always got its share of rain, Never became a forest king But lived and died a scrubby thing.
The man who never had to toil To gain and farm his patch of soil, Who never had to win his share Of sun and sky and light and air, Never became a manly man But lived and died as he began.
Good timber does not grow with ease, The stronger wind, the stronger trees, The further sky, the greater length, The more the storm, the more the strength. By sun and cold, by rain and snow, In trees and men good timbers grow.
Where thickest lies the forest growth We find the patriarchs of both. And they hold counsel with the stars Whose broken branches show the scars Of many winds and much of strife. This is the common law of life.
This short video introduces Emotional Intelligence using interesting animations. This will show the importance of emotional intelligence and how to improve emotional intelligence.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.
Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later
Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion
Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video
Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.
This is a moment from an in-room learning experience pre-pandemic. This a photo taken after an activity related to the ‘Six Thinking Hats’, conducted for one of my clients in Dubai. It now 4 months of online learnings using ‘webshops’, a concept innovated by my team to attempt to create an experience close as possible to the fun and interactive in-room experience.
While some participants who have experienced our in-room and online learning experiences say that they got a similarly impactful experience, my fervent wish, for the sake of the quality of learnings, is that we move back to physical venues as soon as the situation starts permitting us to. Given that life in Sri Lanka is limping back to normal, we have already conducted 3 days of in-room sessions and many more are lined up. I cant tell the impact these have had not only on the participants experience, but also on the quality of our contribution.
When lockdowns happened in mid-march I got standard in Dhaka without flights to return home. Therefore my experience is quite different to those who were with families and had to spend a lot of time with them while working or not working from home. However since returning home about 2 months ago I have been largely working from home that gives me the experience to reflect on that reality as well.
Being away from home with the uncertainty of when I will return home increased the concern towards me by mother, wife and daughters at home as well as my siblings and other relatives from various part of the world. The 10 weeks in Dhaka resulted in more communications with all my close family and other relatives more than ever before. Conversations among relatives resulted in each one inquiring from others about how they are affected by the pandemic, the impact on livelihood etc. Therefore there was concerned among each other for each other, much more than usual. Continue reading “Pandemic and Relationships”→
We can make sense of emotions as e-motions or energy in motion. If the energy in motion in your being is positive it would create positive emotions and if the energy is negative, it creates negative emotions.
Image Credits: Livescience.com
Positive energy gets created with positive thoughts, memories, habits, actions, learnings, relationships, sounds, visions, soothing environments, fragrances and tastes etc. The reverse is also true.
When I realised that getting back home from Dhaka was going to be difficult, that my customers would postpone work assigned to me, having to be self-confined indoors to be safe from the virus and not been able to be with my family when they needed me created negative emotions.
In addition to the anxiety of not being in control of the unknown as well as physical comfort & safety, a part of these negative energy was generated when memories of the 2009 recession where I was struggling financially came back to my mind. Another part of these negative energy was generated when a negative habit of sleeping late and waking late, which I had eliminate some time ago returned. Thankfully I was equipped with tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to erase bad memories and giving up bad habits. Continue reading “Dealing With Negative Energy in Motion (e-motion)”→
When the world started changing due to the pandemic it had a big impact on my focus on my intellectual development process. This blog post tells my story and I hope this will help you to reflect on how the pandemic affected your intellectual development.
Image Credit: medspace.com
Let’s start with the question, what is the meaning of intellectual? While different people may make sense of the word ‘intellectual’ in different ways, based on their thinking, to me intellectual is the quality of my thinking and understanding aspects I am concerned with. The stronger my intellectuality becomes, I tend to understand aspects I am concerned with and the related complexities in a deeper manner. The shift in priorities brought about by the pandemics resulted in some interesting changes to my intellectual development processes.
Empathy & Perspective, an inspirational Speech By Simon Sinek
Everyone can be a leader. Everyone don’t want to be a leader. Everyone don’t have to be a leader. You need to love your people to be a leader. As you listen to this inspirational speech, reflect on if you love being a leader. If not why not? What steps would you do?
In the name of psychology and neuroscience, Daniel Goleman shares his insights on why IQ is not an accurate predictor of how well one does in life. A new metric is called for, one he calls, ‘Emotional Intelligence’. Everyone has the capacity to develop their emotional skills and improve their EQ. This video shows you some examples of ways to cultivate your emotional intelligence so you can put them to work at home, in the workplace, and in your relationships.
Attention! The word ‘depression’ in this video simply refers to feelings of sadness and not ‘clinical depression’.
