In the previous article, we explored what purposeful organisational leadership means and why it matters. In this post, we focus on how leaders can intentionally develop purposeful organisational leadership, turning purpose from a statement into a lived reality across the organisation.
Start with Leadership Commitment
“I hold the view that leaders are better able to contribute to the flourishing of life if their actions are guided by a deeper sense of purpose” (De Silva, 2024, p.6). Therefore, purposeful organisational leadership needs to begin at the top. Senior leaders must embrace the organisation’s purpose as a guiding principle for decisions and behaviours. This commitment is not symbolic; it requires courage to prioritise purpose even when short-term pressures tempt compromise.
Make the Organisational Purpose Your Guiding Light
The starting point for developing purposeful organisational leadership is a clear purpose statement. This is not a marketing slogan; it is the organisation’s reason for being and its unique contribution to the flourishing of life. From this foundation, leaders can craft a mission statement that defines how the purpose will be delivered and set Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) to drive long-term success.
In the previous articles, we explored the first two branches of purposeful leadership: self and people. In this post, we turn to the third and final branch, purposeful organisations. If purposeful leadership begins with the individual and extends to teams, its ultimate expression is in organisations that are guided by purpose rather than vision.
Beyond Vision: Why Purpose Matters
Traditional organisations often define themselves through vision statements, aspirations of what they want to become. While visions can inspire, they are frequently inward-looking, focused on growth, dominance, or profitability.
Purposeful organisations, by contrast, start with a deeper question: Why do we exist? The answer is not about market share or shareholder value; it is about contribution to the flourishing of life. “Flourishing workplaces require the re-creation of organisations to give life to a truly postmodern era of collaboration in order to facilitate organisations to flourish on this planet for future generations” (De Silva, 2024).
Purpose is not an add-on, like corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is not a department or a project. It is the organising principle of the entire enterprise. Every policy, process, and decisions flow from the purpose. Every role is designed to serve it. Every strategy is evaluated against it. Purpose becomes the compass that guides the organisation through daily decisions, complexities and change.
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.
In the previous article, we explored the concept of purposeful people leadership and its importance. In this post, we delve into how leaders can intentionally develop purposeful people leadership, an approach that transforms teams and organisations by aligning individual purpose with collective contribution.
Purposeful people leadership begins with the leader’s own sense of purpose. When leaders connect their role to their higher purpose, they begin to see their primary responsibility not just as managing tasks, but as developing their team members, purposefully. This shift in perspective changes everything. The team is no longer a means to an end; it becomes the very reason for leadership. The leader’s purpose expands to include helping team members discover their own purpose and align it with meaningful roles.
This development process starts with purposeful conversations. Leaders engage with team members to understand their aspirations, strengths, struggles, concerns about their world and values they aspire to live by. They help individuals reflect on their personal purpose, articulate a purpose statement and explore how it can be expressed through their work. When people are placed in roles that resonate with their purpose, they flourish. Their contribution becomes authentic, passionate, and sustainable.
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).
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).
Purposeful leadership starts with the purposefulness of the individual holding the leadership role. How can a purposeless individual help people and organisations to be purposeful? I am not claiming that all leaders are purposeful self-leaders. Many are not, and as a result, the people and businesses are not purposeful. In this article, we explore the notion of purposeful self-leadership. Given the need to keep these articles short, we will explore how to develop purposeful self-leadership and the complexities of such an aspiration in subsequent articles. In the first two articles of this series, we explored the two keywords of the concept of purposeful leadership: purposefulness and leadership and the three branches of purposeful leadership: self, people and organisations.
A useful question to ask at the outset is what is purposefulness and how do we know we are purposeful?
The love, wishes, and blessings we share with our loved ones after New Year mass, parties or at home, as we move into 2025 are always special and energising. In addition, we are bombarded with various New Year messages on social media. One rare but valuable wish is related to a New Purpose for the New Year.
As I reflected on this, the question that came up was, is it a new purpose or a renewed purpose? If the concept of ‘purpose’ is perceived synonymously with ‘goals’ or if the reference is to the purpose for the year, then it could be considered a new purpose. However, if we look at ‘purpose’ as a life-purpose, a reason for being, we look at it as a renewed purpose.
“The first principles of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all really hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws” – Marting Lucher King Jr.
The importance of value for organisational and personal purpose came into my radar about 25 years ago when I was in the mid thirties in age. I have incorporated this notion in my leadership development practice in developing leaders and helping them transform organisations. As I started inquiring in to this notion as a part of my doctoral studies a few years ago, having learnt to look at things critically from different paradigms, I realised the complexity of the notion of ‘values’.
Think of the last time you had to make a difficult decision. A time where options were difficult to pick from. A time where the more materialistically profitable option did feel right. I have faced many such situation. I would like to share my personal experiences to help shed some light on this dilemma.
When I have such a dilemma I reflect on my aspired values to find direction as per the quote by Idowu Koyenikan in the visual above. The five values I attempt to live by are summarised I the following statement.
We inculcate values during our formative ages, influenced by family, teachers, religion and the society we live in. I always found it is difficult to ‘train’ people to live values as they are already part of each person. I also agree with the above quote by Jennifer Cruise; values do not take us get anywhere, they define us. Therefore what is the point of having values in an organisation and developing team members to live by organisational values.
Do you really know who you are? Well, I am still discovering who I am and I am not sure if I will ever find the answer. However, everyday I live with this question in my mind, I see a little bit more of who I am.
Reflect on the values you aspire to live by, the challenges you face in upholding those values in a materialistic world and steps you are taking to avoid compromising your values.
As you read this quote by Aesop, reflect on a baby step you can take to protect your secret – your special character and values, from getting swallowed up by complacency.
As you listen to this powerful poem, let the words touch you deep inside so that you can wake up and turn your dreams in to reality. Reflect on the good thoughts you dream of, that goes to sleep when you wake up. Think of a baby step to take for you to live those dreams.
Reflect on the values you were living by when you were happy and peaceful and what were the values in your life when you were unhappy and disturbed. What were the values you were living by when you made good decisions easily and what were your values when the decisions were wrong and difficult to make. Listing these can help you pick a few values for you to shape your life around.
As your read Mahathma Gandhi’s quote above reflect on the destiny you intend manifesting and think in the reverse order. What values will help create that destiny? What Habit will help live those values? What actions will help create those habits? What words will lead you to those actions. What thoughts are needed to use those words? and what beliefs will help generate those thoughts?
Thereafter develop the required belief through reading, writing, affirmations, conversations, and teaching etc. As you keep moving forward towards destiny by converting beliefs to thoughts to, words, to actions, to habits to values to your destiny, reflect if this process has changed your sense of destiny. If so work backwards from any point in the process and start again.
While you may or may not find and/or reach your destiny in this life time, being in this process, holding it lightly, experiencing the messiness, savouring journey will give you contentment, happiness, and peace. You will feel that your life is purposeful, giving you meaning.
You might be searching for destiny your entire life, but being in this process, holding it lightly, moving forward and backwards will help you to live and happy, content, peaceful life. A Purposeful life.
A collection of Ranjan De Silva’s favourite poems recited by him with short introductions and debrief of each poem at an online Rotary meeting between Rotary Club of Colombo Reconnections Sri Lanka and Rotary Club of Nanganallaur, India.
As you listen to these poems reflect on what inspire you. Is it the selection, a particular poem, the themes, the words, the way they are recited, relevance to you, your mindset or anything else?
As you listen to the beautiful lyrics of this song, with the energising music in the background and motivating visuals, reflect on you being the world’s greatest in the purposeful arena you are born to win. Start taking baby steps with that little bit of hope you have to energise you and see, hear & feel the journey getting more meaningful and exciting as you smell and taste those little wins that grow.
My blog post of last month addressed the notion of purpose of violence in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. We saw the involvement of religion and politics in the aftermath of the incident, over the past month. The intention of this blog post is to help us to understand how religion and politics positively and negatively impacted the lives of people.
Since I am not an intelligence, theological or political science expert to make judgements about what happened, and who was responsible for what happened, I request you not to take the assumptions I make in this post as truth. I am far away from the inner circles to know the truth and I am basing this blog post on what I have heard from trusted personalities such as the Cardinal of Sri Lanka, the Commander of the Army, and a retired intelligence experts known to me personally.
It was Easter Sunday (21 April 2019). I was in my flat in Dhaka, attending to some important business matters when I got a message that a bomb had gone off at St Anthony’s Church in Kochchikade, Colombo. Having not heard of bombings and terrorist violence for the past ten years, since the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, I hoped it was a hand grenade thrown by a business rival involved in unscrupulous business, with no injuries; these were the rare occurrences we heard of over the past ten years. Then the news started pouring in with photos and videos of simultaneous bomb attacks in two other churches and luxury hotels as well. My immediate concern was for my family who would have been at an Easter Mass at the same time. After calling and ensuring they were safe, my thoughts went out to the victims. I started hearing news of people known to me or families of people known to me having lost their lives or being injured, among the 253 souls that departed and 500 plus injured. I had visited St Anthony’s Church many times and I could picture the carnage as if I was there. It is considered a miraculous church and people from all religions visit to reflect on their challenges and ask help from St Anthony to resolve them.
We explored the notion of purpose from various viewpoints in the first ten blog posts in this series. We then started making sense of our purpose in the last three blog post. I invite you to now reflect on the second aspect in the model of purposeful living– The glimpse, the light green circle in the model.
This aspect deals with how we start seeing a glimpse or the beginning of what our purpose might be. The reason I sound so tentative is because I feel that we may have a specific role in this world and a purpose to live by, based on the higher powers that created us, be it God or the Universal energy system or however we chose to make sense of our existence. I discovered the beginning of my purpose about 22 years ago and the more I attempt to live by the sense of my purpose at any given time, the more I become clearer about it. Therefore, my clarity of my purpose has evolved with me and I believe it will continue to evolve during the rest of my life, although I may still not know what my purpose is completely, even when I transcend. Continue reading “Purpose of Living – Part 14: A Glimpse of our Purpose”→
Image credits: Centre for disability and development – Texas A&M University a caption
We explored the notion of purpose from various viewpoints in the first ten blog posts in this series. We then started making sense of our purpose in the last two blog post. I invite you to now reflect on the first aspect in the model of purposeful living – Awareness, the grey circle.
This aspect deals with how we become aware of the notion of purpose, and realise the importance of living purposefully. There are some who are aware of the notion of purpose, but do not realise the importance of living a purposeful life. There are others who are aware of the notion of purpose and its importance as well. I believe both aspects are needed to motivate us to start seeing the glimpse of our own purpose, the second aspect of the model of purposeful living. Let’s explore these two aspects in the next two paragraphs.
We explored the notion of purpose from various viewpoints in the first ten blog posts in this series. We then started making sense of our purpose in the last blog post, the eleventh in the series. I invited you to explore a model of purposefulness that has been developed over the past three years of my doctoral studies. This is still work in progress and will continue to evolve in this year of writing my thesis and beyond. However, I believe it has potential to help us make sense of our purpose because my professional practice over the past 20 years and my doctoral inquiry so far over the past three years has informed me of possible ways of making sense of our purpose.
The model as it stands now, presented in the previous (eleventh) blog post is based on the notion that our sense of purpose, that may evolve with life, is related to making a positive impact on the process of life using the talent, passion and compassion of each living being. I used the metaphor of the sun that provides us energy and inspiration, to explain purpose and the nine planets as the various aspects related to living purposefully. These aspects are related to each other through the space it resides in and I have a hunch that the space is the real thing. Continue reading “Purpose of Living – Part 12: Making Sense of our purpose – the space”→
We are not equal to our past; we are the resources we bring forth. Yes, the past is gone, we need to leave it where it belongs, and however we need to also take the resources from the past to energise our future.
We all started the past year with fresh hope for our families, our teams and ourselves. We planned to make the New Year the most spectacular year of all. Some of us were able to build on success and continuously improve to achieve and even surpass what we set out to achieve. Some others may have started off with great plans and found it fizzle off really fast.
The best we can do is to derive energy from the last year to gear up for a great 2015. This requires us building on the successes and take learning’s from areas that could have been better.
Given below is a few simple steps that can help you to gear up for an amazing 2014.
This can be done individually, as a family or with your team.
Leaving the Agora team was one of the toughest things I had to do. The words, tears, flowers and gifts from the teams in various outlets, office, warehouse and distribution centre was simply heart-warming. I never realized I had made such an impact in the hearts and minds of over 700 team members over the 3 years I led them as their CEO.
After being in Team and Leadership Excellence consulting for 10 years, subsequent to 16 years in corporate life for 16 years as Director for Keells Foods and Keells Super, I took on a new interesting challenge as the CEO of the Agora Supermarket Chain [owned by the highly diversified Rahimafrooz Group] in Bangladesh in July 2009.
This was a 3 year assignment to prepare the company for Rapid expansion. I took over this assignment for 3 reasons; Firstly because Agora was close to my heart as I helped start it as a consultant in 2001 and hence I considered Agora my own baby and I wanted it to be successful. Secondly because I wanted to validate the guidance I give so many companies around the world as a consultant, by being in the hot seat for a while. And thirdly because I respect the Rahimafrooz Group and the family that owns it for running a company driven by ‘Values’ using ‘world-class’ management methods.
My dream was to make Agora a world-class company, the pride of Bangladesh and I write this blog with a mix of emotions that include happiness, sadness, fear, pride and hope.
Firstly I am extremely happy that we together created a company with a positive work culture that was built on the ‘Ultimate Aspiration’, ‘Values’, ‘Agora Aponjon Promise’ [Aponjon is the Bangla word for ‘dear one’ or ‘near one’ and this is the promise we deliver to our ‘guests’ or ‘Aponjon’], quality policy, good leadership, supportive team work and passionate team members. We also made the company profitable building on this culture and taking measures to improve the brand image, value to our guests, business knowledge, planning and execution. We also invested in a brand new state of the art distribution centre, new outlets and a new ERP system [SAP and WINCOR NIXDOEF]. All this helped the company to become profitable for the first time in my first year in office and become a leading revenue and profit contributor of the Rahimafrooz Group [the group that owns Agora an many other companies] providing better benefits and promotional opportunities to Agora’s team members.
