Even before the pandemic struck, “purpose” had become a watchword in business. Thanks in large part to pressure from younger employees seeking to work in places with meaning and from investors increasingly worried about climate change and sustainability in general, organizations have for a few years at least been talking about a purpose beyond simply making a profit. A key step in this becoming more mainstream was the statement by the Business Roundtable group of leading U.S. companies that stakeholder value should no longer be the key focus of corporate activity. But, with the coronavirus bringing about fundamental changes in how everybody lives and works and in many people’s attitudes, there is increasing pressure to turn the talk into action.

Only today, Given, an agency that has been helping companies develop purpose-driven brands for some years, launched an “insider’s guide to purpose.” Earlier this month, a book attempted to set out what this focus means for leadership. Written by Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of the consumer electronics retailer Best Buy (one of the signatories of that 2019 Business Roundtable statement), The Heart of Business describes how the company was turned around by such initiatives as pursuing a noble purpose, putting people at the center, embracing all stakeholders and treating profit as an outcome rather than an end in itself. Along the way, Joly, who stepped down from the chair of Best Buy last June, having passed on the CEO baton the year before, also describes his own transformation from ambitious, hard-driving consultant and young executive into a more thoughtful and considered leader.

Indeed, the role of leadership in the drive towards purpose-driven business is a key element in the book. Joly, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, believes that what this new reality requires is “a style of leadership that puts purpose and people first.” What he calls “purposeful leadership” has five key elements.

1. Be clear about your purpose, the purpose of the people around you and how it connects with the purpose of the company. Joly argues that the pandemic has prompted many business leaders to step up their efforts, seeing the crisis as a “key moment for them to be clear about their purpose and connect it to their company’s.” They knew, he adds, that their performance at this time would be judged by how the company and its leadership were fulfilling a higher purpose and looking after multiple stakeholders rather than whether they were meeting financial targets.
2. Be clear about your role as leader. Joly points out that leaders cannot control all events or choose the circumstances in which they find themselves (like a pandemic), but they can control their mindset. This, he says, “determines whether you generate hope, inspiration and energy around you — or bring everyone down.”
3. Be clear about whom you serve. Leaders, he says, need to avoid the traps set by power, fame, glory and money. Instead, they should focus on serving the people on the front lines, driving the business. “You serve your colleagues. You serve your board of directors. You serve the people around you, first by understanding what they need to give their best, so you can do your best to support them.”
4. Be driven by values. On paper, he says, every company has great values. “But values are no good if they remain on paper. Being driven by values is doing right, not just knowing or saying what is right. A leader’s role is to live by these values, explicitly promote them and make sure they are part of the fabric of the business.”
5. Be authentic. Authenticity is a word much bandied about in leadership circles these days. But it is one thing to adopt it in a glib fashion, quite enough to be properly authentic. Joly himself says it was the hardest of his five principles to adopt. “Like many leaders of my generation, I long believed that emotions were not meant to be shared in a business context,” he writes, adding that it took him a lifetime to embrace the idea of being himself, particularly the notion of vulnerability. He suggests that the pandemic — with leaders and employees alike working from home and communicating via technology — has changed the idea of trying to balance work and life in the traditional sense. “We really brought our whole selves to work, including children, dogs and cats,” he writes. “Our humanity was never more apparent.”

As with other aspects of working life in the wake of the pandemic — such as not having to be in the office to be productive — now that even leaders have shown they have a hinterland there is no going back, even if many more people than is currently expected end up returning to offices. Employees will expect their leaders to be human. The new generation of leaders is likely to grasp this more intuitively and naturally, but for now existing leaders will have to be prepared to show their vulnerability, including acknowledging that they may not have all the answers. That really is a shift from the old idea of the super-hero leader.