Why Purpose Is Needed Right Now

Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry. 

The planet just experienced its warmest day ever. According to NASA, July 22nd was the hottest day on Earth, surpassing the previous all-time high recorded just a year ago in July of 2023. In the US, thousands of cities have hit new daily temperature records. Florida, Oregon, New Mexico, and Louisiana are among the states where temperatures have soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, causing transportation to slow, crops to die, and emergency-room visits for heat-related illnesses to increase significantly. 

In a recent statement, Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said that we are in uncharted territory. “As the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years,” he says.

As the planet warms, millions of lives and jobs will be impacted—even more than they have been already. How leaders respond will be one of the crucial factors in what comes next.

“The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today,” says Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. An influential voice in the world of systems change, Scharmer bucks the old idea that leadership is rooted in any one individual. Instead, he describes leadership as “a distributed or collective capacity in a system.” His research illuminates how an organization’s potential is connected to its ability to create conditions that allow a deeper alchemy to work, conditions that help leaders in a system to broaden and deepen their view of the system—to go from “me” to “we.””

This “we” mentality is core to the purpose movement. A Korn Ferry study of 3,871 senior executives and their direct reports found that a leadership style we call “visionary”—where the leader articulates a shared mission from the heart to the heart—creates the most positive climate, the optimal psychological space for people to do their best. This is the leader who looks at a mission as being a collective one—someone interested in leveraging the power of collaboration in order to benefit a larger society. This leader focuses on the future, offering inspiration through their vision of a reality that has yet to come into fruition.

If you look at all of the thousands of purpose statements among organizations of all types, you will see that many focus on what they want to avoid rather than what they want to create. Scharmer talks about successful leadership as an exercise in driving energy through attention. He encourages leaders and systems to stop focusing on what they don’t want and instead, focus on what they do want. “Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go,” says Scharmer.

This approach may be key to the climate crisis, where some of the greatest inhibitors to change are denial and despair—a refusal to see the problem, or a sense of hopelessness about our ability to impact it. Of the many things purpose-driven leadership requires—from emotional intelligence to clear communication—focused attention is close to the top. Being purpose-driven requires an acceptance of what is, combined with a strong eye on what might be possible—the meaningful change a company can create beyond an increase in the bottom line.

As companies are experiencing the pressure to be “future ready”—to cultivate adaptability and build resilience by looking at how their projects, infrastructure, and community will hold up against the effects of a warming planet—purpose-driven leadership is becoming more and more of an imperative. The “we” mentality is central to figuring out where science, technology, and economics converge around a central purpose to save the planet. 

Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon

Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.