Scaling with Purpose Kit: Purpose-Driven Leadership

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Zakash** (0:17)
Well, come back to The Bliss Business Podcast series Scaling with Purpose. I'm Stephen Zakash here with Tulio Siragusa. Hey, Tulio.

**Tulio Siragusa** (0:27)
Good to be back. Let's get it.

**Stephen Zakash** (0:29)
Let's do it. So these are short 10-minute shows on embedding purpose into every level of your organization to help guide growth and create meaningful impact. Today, we are exploring purpose-driven leadership. This is a critical topic for any organization looking to truly live by purpose. How can leaders embody the organization's purpose and inspires others to do the same? Let's dive in. So I love this topic because leadership plays such a crucial role in making purpose tangible. It's one thing to have the purpose statement, but it's something else to see that purpose in action through the behavior of leaders. Purpose-driven leadership. It's not just about words. It's about leading by example. You've got to model that behavior. You've got to get the ball rolling and hopefully keep it rolling with your teammates. Tulio, let's get into this.

**Tulio Siragusa** (1:27)
This is such a critical thing because it becomes the guide for even how leaders need to behave. So a leader's action, in fact, sets the tone for the entire organization. So it's the whole adage, walk the walk, live by example, set the example. So purpose-driven leaders not only articulate the company's purpose, but they live it daily. It's part of their decision-making process. It's how they communicate. It's how they interact with others. And they become the role models, the evangelists, the cadre for showing employees what it looks like to be in alignment and in actions along the lines of the purpose. So it is something that the leadership team needs to embody because they're sending the example for the rest of the organization.

**Stephen Zakash** (2:25)
Tulio, so what does purpose-driven leadership actually look like? What are we talking here?

**Tulio Siragusa** (2:30)
Well, there's three core principles to make this effective. One, you have to have clarity of purpose. So a purpose-driven leader has a deep understanding of the organization's purpose and can articulate it clearly and consistently.
So this is even more challenging if you're hiring someone from the outside into the organization, and perhaps they were in part of the process that defined the company's culture and the company's purpose. Now, they're basically learning, they're all saying when in Rome do as Romans, they have to learn this culture, what the company stands for, what its purpose is, and not just learn it, but like embody it. In fact, those hiring decisions should be made along the lines of making sure someone has gone to embody these things. The next thing, there has to be authenticity, right? So the behavior can't be an act. It has to align with the organization's values and purpose. Got to walk the walk.

**Stephen Zakash** (3:30)
So, like you said, when you're hiring, you've got to have, you want it to be authentic, right? So you've got to really dig in with who you're hiring and whether they fit your purpose.

**Tulio Siragusa** (3:41)
Right. It's not like it's not like fulfilling a role. It's you that that's not going to be authentic, right? And people will feel that it's got to be someone who that's their life. They believe in it so much. That's why they're joining the organization, because it actually aligns with who they are. So that's important. And then these leaders need to be inspirational, right? They actively inspire others by connecting with the purpose, connecting the purpose to the work that they're doing and on a daily basis. So it becomes like this cultural norm and those leaders are the evangelists for this culture, not just the evangelists. They're living it, they're embodying it, they're showing others how to embody it, and everything that they do has to align it, because otherwise you lose that authenticity. The one thing to add is that purpose-driven leaders are also very good listeners.
They're tuned in to the needs of their teams, they practice empathy to align with the individual's motivations and the organization's greater goals. So it's not like, let's get everybody in alignment to be cookie cutter drones and get this stuff. It's working with the individual's desires and aspiration and realigning them so that they get their personal fulfillment while also aligning to the company's goal. And that's not an easy task unless you have tremendous empathy for people and you want them to be successful. So it's not just about imposing purpose as it is really creating a space for everyone to connect with it. So that's their job is create a space to enroll people into purpose, not push people to purpose.