How Finding My Purpose Changed Everything About How I Lead

I spent over twenty years not leading on purpose. I was good at the job, I climbed, and I still could not have told you why I was doing any of it. If you lead other leaders, my story is worth two minutes of your time, because the same gap I had is sitting somewhere in your management layer right now.

Have you ever stopped to think about doing something on purpose? Most of us hear that phrase and think about being intentional. There is more to it than that, especially when you are trying to build a team that performs because it knows why it exists.

For me, purpose and authenticity turned out to be the same thing. Finding my own purpose was a long piece of self-discovery, and until I did, I was constantly grappling with who I was and what I was actually for. Here is my story, in the hope it prompts you to look at your own, and at the people you lead.

It started when I left the military and travelled through Asia. I had always wanted to make a difference, and I decided the way to do it was to become the CEO of a large company. If you are in charge, I reasoned, you have the greatest influence over an organisation and its people.

So I spent a decade working my way up, and eventually landed a role as a General Manager, on track for the executive team. From the outside it looked like success. Inside, each day I put on a suit of armour and went into battle, never quite feeling I was being true to myself. I worked hard and still struggled to get the results I wanted, and the work brought me little joy.

By 2017 I was deeply unhappy despite having all the trappings of success. The waterfront house, the cars, the toys. I was running on willpower, close to burnout, and the harder I pushed the less I seemed to achieve. I had also realised something that shook my plan. Even the CEO is not really in charge of the organisation. The purpose I had built my identity around was gone, and I had not yet found the real one.

So I made a dramatic change. I left the GM role, packed up, and went back to basics to work out how I could make a difference with the experience I had. It was painful to let go of the things that had become my identity. It was also the moment the real work started.

During that reflection I realised my purpose was to make a difference, but not from the corner office. Twelve months later, while travelling through Latin America, some organisations I knew asked me to help them build leadership programmes and run workshops. My background in neuroleadership, facilitation, my MBA and my time as a corporate GM made me a good fit, and that is when I started supporting leaders seriously.

What I found was consistent. Team after team was falling short of its potential, and the barrier was rarely skill. It was a lack of trust and connection. Teams were shielding themselves from each other, new leaders had inherited groups they did not yet understand, strategies had shifted, and nobody was quite sure who did what. The ambition was huge and the performance was flat.

So I started asking a simple question. What if I could show these teams how to have the conversations that actually change how they work together? Lower the stress, rebuild the trust, and the performance follows. That question became my purpose and my business. And it is the same question I would put to you about your own management layer.

What this means for the leaders you lead

My twenty years of drift were not caused by a lack of ability. They were caused by chasing a purpose that was not mine. The same thing is almost certainly happening to some of your managers right now. Capable people, working hard, unclear on why, quietly heading for the same wall I hit.

You cannot hand someone their purpose. You can create the conditions where they find it, and you can notice the ones running on willpower before they burn out. That is not a soft nicety. It is how you keep your best leaders, and how you turn flat performance into a team that moves because it knows what it is for.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.