Is the pursuit of purpose the latest management fad? Nope. But it is getting more personal…
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.
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Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.
So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?
Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.
The limits of predicting from paper
Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.
This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.
The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.
What counts as evidence
Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.
A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.
Why simulation holds up where other methods do not
When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.
That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.
It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.
For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.
What this means for how organizations think about hiring
Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?
AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.
A few principles worth building from:
- Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
- Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
- Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.
The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.
You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.
La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.
A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.
En este artículo descubrirás:
- Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
- La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
- Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
- Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
- Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.
La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.
Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.
The lighthouse
Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.
Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.
The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.
There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.
Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?
Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.
It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.
Why jargon prevails
- Parking lot that
- Double-click
- Close the loop
Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.
Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.
Altitude without traction
Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.
A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.
A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.
The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.
The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.
In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.
The cost of comfort
When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.
KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.
The quiet power of saying what you mean
None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:
- What do I mean by it?
- What will my audience hear?
A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.
Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.
This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.