Your organization has a purpose problem. Here’s what to do about it.
In the fast-paced world of 2023, your employees’ attention spans rival that of a TikTok video.
With extreme weather events and economic uncertainty becoming daily companions, organizations face an uphill battle in maintaining employee engagement. Your employees find themselves at their desks questioning – why am I here? What is my purpose? Does this organization truly care about my present and future?
This disillusionment deepens when employees fail to see themselves represented in the organization’s leadership ranks. This is a problem – when diversity is lacking, leadership inadvertently creates a hierarchy that benefits those who resemble them, leaving many feeling like there’s no path to success.
Similarly, as employees struggle to stay engaged, feeling unseen and underrepresented, it becomes impossible for leaders to dismantle siloes and move the needle forward. Inspiring cross-functional collaboration or brokering transformation becomes inconceivable when employees don’t even feel connected to their place of work.
Feeling overwhelmed? You’re not alone. This is a leadership challenge that requires organizations to tap into purposeful leadership. Purposeful leadership is the key to enabling your leaders to inspire long-term organizational sustainability, create diversity and safety, and pave the way forward.
But what is purposeful leadership?
Purposeful leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all model or concept; it’s a cultural shift rooted in leaders’ strengths, values and vision. It aligns leaders’ actions with the organization’s soul, strategy, and brand.
Here are the three essential elements of successful, purposefully led organizations:
1. Value-driven decision-making
Tapping into purposeful leadership allows leaders to be more agile and continue making decisions amid rapidly changing conditions. Rather than waiting to have all the facts and data, purposeful leaders rely on their values to make the right call and illuminate the path forward. For example:
- Environmental responsibility: A CEO of a major corporation decides to invest in sustainable and eco-friendly practices, even if it initially costs more, because they believe in the long-term value of protecting the environment.
- Employee well-being: A leader champions flexible work hours and work-life balance, valuing employee well-being over immediate profits.
- Ethical response: During crises, leaders prioritize employee and stakeholder safety, even if it entails short-term financial setbacks.
2. Stakeholder orientation
Purposeful leaders are guided by a strong moral compass and advocate for betterment, change and progress. They remain focused on the needs of employees, customers, shareholders, and society with every decision. At times, value-based decisions may seem at odds with profitability and efficiency, but purposeful leaders stay the course. They recognize that the decision that is best for society, employees, and customers is better for shareholders in the long-term. For example:
- Workplace safety: A manufacturing company invests in safety measures, putting employees’ health first.
- Quality products: An organization focuses on high-quality offerings, believing customer satisfaction leads to long-term success.
- Supply chain transparency: An organization maintains transparency in its supply chain, aligning with socially-conscious consumers.
3. Long-term sustainability
Value-based decision making helps purposeful leaders to generate long-term sustainability. They avoid quick fixes and guide others to see a vision for the future that has a much higher return decades into the future. For example:
- Renewable energy investments: A utility company heavily invests in renewable energy, ensuring a sustainable and profitable future.
- Training and skill building: A company prioritizes continuous employee training, seeing it as essential for long-term competitiveness.
- Innovation: A technology company allocates resources to innovation and long-term technological advancement, securing its position as a market leader.
With the desire to get the most from their leaders, inspire future-forward thinking, and retain and engage employees, many organizations try to make the shift towards purposeful leadership by leaning on safe, conventional approaches. However, true transformation requires more than just a few individual leaders to buy in. Across the business, all leaders need to be introspective, deeply connected to their role and purpose, and aligned with the organization’s mission.
Making this shift requires a significant intervention that touches leaders at multiple levels, encourages exploration, and fuels authentic growth. While this scale of intervention may seem daunting, the reward is worth the work. Adoption of purposeful leadership at scale is what will enable your organization to transform lives and leave an indelible mark on the future. Don’t wait for the next wave of change – now is the time to unlock the potential of purposeful leadership and transform your organization for the better.
Related content
Related content
From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.