When leadership feels like a slog, the usual advice is about productivity and setting boundaries. This piece offers a different diagnosis - and a different way forward.
When leadership feels like a slog, the advice you'll find is remarkably consistent. Audit your calendar. Set better boundaries. Prioritise recovery. Stop answering emails after seven.
If you're a purpose-led founder or leader, you already know that's the wrong diagnosis.
The exhaustion you feel isn't a time-management problem. It's a problem with alignment. When your daily work has plenty of outward consequences - people depend on it, the responsibilities are real, the outcomes matter - but has lost its personal meaning, no amount of calendar auditing will fix it. You're not exhausted because you're doing too much. You're exhausted because the work has become disconnected from the reason you started doing it.
The psychologist William Damon defines purpose as an intention to accomplish something that is both meaningful to you and consequential for the world beyond you. I keep coming back to this definition because it explains so precisely what happens when leadership feels like a slog. The consequential part is still there - the responsibilities, the people who need you, the work that has to be done. What's gone missing is the meaningful part. The connection between the work and who you really are.
When both are present, the work sustains you - even through the hardest stretches. When the meaningful part goes missing, you feel it. Not as burnout exactly. As something hollower than that. The work is still important. You just can't remember why it matters to you.
Two Years of Slog
I know this feeling well.
As well as running The Purpose Company, I serve as Chair of Lancing Parish Council - England's largest village, with a population of 19,000 on the West Sussex coast. For two years, the role has been exactly the kind of slog I've just described. Firefighting and crisis management. Council politics and operational headaches. The work was consequential - people depended on it. But the meaningful part had gone missing. There were many times I thought about throwing in the towel.
If you've ever led something - a business, a team, a community organisation - through a period where every day felt like putting out fires, you'll recognise this feeling. The leadership itself isn't the problem. What's missing is the sense that it's leading somewhere that matters to you.
Purpose Shows Up in Many Ways
Purpose-led founders and leaders channel their purpose in different ways. Some are protecting the natural world and building more sustainable ways of living and working. Some are creating a fairer world - closing gaps in access, opportunity, and who gets to participate. Some are improving health and wellbeing - helping people thrive physically, mentally, and socially. And some are building the capacity for others to do this work.
There are so many different ways to bring your purpose alive through the work you do. The question, when leadership feels like a slog, is whether the work you're doing right now connects to any of them. You can read more about what entrepreneurial purpose looks like in practice on this website.
What Happened on Saturday Afternoon
Then something shifted.
We hosted a free public screening of the People's Emergency Briefing at the Parish Hall - a 50-minute film that communities and organisations across the UK are using to brief the public about the climate and nature crisis. It's based on a Westminster event, and screenings in village halls, cinemas, faith spaces, and workplaces are bringing people together to hear the evidence and considr what an emergency response should look like locally.
The hall was full. The local organisations on the panel had come with displays about their work, so that when we gathered afterwards in the community hub for coffee and homemade cake, people could learn about what's already happening in Lancing and find ways to get involved.
What struck me was the breadth and depth of what's being built right here: a regenerative community farm growing food for local people. A river trust restoring and protecting our waterways. A community group working on tree planting and canopy cover. Neighbourhood projects creating wildlife corridors, community gardens, and spaces where biodiversity can flourish. Practical, committed, grassroots work - being done by people who care deeply about the place they live.
For the first time in two years, both dimensions of Damon's definition were present at once.
The work was meaningful to me - connecting directly to the values formed during a trip to Kenya in my early twenties, where I saw first-hand the power of education to lift people out of poverty and the devastating impact of land degradation on the most vulnerable communities. That trip led to a Masters in International Development and a career-long commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals. Standing in the Parish Hall on Saturday afternoon, watching a room full of people ask what they could do about the climate crisis in their own community, I felt those values come alive in a way the previous two years hadn't allowed.
And it was consequential for the world beyond me. As Chair, I'm using the strategic capabilities I developed over eight years as a CEO to advance the things that matter most to me. Our strategic plan puts stewardship and conservation at the heart of everything the Council does. We're developing a community garden in partnership with Brighton Permaculture Trust and Sussex Wildlife Trust. We're supporting the regenerative community farm. Last year, we won a Gold medal for sustainability practices in the RHS South & South East in Bloom competition. This is what hope-centred strategy looks like in community leadership - the same methodology I bring to every client, applied at a different scale.
What the Slog Was Teaching Me
Saturday afternoon reminded me of something I see in my clients all the time. When the work you're doing connects to what genuinely matters to you - and when it's making a difference to the world around you - something clicks into place. You can handle the difficult stretches because your purpose is carrying you.
When leadership feels like a slog, it's easy to assume the problem is the leadership itself. That you need to step back, set boundaries, find balance. Sometimes that's true. But often the real problem is that the work has drifted away from what makes it meaningful - and the solution isn't less leadership. It's finding your way back to the purpose that drew you to it in the first place.
I nearly gave up on the Parish Council more times than I can count. Had I done so, I wouldn't have stood in that room on Saturday afternoon, led a showing of the People’s Emergency Briefing and felt everything come together.
If you're in one of those difficult stretches right now - where leadership feels like a slog and the purpose feels distant - I'd encourage you to stay with it. The moment when it all connects might be closer than you think.
And if you'd like to know how I facilitated the session - including my opening remarks and the approach I used - you can read the full story here.
Further Resources
The People's Emergency Briefing — free screenings for communities across the UK
William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (2008)
Related
Entrepreneurial Purpose: A Guide for Founders Building the Future They Want
Strategic Hope: The Methodology at the Heart of The Purpose Company
I work with purpose-led founders and leaders at every stage of growth. If this piece has sparked something - and you'd like to think about what it means for your business, I'd welcome a conversation.
