By Marcus Wylie
If you’re looking to drive meaningful change in your organisation, it begins with your leadership. Marcus Wylie explores how aligned and energised leaders can set the tone for collective success, building trust, connection, and purpose that reach beyond strategy and inspire real progress across teams and the wider business.Â
In today’s fast-changing global business climate, the concept of achieving together has never been more critical. Achieving together is about harnessing the power of collective effort to reach new heights and create a more positive and impactful outcome for everyone involved. A study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) revealed that organisations enabling precise team collaboration experience a 39% increase in productivity.
However it all starts with the leadership team. The latest Gallup State of the Global Workplace report has found that manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27% last year. Worryingly, a striking 70% of team engagement is directly linked to the manager, meaning when leaders are disillusioned, the impact on team morale, cohesion, and progress is immediate.
Leadership is the lever. If your senior team isn’t aligned around vision and purpose, the disconnect is visible everywhere – from confused messaging to disheartened teams and missed opportunities for innovation. On the flipside, when leaders are energised, united and leading with purpose, they become the catalyst for widespread, sustainable change.
This idea is central theme of our Insights Global Leadership Meeting this month in Manchester, UK. At its heart lies the understanding that greater success is possible when leaders are truly inspired around a common goal. That might sound simple, but in practice it demands intention, investment, and a rethink of how we lead.
Foster a community of global leaders
Leadership isn’t a solo pursuit. Organisations need to foster environments where global leaders connect on a human level – sharing space to learn, laugh, reflect, and realign. These moments of genuine connection build trust and enable leadership teams to truly co-create a shared vision which can be rolled out across the company. When leaders are visibly aligned in purpose and values, their authenticity sets the tone and inspires others across the organisation to follow their lead.
In today’s increasingly borderless business world, it’s essential to create opportunities for connection beyond just the local office. That means putting the right platforms and tools in place to enable collaboration and growth on a global scale. Last year, our focus at Insights was on energising together, ensuring our rollout of new tools was complete and fully supporting our aim of achieving together.
Too often leaders are expected to keep giving while running on empty. By intentionally creating space for leaders to recharge: through retreats, peer groups, or global gatherings, organisations give their leaders the opportunity to return to their teams re-energised.
In-person meetings remain particularly valuable; spending time with peers from around the world brings a joy and energy that simply can’t be replicated virtually. While it may require greater investment, we’ve found bringing global leaders together pays dividends.
Align strategy with people through sharing stories
Strategic alignment means ensuring that plans reflect the values, aspirations, and lived experiences of your people. It is achieved through continuous listening, honest evaluation, and a willingness to adapt. When organisations ground their direction in human understanding, they build genuine momentum.
At our Global Leadership Meetings, we bring together insights from our Engagement Survey, customer feedback, and 360 input from leaders’ direct reports. These sources help us shape a strategy that reflects what our people are saying, what our customers need, and how we are showing up as leaders.
People don’t connect with spreadsheets – they connect with stories. Real, human stories from customers, teams, and leaders create emotional resonance with purpose, products, and each other. It gives meaning to our work, revealing the real-world impact of our tools, and helping strategy become something people can believe in.
Having our customers in the room – sharing what inspires them and how they experience us – is invaluable for bringing our vision to life and enabling us to achieve together.
Lean into the hard stuff with awareness
It is all too easy for issues to be swept under the carpet in any organisation, creating division, eroding trust, and ultimately working against the spirit of achieving together. Brave leadership means tackling difficult issues head-on, even when they’re uncomfortable and allowing conflict to be a vessel for growth.
Bringing our leadership teams together isn’t just about ideation, connection, and celebration – though those are crucial of course. It also creates space for constructive challenge and collective problem-solving. These gatherings become a vital forum to address unspoken concerns and troubleshoot potential issues before they escalate.
At the heart of this must be self-awareness. Investing in understanding ourselves and others is the bedrock of strong leadership. It allows us to have honest dialogue with people who lead with different personality types and approach tough conversations with empathy.
Whether it’s through building emotional intelligence or leading the energy conversation across an organisation, self-awareness helps leaders recognise unhelpful patterns and replace them with positive, sustainable ones. It enables them to model from the top, push creative boundaries and bring people on board.
From vision to reality – the ripple effect
To create the future we aspire to, organisations need communities of champions; people who are not just aligned with the vision, but who embody it. That starts with leadership. The most impactful leaders today are those who empower others to help co-create the future, rather than dictating it from above.
Leadership must now be seen not as hierarchy, but as community. One that inspires passion through authentic connection to products, people, and purpose. When leaders put conscious and sustained effort into achieving together, the ripple effect is real – teams feel it, customers sense it, and the organisation moves forward with clarity and momentum.
