By Jennie McLaughlin and Sarah Rozenthuler
Purpose drift quietly drives disengagement, poor decisions and declining performance — and most organisations have no idea it’s happening.
Many leaders today feel exhausted, disengaged, and quietly questioning whether their roles are worth the cost. Jennie McLaughlin and Sarah Rozenthuler argue the real crisis is not burnout but purpose drift — the gap between an organisation’s stated purpose and how it actually makes decisions. McLaughlin, Founder of Purpose Led Transformation and former EY Partner, and Rozenthuler, a chartered psychologist and author of Powered by Purpose, draw on global research and years of work with boards and executive teams to show how embedding purpose as an operating discipline, not a statement, is becoming leadership’s most urgent task.
The burnout narrative has dominated leadership discourse for the better part of five years. Rightly so — the data is unambiguous. 75% of C-suite executives are seriously considering quitting for a job that would better support their wellbeing, higher than any other worker group including frontline employees. At least 4 in 10 say they always or often feel exhausted or stressed, and 73% cannot disconnect from work. Yet more than three in four of these same leaders believe their workforce’s health has improved — a perception the data does not support.
According to the 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025 — its second consecutive annual decline, and the lowest level since 2020. Gallup estimates that low engagement now costs the global economy some $10 trillion a year, equivalent to 9% of GDP. These are serious numbers. But they describe consequences, not causes. Engagement does not simply decline — something that once made work feel worthwhile erodes first.
The picture is consistent across geographies, sectors and organisation sizes. Capable leaders disengaging from roles they once found meaningful, executive pipelines thinning, and organisations struggling to sustain the leadership quality that strategy requires. Something structural is failing.
The misdiagnosis and its cost
The experience leaders describe is not primarily one of having too much to do, though that is real. It is one of not knowing what to do first — of operating without a reliable filter for what truly matters. When an organisation has not genuinely activated its purpose, leaders carry a persistent cognitive dissonance: expected to prioritise and inspire while having no reliable organisational basis for either. Everything presents as urgent because nothing has been made truly important. Time scarcity is the symptom. The absence of activated purpose is the cause.
Purpose drift rarely arrives as a crisis. It accumulates. An organisation launches its purpose with genuine conviction — a well-crafted statement, a leadership offsite, an internal communications campaign. And then the quarterly targets reassert themselves. Strategic decisions get made on financial grounds without reference to purpose. Hiring and performance criteria drift back to traditional metrics. The purpose statement remains on the wall and the website, but it has ceased to function as a filter for anything consequential.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the layer leaders most depend on to carry their intent into the organisation. According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, manager engagement has dropped from 31% to 22% between 2022 and 2025 — a nine-point slide that has stripped managers of the engagement premium they once held over the people they lead. Given that managers account for up to 70% of the variance in team engagement, this is not a contained problem. It compounds at every level beneath it.
The financial stakes are equally clear. Companies that genuinely align their business practices with a stated purpose grew median pre-tax profit by 31% in 2024. Those with purpose statements but no activation: 3%. The Top Employers Institute’s 2026 global research, drawing on data from 2,358 organisations, found that higher-performing organisations are 8% more likely to have deployed a purpose measurement scorecard — treating purpose not as a communications asset but as an operational discipline.
Purpose drift, in other words, is not just a leadership experience problem. It is a performance problem.
The discipline of activation
The distinction that matters is not between organisations that have a purpose and those that don’t. It is between those that have stated a purpose and those that have activated one. Activation is the harder, slower, less visible work — and it is precisely where most organisations stop short.
In our work mapping what genuine purpose activation looks like in practice, we have identified six distinct phases: Awaken, Act, Articulate, Align, Amplify, and Assure. The first three — awakening, committing, and crafting language — are the phases most organisations complete. The last three, where purpose becomes an active decision-making filter and an ongoing accountability discipline, are where momentum consistently stalls.
The Align phase is mostly a discipline of subtraction. It is where purpose moves from aspiration to infrastructure — shaping which projects get funded, which get stopped, who gets hired, and how performance is evaluated. One of our clients, a government organisation, conducted a full inventory of inflight projects at this stage, mapping each against purpose alignment. Over twelve months, they wound down 30% of projects. The result was not contraction — it was clarity. And clarity is precisely what will help time-poor leaders resolve the dissonance between urgency and importance that is quietly costing them their engagement.
The same logic, taken through all six phases, produces measurable commercial results. Kiwibank, the New Zealand state-owned bank, has grown its lending consistently faster than the market since activating its purpose in 2021 — organising around three externally focused Purpose Pillars, each with time-bound goals. CEO Steve Jurkovich is direct about the mechanism: “We get performance through purpose. Once we worked out what purpose really meant to us, it became a win-win — not a trade-off.”
The leadership question worth asking
The burnout crisis is real. But organisations that respond to it only at the level of individual wellbeing are missing the structural opportunity that the data presents. The question is not simply how to support leaders who are struggling. It is why so many capable, committed people are struggling to find meaning in organisations that claim to have a clear sense of purpose.
Answering that question honestly requires looking at the gap between purpose stated and purpose lived. In our experience, that gap tends to reveal itself quickly under direct inquiry. Three questions worth asking:
- Is our purpose an active filter in how we make decisions — or has it become a statement we point to rather than a discipline we practice?
- Can every leader in this organisation explain, in their own words, what our purpose means for the choices they make this week?
- When did we last make a decision that cost us something — commercially or politically — because it was the right thing to do for our purpose?
One senior leadership team we worked with described confronting these questions as a ‘rude awakening’ — the gap between their espoused purpose and their actual decision-making was wider than any of them had admitted. Facing it was uncomfortable. It was also the spur for some of the most consequential decisions the organisation had made.
Purpose is often described as a north star — a fixed point that gives direction and makes day-to-day work meaningful. It is also an anchor: the resource a leader reaches for when the environment is uncertain and the right course is not obvious. But only when it is genuinely activated. Purpose without follow-through is just wallpaper — it looks good, signals good intent, and then fades into the background while the real work carries on unchanged. When purpose becomes a lived reality rather than a corporate aspiration, people do more than perform. They endure, adapt, contribute and flourish. In a world where leadership itself is becoming harder to sustain, that may be the ultimate competitive advantage.
