Today's Digest is a 4 minute-read

Purpose is having a difficult moment. Companies that once made bold social commitments are retreating as performance pressure, political hostility and employee scepticism expose the gap between what organisations say and how they operate.

This Digest asks what remains when the slogans fall away. Katie Jacobs examines whether organisational purpose still has a future and what makes it credible. Erika Clegg looks at why carefully crafted values so often fail to shape behaviour. Rob Cross takes the question closer to home, exploring why career success can still leave people wondering whether their lives are being spent rather than fully lived.

Across all three stories runs the same challenge: purpose only carries weight when it influences choices, behaviour and the way people use their time...

1. Purpose has to earn its place

Organisational purpose is under pressure. Political hostility towards ESG and DEI has combined with tougher commercial conditions to push many leadership teams back towards performance, productivity and profit. Companies are also facing growing scepticism from employees who have watched confident public commitments quietly disappear when circumstances changed.

The signal: Unilever once represented the ambition of purpose-led business. Former chief executive Alan Jope said in 2019 that brands without purpose had “no long-term future” at the company. Four years later his successor Hein Schumacher described purpose as an “unwelcome distraction” for some brands and suggested that sustainability investment may have diluted performance.

The shift captures a broader reassessment. Alison Taylor, clinical associate professor at NYU Stern School of Business, believes purpose has “collapsed under the weight of its own not very convincing PR”. Some organisations promised more than they could deliver while others never moved purpose beyond a marketing exercise.
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Signs of retreat are visible elsewhere. Observer analysis found that mentions of climate change in FTSE 100 annual reports had fallen by nearly 20% since 2022 while references to net zero had dropped by almost 30%.

Why it matters: A backlash against performative purpose is healthy when it forces leaders to examine whether their claims bear any relationship to the business. Pulling back from every commitment as soon as the political or economic climate changes creates another problem: employees learn that stated principles apply only when they are convenient.

Purpose can still support performance when it helps people make decisions. David Collings, professor of sustainable business at Trinity College Dublin, tracked 50 CHROs during the pandemic and found that organisations with a strong sense of purpose were better able to act at speed. It gave leaders a reference point when there was no established playbook.

The evidence linking purpose directly to financial performance remains weaker. That makes commercial relevance essential. Neil Morrison, group HR and communications director at Severn Trent, argues that purpose needs to be tied to what the organisation exists to do and how it creates value.

What’s really going on: HR can help leaders distinguish between purpose used in external messaging, the promise made to employees and the operating discipline used to guide choices.

That discipline becomes visible in ordinary decisions. Julia Mixter of housing association Saxon Weald asks whether a trade operative should complete more plumbing jobs or spend an extra 10 minutes talking to a lonely older customer. Neither choice is automatically right. A credible purpose helps the employee understand which outcome the organisation values and how to handle the trade-off.

The same test applies to bigger decisions about AI, restructuring or withdrawing from a market. Leaders should be able to explain how purpose influenced the choice rather than attaching purpose language after the decision has already been made.

Values then become important because they translate purpose into expected behaviour. They also reveal quickly whether the organisation is prepared to hold people accountable when those expectations become inconvenient.

The leadership question: Which recent business decision was materially changed by your organisational purpose? If leaders cannot identify one then the purpose may still be sitting above the business rather than operating inside it.
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👉 Read Katie Jacobs’ full article for The People Space on the purpose backlash and what credible organisational purpose now demands from leaders: Does organisational purpose have a future? 5-minute read

2. When values become junk food

If purpose is the reason an organisation exists and the discipline shaping how it operates then values should tell people how to act along the way. Yet many companies have values that sound impeccable and influence almost nothing.

The signal: Leadership and cultural transformation adviser Erika Clegg calls these ‘junk values’: familiar words such as respect, integrity, collaboration and diversity that appear nourishing but provide very little practical guidance.

The problem is that single-word values often fail because each person can interpret them differently. Ask 10 leaders to define ‘passion’ or ‘respect’ and you are likely to receive 10 interpretations. Employees are then left to work out for themselves which behaviours count and whether the values carry any weight when commercial pressure rises.

This is becoming harder for employers to ignore. Research from Co-operatives UK in 2025 found that 61% of young workers place as much importance on an employer’s values, including its environmental and social commitments, as they do on pay. Some 42% had considered leaving a role because the organisation lacked sufficient purpose or strong values while 40% had rejected or avoided employers they considered unethical.

Why it matters: Values can provide a practical framework for decisions where the right answer is unclear. They can help organisations recruit people who will thrive, make expectations of leaders explicit and create greater consistency across teams.

Generic language cannot do that work. Values need to reflect the organisation’s purpose, ambitions, challenges and way of operating. A logistics company should not sound like a charity and a technology business should not sound like a family-owned manufacturer. Language that could sit on any company wall is unlikely to shape what happens inside a particular one.

What’s really going on: Many organisations have confused producing a values statement with building a values-led culture. The words have been consulted on, approved and placed on the website. The tougher work begins when leaders must use them to decide who gets promoted, what performance is rewarded and which commercial compromises they will refuse to make.

Employees watch those choices far more closely than they read the values page. Every exception teaches them which principles are real and which are ornamental.

The leadership question: Where can employees see your values carrying genuine consequences? Look at a recent recruitment, promotion, reward or strategic decision. Could you explain clearly how the values shaped the outcome?

👉 Read Erika Clegg’s full article to discover how organisations can replace junk values with principles people can recognise and use Your company values are perfect. So why does nobody care? 4-minute read

3. When success stops feeling like enough

So if values reveal whether organisational purpose is real then the next question is more personal. What happens when employees begin asking whether their own lives and careers still feel meaningful?

The signal: Leadership coach and author Rob Cross describes a ‘perpetual life crisis’: a persistent sense that life is being spent rather than fully lived. It can emerge at any age and often appears when a person’s career, finances and family life look successful from the outside.

Someone may achieve the promotion they have worked towards for years and then find the satisfaction fades far more quickly than expected and attention moves to the next milestone. Then the question begins to surface: is this it?

Cross traces this questioning back to three deceptively simple prompts:

• Who am I?
• Why am I here?
• How will I live?

The first separates identity from job title and status. The second asks what contribution someone wants to make through their work, relationships and choices. The third turns reflection into action by examining where time and attention are actually going.

Why it matters: Questions of identity and fulfilment inevitably enter the workplace. They influence motivation, career decisions, wellbeing and whether someone can still imagine a future with the organisation.

Traditional development conversations often concentrate on the next role, capability gap or promotion. Someone may be performing well while privately wondering whether the path itself still makes sense. A bigger job will rarely resolve that uncertainty.

What’s really going on: Busyness can conceal career drift for years. Capable people keep delivering, meeting expectations and accumulating achievements without pausing to decide whether those achievements still matter to them.

Organisations also need to be careful about the promise of purpose. Work can provide contribution, connection and growth. Expecting an employer to carry someone’s entire identity and sense of meaning places an impossible burden on both sides.

The leadership question: Do your career and development conversations give people space to explore who they are becoming and the contribution they want to make? Leaders do not need to supply the answers. They can create the conditions in which better questions are safe to ask.

👉 Read Rob Cross’s full article on why the perpetual life crisis is becoming an issue for careers, leadership and employee wellbeing The perpetual life crisis: why success at work no longer feels like enough 5-minute read

Find your purposeful space!

Siân

Editorial director, The People Space​

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