Purpose Under Pressure | Leadership for the For Purpose Economy

In the first article, I argued that the real task of for-purpose leadership is to hold impact and commercial viability together, not to balance them. This article asks the harder question: who actually holds it?

The response to the first article told me something. The idea that resonated most was not the emergence of a new kind of leader, welcome as that recognition was. It was the smaller, more stubborn point underneath it. That purpose and viability are not balanced, they are held, in tension, continuously, by leaders willing to live inside the discomfort.

Which raises the question the first article left open. Who holds it?

The easy answer is the CEO. It is also the wrong one. No chief executive, however bilingual, however emotionally intelligent, holds a tension like that alone for long. They may carry it, but carrying is not the same as holding, and carrying alone is exactly how the best of them burn out. The tension is held by two hands, not one. It is held in the relationship between the Board and the CEO. That relationship, not the individuals in the chairs, is the load-bearing structure of a for-purpose organisation. And like the leader it supports, it must be built deliberately.

The relationship is the structure

Consider what happens when the relationship is weak. A cautious board and a bold CEO, as I put it last time, is a failure waiting to happen. The leader reaches for change and finds no backing, and either they are neutered or they leave. A dominant board that manages rather than governs smothers the leader until nothing moves without permission. A passive, rubber-stamp board offers no real challenge, so blind spots go unnamed until they become crises. A disengaged board leaves the CEO alone with the whole weight of the tension.

In every one of those cases, the tension snaps toward one pole. The organisation drifts from its mission, or it drifts toward financial demise. Not because the CEO was weak or the directors were ill-intentioned, but because the relationship could not hold the load. Get the relationship right and the same tension becomes productive, even generative. Get it wrong and no amount of individual talent will save you.

A two-way street: what the Board owes the CEO

The relationship is a two-way street, and it is worth being specific about the traffic in both directions.

What the Board owes the CEO begins with something deceptively simple, the conditions to lead with clarity and courage. That means authority that matches the risk you are asking them to carry. It is unfair, and unfortunately common, to hand a leader responsibility for transformation while withholding the mandate to transform. It means challenging hard inside the boardroom and then backing the decision decisively outside it, rather than letting doubt leak into the organisation. It means measuring and reporting in a way that helps the leader lead, not reporting that simply keeps them busy. It means removing barriers rather than adding them, taking succession and wellbeing seriously rather than assuming resilience is infinite, and resisting the urge to second-guess every call.

Underneath all of it sits a question every board should be asking itself. Are we creating the conditions for our CEO and team to succeed, or are we quietly making the job harder than it needs to be? A set of board questions circulating recently put the principle well. Strong leadership does not happen by accident, it is shaped by boards that behave as stewards, not spectators. Stewardship is active. It asks what the board needs to understand better about the pressures its leaders face, what conversations it is avoiding, and what it would hear if its people could speak to it directly. Spectating is comfortable. It is also how good leaders are lost.

A two-way street: what the CEO owes the Board

Traffic runs the other way too, and this is the half leaders more often forget. A board can only govern as well as the CEO allows it to.

What the CEO owes the Board is, above all, the ability to govern with foresight rather than hindsight. That means radical transparency and no surprises, the difficult numbers surfaced early rather than managed quietly until they can no longer be. It means making the trade-offs visible.When a decision advances the mission at a cost to viability, or protects viability at a cost to the mission, the board should see that choice clearly, not discover it later. It means bringing the board along, treating directors as people to be educated and engaged, not merely reported to. A board that only ever sees polished papers cannot offer the constructive challenge the organisation needs, and a CEO who withholds the messy reality is, however unintentionally, disarming their own best source of support.(Given the onerous requirements and personal liability of being a Director, polished papers, legally worded, become the norm to avoid potential liability.)

It also means extending psychological safety upward. We talk a great deal about leaders making it safe for their people to name problems. The same must be true between the CEO and the Chair. The leader who can walk into the board and say, this is not working and here is what worries me, is building the exact trust that lets the relationship hold weight when it matters most.

Culture, not just structure

All this rests on culture more than structure. Terms of reference and delegation of authority matter, but they do not create trust, candour or shared purpose. Three things do.

The first is role clarity: a genuine, respected line between governing and managing, so the board can challenge without meddling, and the CEO can lead without looking over their shoulder.

The second is a shared language: In the first article I described the bilingual leader, fluent in both purpose and commerce. The board needs to be bilingual too, or the two sides end up talking past each other, one speaking mission while the other speaks money.

The third, and the rarest: is a shared appetite for the tension itself. A board and a CEO who both accept that impact and viability will pull against each other, permanently, and who treat that as the normal condition of the work rather than a fault to be blamed on one another, can hold almost anything. A board and a CEO who keep expecting the tension to resolve will eventually turn it on each other.

Questions for the boardroom

If it helps, here are the questions I would put in front of any for-purpose board:

•Are we giving our leader the authority to match the risk we are asking them to carry?

•Do we challenge inside the room and support outside it, or have we let that reverse?

•Is our reporting helping our leader see around the corner, or just keeping them busy?

•What are we not talking about that our leader needs us to?

•Are we preparing this organisation for the future, or protecting its past?

•Would our CEO feel safe telling us the one thing they are most worried about?

•Would our Board feel safe telling the CEO the one thing they are most worried about?

From holding to delivering

The new leader as described in the first article does not emerge in a vacuum. They emerge, or they are quietly extinguished, inside this relationship. A board that gets it right becomes the single greatest multiplier of the leadership the sector now needs. A board that gets it wrong will keep wondering why it cannot find or keep good CEOs, never quite seeing that the problem was never only the person in the CEO role.

But relationship and good intent, however strong, are not results. Holding the tension well is the condition for delivery, not delivery itself. The third and final article in this series turns to exactly that, the job of delivering under this new style of leadership, and what it takes to convert a strong Board and CEO relationship into real impact and real commercial outcomes on the ground.

Dr Myron Mann

Founding Partner, Innovation Impact Group Pty Ltd

July 2026