An article on the new kind of leadership rising across the for-purpose sector, at Board and Executive level, and what it will take to recognise it, back it, and let it lead.

A different kind of leader is emerging in the for-purpose sector, and if you know where to look, you can already see them.

You will find them in the rooms where the sector now gathers, naming commercial reality out loud without surrendering an ounce of mission. They are not waiting to be rescued; they are rebuilding. They speak a language the old model rarely taught, purpose and viability, in the same sentence, without apology.

This series is about them. Part One is the story of why they have appeared now, and the pressure that forged them. Part Two is who they are. Part Three is the harder question: whether boards, and the rest of us, are ready to recognise this leadership, back it, and let it lead.

Part One — The Turn: Two Logics, One Organisation

To understand the new leader, you must understand the pressure that produced them, because this leadership did not appear by accident. It was forged.

For most of its history, the for-purpose sector was organised around a single idea: do the good that government and the market would not. Organisations existed to serve a mission, and money was the means, whether raised, granted, or scraped together, to keep that mission alive. Commercial viability was rarely the point. For many, it was barely a conversation.

Those days are over. The days of not-for-profits running large surpluses and accumulating property on the balance sheet are in the past. Government funding, community grants and public fundraising have become more targeted, less flexible and far more demanding. At the same time, the cost of running an organisation is higher than it has ever been.

The organisations that feed families, support people with disability, look after the elderly, house the homeless and hold communities together are now being asked to do something the old model never prepared them for: be commercially disciplined and mission-driven, at the same time, under sustained financial strain. Demand is rising, funding is tightening, and costs are climbing. The Australian Charities Report puts total sector revenue at just over $200 billion, but expenses have been outstripping income growth, and staffing costs recorded their sharpest annual rise on record. The HLB Mann Judd Not-for-profit Leader’s Report (2026) found leaders naming cost pressures, external uncertainty and financial sustainability as their three biggest barriers and concluded that strategy across the sector has shifted from optimisation to something more defensive: protecting people, purpose and viability. Nearly two-thirds of leaders said they had been forced into difficult strategic choices in the past year.

This is the reality, and it lands differently depending on where an organisation began.

Not-for-profits and social enterprises are not the same animal. “Not-for-profit” is essentially a tax status, not a business model. Most NFPs were born of cause, with purpose foremost and commercial capability an afterthought. Many still carry a founder, family or mission dominated culture in which strategy means tweaking the current operating model rather than rethinking it. Social Enterprises grew up differently. They emerged because for-purpose organisations recognised they needed to become commercially viable businesses to fund their mission. A Social Enterprise is hybrid by birth: purpose and commerce braided together from day one. Social Traders’ analysis suggests there are some 12,000 social enterprises in Australia, contributing roughly $16 billion to the economy and reinvesting billions into impact each year. Proof that the model works at scale. Social Enterprises also opened the sector’s conversation about measuring impact and even measuring a social return on investment (SROI). Social Enterprise is a different way of solving complex community problems that government and corporates are generally unwilling to tackle, and impact investors are increasingly looking to fund it.

The distinction matters because it tells each cohort what its hard problem is. For the NFP, the challenge is retrofitting commercial capability onto a charitable foundation that was never engineered to carry it. In other words, changing the business model. For the Social Enterprise, the challenge is guarding and scaling the commercial engine without letting it pull the organisation away from the people it exists to serve. If purpose is truly embedded in the commercial operations, scaling does not have to conflict with mission. Different starting points; the same destination. Both must now hold purpose and viability together.

That “holding together” is the whole game, and it is worth being precise about why it is so hard. The academic literature on hybrid organisations is blunt: when an organisation runs on two logics, a social logic and a commercial one, those logics compete for attention, resources and identity. Push too far toward commerce and you risk mission drift: beneficiaries quietly become customers, the easy revenue crowds out the hard mission, and one day the organisation no longer recognises itself. Retreat too far into purpose and ignore the numbers and you risk mission failure: the slow insolvency of the well-intentioned. Both still happen across the sector. But a growing number of leaders are proving that neither is inevitable.

Here is the truth that should shape everything that follows: “balance” is the wrong word. Balance implies a stable midpoint you can reach and rest at. There is no such point. Purpose and viability pull against each other continuously, and the leader’s task is not to resolve the tension but to hold it, productively, deliberately, every quarter, without falling off either edge. The organisations that will still be standing in a decade are not the ones that picked a side. They are the ones that built the leadership, the systems, the frameworks and the governance to live inside the tension. That capability, it turns out, is exactly what is now emerging.

This is where the strain shows, and where the story turns. Holding two logics at once is a profoundly different job from the one most for-purpose CEOs were hired to do. For some, the weight of it is breaking them. But for a growing number, it is the making of them. The very pressure that threatens the old model is forging a new kind of leader equal to it.

Part Two — The New CEO: A Leadership Coming of Age

You can see it most clearly in the rooms where the sector now gathers. Disability employment is a telling example. It is a sector in genuine difficulty: in our own interviews at 2ig with the leaders of disability enterprises across the country, more than half reported running at a loss, a position no mission can sustain for long. And yet it is precisely here that the new leadership is most visible. At SHIFT 2026 and the recent Disability Employment Australia conference, the tenor of the conversation had changed. CEOs spoke openly about commercial fragility rather than guarding it. Benchmarking and candour were displacing competitive secrecy; survival, it turns out, is a stronger instinct than the fear of competition. The language had moved from “care” to real jobs and real outcomes, and the agenda with it. Leaders were no longer asking for more money for individual participants but for systems change at scale: new pricing models, outcome-based funding, new pathways, a redesign of the model itself and investment in real structural change. Mergers, long rare in this sector, are rising, and there are now Australian examples worth studying. This is not a sector being told to change. It is a sector beginning to change itself, and a new kind of leader is the one doing the changing.

It takes real courage to stand in front of your peers and name your own organisation’s fragility. That courage is the first marker of the new leadership, and it deserves to be recognised before anything else is asked of it.

The emergence is uneven, and it is important to say so. In those same interviews, it is roughly the top third of providers who are actively rebuilding their business model, while others are still hoping the system will save them. That unevenness is not a simple story of good leaders and bad ones. Funding, scale and the communities an organisation serves all shape what is possible, and the system has under-resourced this work for a long time. But within those constraints, leadership is the variable that most often separates the organisations finding a way forward from those waiting for a rescue that is not coming. What we are watching, in these rooms, is a generation of for-purpose leadership beginning to come of age.

This new leader looks meaningfully different from the one who built the organisation. The leader of the old model was, very often, a creature of the mission: a passionate advocate, a tireless fundraiser, a clinician or a community champion who rose because they cared most and worked hardest. Those qualities are not obsolete. Purpose without conviction is just management. But those qualities alone are no longer sufficient.

The emerging archetype is rarer and harder to find. Call it the bilingual leader, fluent in purpose and in commerce, able to sit credibly with a funder, a bank, a board, a support worker and a family in the same week, and to translate between them without losing anyone. If a single trait makes this possible, it is emotional intelligence, off the charts: the capacity to read a room, hold competing interests with empathy, and carry people through change rather than drag them past it. Commercial fluency without it produces a technocrat; purpose without it produces a martyr. The new leader needs both, bound together by the emotional intelligence to make them cohere.

That emotional intelligence shows up most clearly in how the new leader shares power. The old model, for all its good intentions, too often designed services for people rather than with them. The emerging leader works the other way around. They treat co-design as a discipline, not a courtesy, and they understand that the people who use a service, and those with lived experience of disability, hold knowledge no executive or consultant can replicate. More than that, they are bringing that expertise inside the organisation: welcoming senior managers, executives and board members with disability and lived experience, not as representation to be ticked off but as authority to be drawn on. A leadership that genuinely listens, and genuinely shares the table, is the surest guard against the oldest failing in this sector, deciding what is good for people without ever asking them.

What distinguishes this leader is not that they have “gone corporate.” It is a particular set of capabilities suited to systemic change:

•They think in systems and frameworks, not services. They have stopped asking for more money for individual programs and started rethinking the architecture itself: the business model, the commercial operations that fund the mission, the employment pathways, the way the whole system is designed and funded. The most progressive CEOs in disability employment today are not defending the status quo; they are trying to redesign it.

•They diagnose before they prescribe. Grant Bayldon, CEO of World Vision Australia, draws on the strategist Richard Rumelt’s insight that leaders routinely mistake symptoms for problems. A fundraising shortfall is rarely a fundraising problem; a viability crisis is rarely solved by another cost-out. The new leader has the discipline to ask what the problem is underneath before reaching for a solution.

•They build something that does not depend on them. Bayldon’s most important lesson is that the leader’s job is not to be the chief problem-solver but to create the conditions, the operating rhythms, the psychological safety, the risk frameworks, the alignment at the top, that let the organisation function when they are not in the room. The leader who fixes everything personally builds dependency, not capability.

•They are comfortable holding paradox. They do not need the tension between purpose and viability to be resolved. They can run a commercially serious organisation and a deeply mission-anchored one simultaneously and treat that as the normal condition of the work rather than a problem to be escaped.

This is leadership built for transformation. And transformation is precisely the thing the current environment makes almost impossible to deliver, because it must be done on top of business-as-usual, by people who are already at full stretch.

We should be clear-eyed about what we are asking of them. The evidence on CEO strain is now hard to ignore. In the United States, where the data is cleanest, the Centre for Effective Philanthropy found the share of NFP CEOs describing burnout as a serious concern jumped to 46 per cent in 2026, up from 29 per cent a year earlier, with roughly two in five organisations running a deficit. Executive recruiters report record CEO departures and note that the sector’s fixation on low overheads actively deters the talent it most needs. Australia’s read is quieter but consistent: the HLB Mann Judd report found leaders consumed by stabilisation, and only about a quarter with a locked-in plan for who leads next.

We are asking a smaller pool of leaders to perform a harder job, carry more risk, absorb more stress, and transform the organisation while keeping the lights on, and we have not yet built the team beneath them to share the load.

This is the heart of the matter. You cannot build the new from the old. The capability that systemic change requires, strategy, transformation, financial modelling, integrated reporting, mergers and partnerships, commercial negotiation, is specialist, episodic and largely absent from organisations that, quite rightly, refuse to carry high overheads. Expecting one purpose-built CEO to be all those things, all at once, while running the organisation, is not a leadership strategy. It is the why behind the burnout the data is already recording.

And the CEO is only half the equation. The other half is whether the Board is ready to back the change: whether it has the risk appetite, the financial and commercial literacy, and the stomach for step-change the moment demands. A bold CEO and a cautious board are a failure waiting to happen. We return to the Board’s readiness in Part Three.

The best of the new CEOs understand this better than anyone. Their defining quality may be the humility to know what they cannot do alone, and the judgement to build the support, the systems and the external capability around them before the strain does the choosing for them.

These leaders are not a hypothesis. They are in the role right now, often carrying more than is reasonable, and frequently without the board, the bench or the backing they deserve. Recognising them is the easy part. The harder, and more urgent, part belongs to the people who appoint and govern them.

Part Three — The Board’s Job: Rise to the Moment, and Don’t Do It Alone

If the CEO carries the weight, the Board decides whether the new leadership can do its best work or merely survive. This is where the opportunity is greatest, and, today, too often missed. Boards in this sector are often, though by no means always, founder, family or mission-shaped, conservative by instinct, and used to spending their time on mission rather than on commercial viability five and ten years out. Many are highly capable; the gap is less about competence than orientation. Strategy, in too many boardrooms, is not yet a standing conversation. The encouraging news is that this is the most fixable part of the whole picture: a board that rises to the moment becomes the single greatest multiplier of the new leadership. It has four jobs.

First, specify the right leader, for the future, not the past. The most consequential decision a board makes is who sits in the leader’s chair, and too many CEO specifications are still written for the old model: a safe pair of hands, mission-aligned, financially careful. The hybrid era needs the bilingual leader described in Part Two, and boards must be willing to recruit for commercial and strategic capability as well as purpose, even where that means looking beyond the familiar talent pool and paying closer to the market.

Second, build the Board’s own literacy. A board cannot govern a commercial-and-purpose organisation if it can only read one of those two languages. Directors need enough fluency in commercial strategy, financial modelling and risk to challenge management constructively, the kind of “constructive challenge” that good governance depends on. Where that capability is missing, it must be added: through recruitment, through education, or through external expertise brought to the table. And literacy is not only commercial: the boards making the best decisions are also bringing lived experience into the room, including directors with disability, because governance is sharper when the people most affected by its decisions have a vote, not only a voice.

Third, move from oversight to foresight, and change what you measure to get there. Most for-purpose organisations report on last month and last quarter; they are blind to what is coming. And the metrics they use measure neither logic well, financial accounts on one side, activity counts (“we served X people”) on the other, with the trade-off between them invisible. The emerging answer is integrated, blended-value reporting: pioneered conceptually by Jed Emerson and expressed through tools such as Social Return on Investment and integrated reporting’s “capitals” framework, it puts financial health and social outcomes on the same page. None of these tools is perfect, and impact measurement remains genuinely contested; SROI in particular has its critics. But the direction is right. In practice this means a board dashboard that tracks the commercial-revenue mix, operating reserves and outcomes together, so the tension between purpose and viability becomes something the Board can see and steer, not something it discovers too late. It also means retiring the “overhead myth,” the false belief that spending on capability is waste. The organisations that survive will be the ones that invested in the very capacity the overhead obsession told them to cut.

Fourth, support the leader, and don’t do this alone. Supporting the CEO means succession planning, attention to wellbeing, and the discipline not to slip into micromanagement, which is itself a documented driver of executive burnout. But it also means accepting that transformation cannot be a one-person, in-house project bolted onto business-as-usual. Specialist, external capability such as strategy, financial modelling, transformation and M&A readiness is an investment, not a cost. None of this requires a large organisation or a large budget; the right help at the right moment can be a matter of days, not a standing expense. The sector’s habit of treating external advice as an indulgence is precisely backwards: it is the cheapest insurance against the most expensive failures. This is not a licence for advice without accountability: external capability must produce a measurable return, and holding it to that return is itself part of the Board’s commitment.

A worked example: disability employment

Nowhere is this clearer than in disability employment. Australia’s disability employment providers are caught in a genuine double squeeze: wage increases through the Supported Employment Services Award on one side, and constrained NDIS pricing on the other, with further pressure coming as the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations reforms reset participant budgets from late 2026 and reshape provider economics. The history is uncomfortable. For years the true cost of the sector’s social mission was never properly understood or funded, and too much of that gap was carried by the people least able to bear it, through wages that fell short of what the work deserved. Putting that right is not a threat to viability; it is part of what the new model has to make affordable. None of this is a problem any single CEO can out-work or out-run. It calls for a redesign of the business model, new commercial revenue, integrated reporting that makes the trade-offs visible, and a board with the literacy and the courage to back the change. More than that, it calls for a genuine rethink of how disability employment works: a shift away from services placing people into jobs and toward employers who actively want to hire them, with real wages, real choice and real careers. People with disability are not a cohort to be moved through a system; they are workers and colleagues whose aspirations the model should be built around. The test of any of this is not whether providers survive, but whether people with disability get more of what they actually want. The providers leading the way are already doing this work. The difference between them and the rest is rarely passion. It is leadership, governance and a willingness to bring in help.

The challenge

None of this is a criticism of the people in these roles, and none of it lets the funding system off the hook. CEOs and boards across the for-purpose sector are doing extraordinary work, under conditions and on budgets that would break most commercial executives and doing it for a fraction of the reward. Government and funders carry a real and continuing responsibility to fund this work properly. But the job has changed, the leadership to meet it is already emerging, and the model of governance must change to match. It is almost impossible to build the new organisation out of the old one, alone, while keeping the old one running. The leaders who are succeeding have stopped trying to.

The challenge to boards is also an invitation. Be honest about the capability the next decade demands. Recruit and equip a leader who can hold purpose and viability together, and then back them with the literacy, the risk appetite and the support that lets them lead. Change what and how you measure so you can see around the corner. And resist the false economy of going it alone. The organisations that will still be serving their communities a decade from now are not the ones that protected purpose by neglecting viability or chased viability until purpose drifted away. They are the ones whose leaders learned to hold both, and whose boards were wise enough, and bold enough, to help them do it.

This series sets out to recognise and support the leaders and boards already navigating these questions. The challenges are real and the pressure is mounting. But the more important truth is the hopeful one: a new generation of for-purpose leadership has arrived and is coming of age, in the rooms where the sector gathers and, in the organisations, bold enough not to face the future alone. The task now, for all of us, is to recognise it, back it, and let it lead.

Dr Myron Mann

Founding Partner Innovation Impact Group Pty Ltd

June 2026