In complex times, many leaders find themselves facing one crisis after another. It can leave you breathless and run ragged as you try to deal with problem after problem.

But in uncertain times, it’s more important than ever to stop, take a breath, and look at the big picture. As you’re trying to get everything shipshape, are you getting blown off course? When the storm passes, will you find yourself drifting – or run aground?

This is why leaders need to dedicate some real time and thought to the question: what’s my purpose? What am I really trying to achieve here? That knowledge can be your north star, helping you stay the course when the waters are choppy. And knowing their leader has that clear sense of direction helps keep everyone else calmer and more focused too – after all, it’s hard to respect and trust someone who turns with every breeze.

Purpose-led leadership

One of the core aspects of my coaching is purpose-led leadership. Whether you’re aiming for a leadership role or already in one, I think it’s essential to pause and think about why you care about the role.

It doesn’t have to be a grand ambition – though it can be, of course. It could simply be that you want to make sure things run smoothly, so everyone in your workplace can do their job without unnecessary friction. Maybe you have ideas for how to shake things up, and relish the challenge of improving things in your organisation or industry.

Whatever it is, I encourage you to really drill down into it. What takes priority in your decision-making? Figure that out, and communicate it clearly to the people around you. Then – and this is key – actually stick to it.

When times are tough, we often have to compromise. But if you go back on your core values, people will notice very quickly, and their trust in you will be severely undermined. There’s nothing worse for buy-in and loyalty than people seeing their leader as unreliable 

There’s an important distinction to be made here. Knowing your priorities and values doesn’t mean you should oversimplify things. The world isn’t simple – now more than ever – and it can be dangerous to pretend it is.

As I put it in my New Year’s newsletter:

“Some figures – demagogues, populists and other unwise leaders – seek to oversimplify. This can be reassuring in the short term, both for ourselves and our listeners. Those who polarise – which we see increasingly on all sides – are doing the same. Polarised positions are oversimplified positions. They dismiss everything ‘over there’. As leaders, we must hold all that should be taken into account, and not recoil.”

It’s very important to understand this distinction. A purpose-led leader may say “my priority is protecting the livelihoods of my team.” But it would be an oversimplification to say “I will always protect the livelihoods of my team.” It may sound comforting in uncertain times, but you’re doing your people a disservice by saying that – can you really guarantee that, after all? And if you can’t 100% deliver on it, will you start trying to place the blame ‘over there’, away from you?

The battle versus the war

The key here is treating your purpose as a direction, not as a destination at which you’ve already arrived. You’ll need to constantly adjust as you get new information, and often, you’ll need to make painful decisions so you can stay broadly on course.

Sometimes, these compromises or concessions might even make you ‘look weak’. But as I’ve explained before, those who care more about looking strong than actually being strong – ‘strongman leaders’ – are both dangerous and ultimately ineffectual.

Sir Winston Churchill has a legacy as a strong and courageous wartime leader. But he too had to make bitterly difficult choices, and accept smaller losses in service of the larger victory – even when his opponents said those choices made him look weak.

During the war, the UK needed to procure supplies from the US, which, under its neutrality laws, said that only dollars or gold would be acceptable payment. The British government spent much of its gold reserves under this “cash-and-carry” arrangement. When those reserves began to run low, Britain turned to offering long-term leases of naval and air bases to the US—as in the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement—and shared a wide range of advanced technologies through the Tizard Mission, including radar and jet engine designs. These moves helped build strategic ties with the US, eventually contributing to the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, which allowed the UK to receive military aid without immediate payment.

There’s an important lesson in this. Figuring out your north star might feel like a thought exercise, a nice thing to ponder when you have the time, but it’s actually most necessary in complex, demanding times. If you aren’t clear and firm on your purpose, it’ll be much easier for you to lose sight of the bigger picture and make choices that hurt more in the long term. Develop a core of steel, and you’ll bend in the face of instability, but you won’t break.