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Beyond Authority: Embracing Integrity and Purpose for Effective Leadership

Leadership is evolving from authoritative models to purpose-driven practices emphasizing integrity, transparency, and empowerment. Leaders who model balanced lives, foster purpose-driven cultures, and maintain transparency build trust, engagement, and team loyalty. This shift aligns personal values with organizational goals, creating sustainable workplaces where employees thrive and leaders inspire growth and collaboration.

This article was written by Tracy Marlowe and published in Enterpreneur.

Authoritative leadership is out. Leading with integrity and purpose is in.

The proof is in employees’ sentiments: those in high-trust workplaces are 76% more engaged and 29% more satisfied with their lives.

As CEO and founder of Creative Noggin, an advertising and marketing agency whose mission is to empower smart, passionate women to enjoy their work and life, I’ve seen the evidence firsthand. Leading with integrity and purpose has resulted in a culture of trust where team members stay for an average of over eight years.

I’ve also experienced the flipside.

Before founding Creative Noggin, I worked for several organizations, some of which lacked a clear purpose. Despite checking all the boxes when it came to benefits, birthday cakes and happy hours, employees didn’t feel a part of a larger driving purpose beyond achieving revenue goals. Burnout was commonplace, morale suffered, and turnover was high.

These experiences taught me leadership isn’t simply about perks or policies. It’s about always doing the right thing and giving team members a real reason to come to work daily beyond checking boxes or selling widgets.

When a client double-pays for an invoice, there is never any question about what will happen with the extra money. That clear sense of integrity goes a long way in fostering genuine trust with our team and clients.

As a company with an all-female leadership team, I find that women are uniquely capable of engendering this trust. When you consider common feminine characteristics like loyalty, optimism and compassion, it’s no wonder.

If you’re interested in learning how to instill a sense of trust in your workplace, there are three core practices you will find in leaders who exemplify integrity and purpose.

1. Lead by example

As a worker, I often heard: “You should mirror your boss if you want to be successful.” As a leader, I take this to heart.

My goal is for my employees to show up daily as their whole selves and work — and play — hard. To achieve this, they need to be present in their personal lives and be there for their families. As a leader, it’s my job to model living a balanced life. I often tell my team we should all be “working to live, not living to work.” While I never hesitate to work hard, elbow-to-elbow alongside my team, to get projects done, I don’t shy away from leaving in the middle of the day to pick up my kids from school.

Mary Barra, the first female CEO of General Motors, is another leader who makes a point of leading by example. Her inclusive leadership style involves building teams and working together to solve challenges. With her purposeful leadership at the helm, General Motors has consistently scored well in gender equity reports and was one of only two global businesses without a gender pay gap in 2018.

2. Empower others with a purpose-driven culture

When employees understand the purpose behind their work, they’re much more likely to be engaged and perform at their best. At Creative Noggin, our purpose-driven mission to empower women takes shape in many ways. To name a few:

We donate at least 5% of our profits to community-based organizations supporting women, such as Women’s Empowerment and Saint John’s Program for Real Change.
We partner with purpose-driven organizations. Over 70% of our work has been for mission-driven organizations.
We each take ownership of our work and roles and improve the business operations as a whole. I give my team autonomy over their responsibilities, and as a company run on the EOS (entrepreneurial operating system) platform, my team regularly identifies and solves issues within the company, such as improving our business services, systems, and processes. No one on the team has a “that’s not my job” mentality; instead, they all work together to level up the business.

All of these practices have contributed to rallying my troops around a central driving vision for the organization and provided a strong foundation for our purpose-driven culture.

A leader I admire who also prioritizes purpose-driven cultures is Sarah Friar, the former CEO of Nextdoor. She aligned her personal commitment to fostering a better world through the transformative power of community with the company’s mission: to be a globally impactful platform that helps neighbors connect and strengthen their communities.

To continue reading this article in full click here: It’s Time to Move Beyond Authoritative Leadership — 3 Ways to Lead with Integrity and Purpose