Nobody believes your purpose

Your company has a purpose. Your people do not believe it.

And they have their reasons. McKinsey calls it the purpose hierarchy gap: 85% of executives say they live their company's purpose day to day. Among frontline employees, 15% do. Gallup puts employee engagement at 20% worldwide, 31% in the United States and Canada and 12% in Europe, the lowest region on earth. Deloitte prices poor mental health at 51 billion pounds a year for British employers, and the biggest item in that bill is not absence. It is presenteeism, around 24 billion: people at their desks, logged in, producing a fraction of what they would produce well.

Your purpose is probably not false. It simply has not arrived.

This is not a book about communicating better. It is an implementation manual.

There are shelves of books on why purpose matters. This one is about how purpose gets installed: the rituals that make it visible, the middle managers who either translate it or block it, the incentives that confirm or contradict it every month, the governance that protects it from the next change of chief executive, and the five indicators that take it to the board. Internal communications, understood as a management discipline and not as the Friday newsletter, holds all of that together.

Every figure here was verified one by one against its primary source. A study of close to half a million employees, published in Organization Science, found that purpose produces financial results only when it comes with communicated clarity. Without clarity the effect is zero. And communicating a purpose that is then not practised performs worse than saying nothing at all.

What you will be able to do on Monday

• Test in two minutes whether your purpose is implemented or only published, with three questions.
• Put a figure on what disengagement costs you, using data you already have.
• Turn your middle managers into translators of the purpose, which is where this is won or lost.
• Replace campaigns with rituals, which are the only thing that changes habits.
• Audit whether your incentive system contradicts your purpose every month.
• Take the board a dashboard of five indicators instead of a report on clicks.

Every chapter closes the same way: the idea in one sentence, what the author would do on Monday morning, and one concrete task. At the end, the full 90-day plan, in four phases, with an owner on every row.

Verified cases, including the ones that failed

A 1970 speech that still governs a British engineering firm. A department store chain owned by the people who work in it. An Indian group that put worker welfare in writing before the law asked. A chocolate company that rebuilt its supply chain to keep its promise. A purpose brand that ended in liquidation. The failures are here too, because they teach more.

Who it is for

For chief executives, leadership teams, people directors and heads of internal communications who no longer need convincing that purpose matters, and need to know what to do on Monday.

Three hours to read. A quarter to implement.

Enrique Burgos spent twenty years in senior marketing roles, with a focus on data, digital and CRM, including the Coca-Cola marketing team for Western Europe, before turning to purpose and internal communications. He is Senior Advisor at ImpactCo and Director of the Institute of the Purpose Economy, where he leads the Purpose-Driven Communications and Marketing practice. From ImpactCo he is a co-founder of the Chair of Purpose-Driven Companies at the University of Navarra (Spain). He advises chief executives and leadership teams internationally and teaches at business schools.

With a foreword by Ángel Bonet.