In this Leadership Lab, we turn to another “star” in the “constellation” of measuring leader development: purpose.
Purpose is especially interesting because it’s deeply related to identity, motivation, and behavior, which makes it closely related to our core leader development measures: leader identity and leader self-efficacy.
Purpose also connects to other measures we’ve discussed, especially aspirational self-clarity, which we found increased in people who wrote a values-driven purpose statement.
Furthermore, purpose is one of those outcomes that’s consistently linked to leadership in the popular discourse, where we often hear about “purposeful leadership” or “leading with a purpose.”
However, despite being widely valued, there’s a surprising ambiguity around what purpose even is—creating a real challenge for anyone hoping to measure or develop it.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try! However, it does require us to be deliberate and thoughtful in doing so.
Defining Purpose
What even is “purpose?” People answer that question a lot of different ways, and scholars across a variety of fields often use fuzzy or overlapping definitions of purpose that vary in how much they overlap with one another.
However, in his 2025 review of the field (linked at the end of this piece), psychologist William Damon identified five recurring elements common among most definitions of purpose.
- Purpose is an “ultimate concern.” It’s not simple, short-term goals like brushing one’s teeth, or even important ones like making one’s next rent payment or making a profit next quarter. Instead, purpose is the larger framework that organizes smaller goals into something more significant.
- Purpose reflects an active commitment. It’s not just a daydream or vague “wouldn’t it be nice if…” vision. It implies, as Damon says, “walking the walk, not just talking the talk,” meaning it has at least the potential to direct behavior.
- Purpose is long-term. It endures across time, rather than being a one-time act, even if an important or noble one-time act. That doesn’t mean purpose never changes! People can have multiple purposes across their lives, or even several at once across different roles and identities. However, even in these cases, purpose will still have a long-term, enduring quality.
- Purpose is meaningful to the self. It’s not the result of external pressures like fear of punishment or wanting to fit in. Purpose is something people pursue because it is seen as valuable and meaningful to who they are.
- Purpose has a beyond-the-self component, according to Damon. This is the most potentially slippery part of defining purpose.
Many interpret the idea of “beyond the self” to mean that purpose must be prosocial, altruistic, or otherwise “good.” However, people can pursue purposes that are selfish, or even harmful. There can be purposeful bullies or authoritarians.
What matters here isn’t whether the purpose is morally good or bad, but whether it reaches beyond the self. Generally, purpose will have consequences beyond the self: it will reach and have at least some impact beyond one’s own private, internal state.
Why Purpose Matters for Leader Development
It’s no surprise that purpose is something people desire in leaders. Purpose is what gives leadership (as well as many other things) a deeper “why,” providing direction and motivation.
Purpose also has concrete benefits.
Across more than three decades of scholarship, purpose has been repeatedly associated with increased motivation, persistence, and resilience, as well as more specific organizational outcomes, including stronger buy-in and alignment across organizational levels.
Thus, wanting purposeful leadership isn’t just a matter of vaguely prosocial niceties: it has practical value.
Importantly, purpose can be developed. We’ve seen this ourselves at the Doerr Institute, especially in our professional coaching program, in which semester after semester, we see students’ sense of purpose increase as they reflect more on what they want to accomplish as leaders. Anyone engaged in similar developmental efforts might consider assessing purpose.
Measuring Purpose
There are several ways to measure purpose, and not all of them capture the same thing.
One common approach is to assess general sense of purpose—i.e., the subjective experience of feeling like one has a purpose in life. This can be useful and important, especially when the primary goal is understanding if someone feels direction, intentionality, or a meaningful orientation in their life. However, these measures can also be changeable from moment to moment, which means they can miss purpose’s long-term, enduring nature.
Another approach is to use a more beliefs-oriented measure, such as Carol Ryff and colleagues’ (1989) purpose in life scale. Such measures go beyond a felt sense of direction, and instead capture the goal orientation, intentionality, and broader directedness that are central to purpose. This is one of the primary ways we assess purpose at the Doerr Institute, because we want to distinguish purpose from simple meaning-making or mere self-confidence. Additionally, many of our programs allow students the freedom to set their own developmental direction, which makes Ryff’s broader purpose-in-life measure more useful for our context.
It’s also possible to assess purpose in more behavioral or indirect ways, such as a 360-style assessment of whether someone is perceived by others as purposeful, or having people write their own purpose statements and then scoring those statements based on how concrete, clear, or personal they are. Such approaches might be better for capturing purpose’s behavioral influences, but they’re also both less established in the literature and more resource-intensive to obtain and score.
No matter how you choose to measure purpose, the key is being clear on what elements of purpose matter the most for your context.
Whether you’re trying to assess peoples’ general purpose in life, their subjective sense of direction, or their concrete ability to articulate and enact a purpose, the best measure will depend on which questions are most relevant to your situation, theory of change, and specific intervention.
References
Damon, W. (2025). The psychology of purpose: A comprehensive approach. Review of
General Psychology, 29(4), 395–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680251324154
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
