John Blakey is an executive coach for FTSE 100 chief executives, founders and top public sector officials. He has written a new book called Force for Good: How to Thrive as a Purpose-Driven Leader.

Here are teachings from him on how to be a purpose-driven leader who can get the best out of yourself and your team:

Performance = motivation x ability x opportunity

I’d always taken motivation for granted in my leadership career. I got up, did my job, went to bed and life goes on. I really focused on ability and opportunity. But I think the experience of the pandemic and working with people who are fuelled by an emotional commitment to a cause started to bring motivation to the fore.

I learned a lot as a coach working with elite sports coaches for Team GB in the Olympics, Premier League football clubs and England cricket. In the world of elite sport, motivation is prized much more highly than in organisational life. In sport I learnt that you can’t take motivation for granted and that the potential for people to be highly motivated is massive.

There’s a big scale between business-as-usual and people really wanting to run through a brick wall for the cause. Motivation is an untapped resource in a lot of organisational life and I think we’re still taking it for granted.

Identify your radiators and drains

This is a technique that I learned from the world of Team GB rowing. Every couple of months the coach I was working with would ask the Olympic rowing athletes to do this exercise. It was a very simple one. They got a piece of paper or a flip chart, drew a line down the middle and on the one side they headed it up ‘radiators’ and on the other side it was ‘drains’. On the radiator list, they brainstormed any activity, role, person, place or responsibility that lifts them up.

On the drain side, they listed anything that drags them down. If you do the radiator-drain exercise on a regular basis it’s amazing how it can prompt you to think about making more conscious choices about how to build the radiators in your life and how to take out the drains. We can become more conscious about managing our motivation levels over a period of time. Can you create new radiators or boost radiators that are already there? How can you minimise or remove drains?

Obviously, you go about that in a way that’s appropriate and respectful, particularly when you’re dealing with people. But a lot of leaders, and myself included in times gone by, would go through their roles and finish the day feeling demotivated without knowing why.  So, this is about saying, hang on a minute, there’s no reason why we can’t become more aware of the detail of what is lifting us, what is draining us, and how we make more conscious choices to shift that balance over a period of time.

Be a force multiplier by thinking long term, not short term

If you are working as a force for good, if you are a purpose-driven leader, then why not raise your sights and think about taking it to the next level by helping other leaders become a force for good? Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and they underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years.

That’s been true in my life and it’s been true with a lot of the clients I work with. I think it’s amazing what you can achieve over 10 years. So, could you become a force multiplier over a 10-year period and what might that look like? My version of force multiplication is writing books. That’s how I leverage my impact to try and reach as many people as I can.

Coaching allows you to get alongside other leaders and help them be the best they can be. There are many different ways for people to manifest this force multiplication. We’re probably going to need it. We live in anxious times and we’ve got wicked problems that we’ve got to wrestle with in the coming years. We need leaders to be bold and have this vision about making a difference in the world. Their leadership counts in that challenge.

Set five-year goals and share them

One of the techniques I use with peer groups of leaders that come together is sharing courageous goals for the triple bottom line. What are your five-year goals for yourself, your business and your wider contribution? That is the triple-bottom line. Once these goals have been shared that group can then hold each other accountable and start to track the progress. It’s liberating for leaders to share these moonshot goals.

As long as they’re kept in our heads and never shared with anyone it’s like our own private secret. But the moment you get it out into the open and you get the reaction, “Wow, that’s interesting”, it gives people confidence these are not idle dreams – they are potentially very inspiring goals that can lift you and others up.

Don’t let reality get in the way of that five-year vision

There’s a tactical level that you can work at. You’ve got your five-year vision and then you work back from that and say: “Okay, if I want to run a marathon in five years’ time, what does that mean I need to do in year one?” It’s not that one-year goals are not worth having, but it’s about putting them in context and challenging ourselves around not creating goals in the short term that are so ambitious that they start to become a burden because they’re just not viable.

I’ve probably become more aware of that in recent times because there are circumstances outside of our control that can knock us off track. The Ray Dalio formula from his book Principles is dreams plus reality plus determination equals a successful life. I think the bit that we need to factor in more because of events over recent years is reality. You’ve got dreams, you’ve got determination, but there is reality. For example, if there’s a pandemic happening, it’s going to affect you. Whatever your dream is, however determined you are, there are some things that are not in your control – that’s a reality you have to face.

Over one year that can make a big difference, but over five or 10 years you factor that in and navigate through it. The shocks of recent years have reminded us that we are not in control of everything. But when it does knock us off track, how do we keep that hope? How do we not give up on that long-term vision?

Listen to our podcast with John Blakey.