When you’re leading strategic change, employees take cues from your leadership team’s conviction—and building that conviction takes time and emotional investment. Before drafting a purpose statement, help your fellow leaders work through what the organization’s challenges mean to them personally.

Surface the emotions. Ask each executive to identify the strategic issue that feels most urgent or unresolved and the feelings attached to it. Encourage them to share their concerns about the present and hopes for the future.

Stay with the discomfort. Give people time to compare their reactions and work through disagreements. Resist rushing toward consensus. Ensure team members trust one another enough to speak honestly, and remain open to criticism of your own role in the problems.

Draft a purpose statement your team believes in. Once you’ve worked through the underlying issues together, turn those conversations into a shared purpose statement. The goal isn’t just to agree on the wording; it’s to create language that reflects what the team has worked through and feels genuinely committed to putting into practice.

Adapted from To Make a New Strategy Stick, Executives Need Shared Emotional Investment by Davide Nicolini, et al.

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