Imagine you are a CEO making the difficult decision to furlough frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the decision weighs heavily on you, you know that furloughs are preferable to layoffs. Yet when you make the announcement, you face a withering, deeply personal Twitterstorm: customers and even employees ridicule you with your own interview quotes about the “importance of community,” and how “our people are our purpose.” Under pressure, you reverse the decision, but the damage to your reputation proves irreparable.

Or let’s say you are a new regional division head, an “outsider” who’s trying to decide how to approach an important meeting with your key reports. Do you choose the status quo (taking time to establish yourself) or do you take a risk and describe the outlines of a bold vision that you have to redefine a key product offering around the company’s purpose? You take a deep breath and choose risk—and quickly find that your team is far more enthusiastic to the idea than you had anticipated.

Finally, imagine you are a senior executive in a company that has successfully challenged—and raised—its purpose ambitions. Now, just as the enthusiasm is peaking, a member of your team spots a profitable business opportunity—but it goes against the company’s newly galvanizing purpose. Do you seize the opportunity or do you say no? And what do you tell your teammate, not to mention the CEO?

These examples—composites drawn from real cases—highlight the unique, intensely personal nature of organizational purpose for top executives. As a CEO in particular, your company’s ambitions around purpose should start with your unique aspiration for what you expect for the organization—beginning with what it stands for. You will also take the heat for any stumbles, should either you or the company fail to live up to your purposeful aspirations.

And yet even though you’re best placed to be the catalyst in the kind of energizing organizational chain reaction that happens when purpose takes hold and is activated in a company, you’re still one person in a large company and your time and priorities are spread thin. No one, not even the CEO, can make purpose happen by themselves—or make it happen for other people. And yet when it does happen—when companies find the sweet spot where the “we” overlaps with the “me” (see sidebar, “Find your purpose sweet spot”)—the benefits to employees, the company, and even society are powerful (Exhibit 1).

This article describes how CEOs and other top executives can better live up to their special role in a purpose journey, not by going it alone or by making pronouncements but by enlisting the organization’s help to challenge the purpose, test it, and improve it so that everyone can shape it and own it together. We suggest you think of the task not as a process of ticking off items on a list, but as a series of ongoing, overlapping dialogues. These conversations about purpose must happen again and again with the people who matter: the top team, your employees, and even yourself. These dialogues should also look ahead—both to the ways your company can increase impact by bringing its purpose to the outside world, and to the “predictable dilemmas” that your pursuit of purpose will inevitably raise. The promise of purpose will always be accompanied by some element of peril.

Start a dialogue in the top team

“We really need to talk about our purpose.”

These eight words can unlock an organization-changing chain of events when they’re voiced in a meeting with your top team. And yet when we talk to CEOs and other C-suite leaders about purpose, many admit that the conversation simply never happens. Everyone’s too busy with this quarter’s business, or thinks the mission statement is fine already, or thinks it’s unimportant in the first place since business should focus on shareholder value only. Many more executives, however, tell us privately that they want to engage on purpose but hold back because they don’t want to be viewed as “the soft one.”

The result of this hesitancy is a workplace manifestation of social scientist Jerry Harvey’s famous Abilene Paradox, where the failure of individuals to discuss a decision is interpreted as agreement by the group. (In Harvey’s case, this resulted in a sweaty, 100-mile car trip in the Texas summer heat to Abilene for a family dinner—a drive no one wanted to make.)

The upshot for CEOs and other top executives? Stop the car. Don’t assume a lack of discussion equals agreement. Don’t assume that your organization’s purpose is good enough, goes far enough, or that your colleagues even see eye to eye about it. Have the courage to participate in tough discussions and learn where things stand. Our experience, supported by our research, suggests that many leaders aspire to greater social impact and more purpose but don’t know where to start. A full 39 percent of company leaders we surveyed said they want to change the purpose of their company, compared with 24 percent of all other employees.

The genesis of former Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini’s tough discussions about purpose was both unusual and inadvisable: a serious skiing accident that almost killed him. During his recovery, Bertolini turned to yoga and meditation; when he wanted to introduce these to the company more broadly as a wellness benefit for employees, his CFO pushed back, saying, “We’re a profit-making entity. This isn’t about compassion and collaboration.” Bertolini’s response? “Well, I actually think it is. And I’m in charge, so we’re going to do it.” Bertolini’s drive to improve the lives of his employees led him to work with his top team to learn more about the financial hardships some of his employees faced, which in turn led to raising the company’s minimum wage.

As Bertolini’s example suggests, hard-nosed dialogue may be required. But how should you frame the conversation, and where should you start? Consider, as a team, the disruptions, pressures, and challenges that exist at that edge where your business system meets the pain in the world, and see what you might do about it.

One way to start this dialogue is through an “ESG teardown.” The concept of a competitive teardown—dismantling a product or service to learn from it by comparing it to the offerings of rivals—has long been used in manufacturing settings. We suggest ESG (environmental, social, and governance) as the focus because purpose usually anchors a company’s ESG priorities (and if it doesn’t, it should), and the tangibility of a company’s ESG offerings typically allows for apples-to-apples benchmarking and a more objective view of how the company is perceived from the outside in.

ESG teardowns start with discussions about which issues matter most to the leadership team and why, and then move to comparisons of the company’s performance with that of its peers. This helps spot pain points. For example, leaders of a large financial-services group were insistent on the need to give back to the communities in which the company operated. Yet as important as this goal was, the team was chagrined to learn that the company’s program of giving employees paid time off to encourage volunteerism was nowhere near as “industry beating” as leaders presumed. Another relevant and pressing area of concern was the fact that the company lagged behind its competitors on employee training, as well as pay and benefits.

Similarly, the top team of a consumer services company maintained that it was a high performer on the “S” of ESG because of its “investments in employees.” Yet an ESG teardown showed that it paid only average compensation and benefits, relative to peers, and underinvested in training and development. This sobering realization led the team to rethink its approach.