Photo by Edz Norton on Unsplash

When purpose does the work that money and hierarchy cannot.

In 2014, I was given a mission that most people would have found impossible.

Cathay Pacific needed to rebuild its humanitarian response program — the Care Team — from the ground up. My task: recruit 600 volunteers and trained them all in the first year, scaling to 1,800 in the years that followed. The budget was almost nothing. The team was three people, including me, and two other colleagues partially dedicated to the work.

And the context could not have been more demanding. That same year, two unthinkable events had shaken the aviation world and changed forever what passengers and families expected from airlines in their most vulnerable moments.

I had no background in aviation emergency management. I had no humanitarian response credentials. What I had was 10 years of working with people — in church leadership, in personal-care work, in occupational therapy — and a Department Head who took a chance.

What I learned in the years that followed became the foundation of everything I now bring to organisations.

The resource that made it possible

When you have no money and almost no team, you learn very quickly what actually makes people show up. And what I discovered — building this program from nothing — is that purpose does the work that money and hierarchy cannot.

The volunteers who joined the Care Team were not paid. They were cabin crew and office staff— people with full primary roles elsewhere in the organisation. They were being asked to give additional time, to train for situations that were emotionally demanding, and to be available to respond when they were needed regardless of what else was happening in their lives.

They showed up in extraordinary numbers. They referred more volunteers. And they stayed.

Not because of what we were offering them. Because of what we were asking them to be part of.

The mission was so clear — and the cost of failing it so human — that it became its own recruitment engine. People who aligned with it were drawn in. People who didn’t felt the dissonance and moved away.

That is what genuine mission alignment looks like in practice. Not a values statement on a wall. Not a recruitment pitch. A purpose so clearly held and so consistently lived that it functions as a filter — attracting the people who belong and creating honest discomfort for those who don’t.

What alignment made possible

Because the mission was clear and the values were real, we could build everything else on top of them.

A bespoke leadership development program — because we needed leaders who understood not just what to do but why it mattered. A refresher training cycle that brought volunteers back regularly — not just to maintain skills but to stay connected to the people and culture. Detailed procedures designed around the actual strengths and capabilities of the people doing the work. A network of external partners and formal agreements that could be activated at short notice.

We ran exercises that tested everything — including senior leaders up to executive level. We navigated COVID, rewriting our entire response protocol to ensure we were ready for accidents during those extraordinary times. We came through two organisational restructures, losing significant numbers of volunteers in the process, and rebuilt.

Through all of it, the thing that held was the mission. Not the org chart. Not the procedures manual. The shared understanding of who we existed to serve and what we owed them.

What this looks like in a corporate context

I work with organisations now where the mission exists on paper but has lost its operational force — where people can recite the strategy but couldn’t tell you what it means for how they do their work tomorrow.

The symptoms are familiar. Divisions pulling in different directions, each optimising for their own metrics rather than a shared outcome. Leaders who are technically capable but not aligned — working in parallel rather than together. Staff who are busy but not purposeful, productive by the measure of activity but uncertain about what the activity is actually for.

I also see it in founder-led businesses — organisations built on a founder’s vision and energy that have scaled faster than the shared understanding of what the mission actually means at every level. The strategy is clear at the top. By the time it reaches the people doing the work every day, something has been lost in translation.

The fix is not a restructure. It’s not a new strategy document. It’s the harder, more fundamental work of going back to first principles — who does this organisation exist to serve, what do those people genuinely need, and what does that require of the people leading it?

When that work is done well — when the mission is genuinely owned rather than merely stated — everything else becomes more possible. Not easy. But possible in a way it wasn’t before.

Because people will do extraordinary things for a purpose they genuinely believe in. What they won’t do — for long — is exhaust themselves in service of something that doesn’t feel real.

The thing I tell every leader I work with

You don’t need a bigger budget to build an aligned team. You need a clearer mission, values that are actually lived, and the discipline to connect every significant decision back to the people you exist to serve.

That’s not idealism. It’s what I built a program on — with three people, almost no budget, and a mission that turned out to be enough.

What would your organisation be capable of if every person in it could answer — with conviction — why what they do matters?

— Because good-looking leadership and effective leadership are not the same thing.