More so than ever, organisations have to hold fast to their essential purpose in a world where the word ‘mission’ – like vision and values – can sound a bit hackneyed. We have seen numerous examples of organisations that promote a purpose undermined by the actual behaviours or actions of leaders of governments or companies, and the resulting loss of trust can be hard to repair. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, released this month, the continuing decline of trust in institutions such as government, NGOs, media and business is leading to a culture of insularity in which individuals focus on themselves and those who agree with them rather than engaging with others who may differ in opinion, culture or beliefs.
What can we do in a climate of growing distrust and alienation?
There is a strand of the management literature that promotes the notion of stewardship as trust-based, relational leadership. Stewardship is often discussed as an individual responsibility, for instance how I use my resources of time or money or skill to benefit others. That’s a good starting point. Many cultures and faith traditions have an understanding that life itself, the creation in which we live, is given to us as stewards to use and cultivate for our good and the benefit of others: that the bounty of the world is a gift and not a possession.
In the context of leadership however, stewardship theory suggests that purpose-driven leaders can think about stewardship more deeply.
Organisational stewardship means nurturing the mission of an organisation for the benefit of others. That means managing the organisation’s resources in ways that are effective and sustainable. Stewardship is a generous role, one that accepts the responsibility of managing resources wisely for someone else’s benefit. In recent decades, the agricultural and environmental sectors have applied the paradigm of adaptive stewardship to the management of the land and environment for the benefit of future generations.
In organisational life, leaders in both executive and governance roles are called upon to manage, or be stewards of, the organisation’s vision and purpose. Their roles differ but their calling is the same: acting for the good of the organisation.
My five principles of organisational stewardship are fairly simple if not always easy.
- Mission clarity is the foundation of organisational stewardship – if you don’t know what your purpose is, you can’t nurture, grow and sustain it.
- Mission fidelity can be kept simple and easy to articulate – outcomes should be clear, measurable, transparent and understood by all.
- Stewardship is a collective responsibility – lasting success is built on trusting collaboration.
- Stewardship and mission fidelity must be nurtured – they don’t happen by themselves but need to be top of mind, all the time.
- Governance is a critical component of stewardship – but governance is not the only form of stewardship.
An organisation’s ability to operate effectively is dependent on its ability to articulate a clear purpose, one with which all activities of the operation are aligned. As obvious as that may sound, it is easy for not-for-profit and charitable organisations to lose sight of this principle. Mission drift can happen slowly and quietly without notice, until one day the organisation may discover it has lost sight of what it is about.
My research has demonstrated that a not-for-profit’s legitimacy, or ‘license to operate’, is grounded in three things:
- The organisation’s identity – its sense of itself, its culture and its history.
- Its set of values – not just what it says but how authentically it does what it says.
- Its accountability – those relationships which both bind the organisation and help to define it, including service recipients, public supporters, volunteers and donors.
An organisation’s legitimacy is expressed not only through its actions but its intentions. Why is the agency doing what it does? For whom, and on whose authority, is it acting? Is it genuinely committed to working together with service users, thus relinquishing power to those in need? Any one of these intentions may influence not only what is done, but how effectively it is done.
The Stillpoint organisational stewardship framework identifies three pillars which support the mission of the organisation.
- Identity – the organisation’s values, the character formed by its history and culture, and its relationships of accountability.
- Integrity – the organisation’s intentions, and the authenticity with which it operates in the world.
- Impact – the organisation’s actions and outcomes.
You need all three. Focussing on impact without tending to the other two may lead people to take shortcuts or sacrifice mission fidelity to outcomes. This can lead to mission drift. Likewise, spending too much time focussing on making sure our identity is clear and that we are doing everything right can lead us to not do anything at all. Or trying so hard to make sure that our integrity is intact and we don’t do or say the wrong thing can lead us to play it safe when we need to take risks.
So mission is at the heart of stewardship, and it is supported – made manifest – through these three pillars.
At the same time, we don’t live in a vacuum. Organisations have an internal environment, where leadership, culture, expertise and resources shape and inform the outworking of mission. They also operate within an external environment that can influence an organisation’s performance through factors such as geopolitical shifts, demographic changes, access to infrastructure and so on. This is not an exhaustive list of the internal or external factors that can influence organisational performance; the point is that you just can’t look at the three pillars in isolation. We live in a complex, dynamic and multi-polar world. Challenges can and will come from unexpected quarters.
How can this framework help organisations in practice?
Stewardship is a useful paradigm for thinking about leadership within NFPs as it requires organisations to acknowledge and centre themselves within a network of accountability, something critical for community-based organisations. This keeps organisational intentions and authenticity at the forefront of implementation. Integrity is the congruent demonstration of organisational values in practice.
The framework can form the basis for strategy development as well as a tool for monitoring and evaluation. There are three points to make here:
- Mission clarity is the foundation of stewardship, and strategy is the means by which mission is implemented.
- Strategy is informed by the reflections on, and evidence of, the three pillars as well as assessments of environmental factors.
- Linking strategy to the stewardship framework ensures that monitoring and evaluation keep the strategy closely aligned with purpose and provide early indications of mission drift.
Identity, integrity, impact – these are the pillars that support organisational mission and they must be nurtured to maintain mission fidelity. Good stewardship requires leaders to cultivate these foundations. Foundations built on these rocks are more likely to foster sustainable and effective outcomes. In the end, that is what counts.
(Photo by Jennifer Delmarre on Unsplash)