Circle Leadership

Dave Clare founded Circle Leadership for leaders who can feel that the business has grown complicated and the purpose has gone quiet. He has been doing this work for thirty or thirty-five years, across three continents, and he has been helping people name a purpose in a formal way since 2001. What he says he keeps finding, after all of that travel, is that every business has a story, and that the trouble usually starts when the people inside it cannot tell you what the story is. The job, as he describes it in the film, is to get that story clear enough for people to believe, and then to build a culture that can carry it once the workshop is over.

Culture, in his telling, belongs to every leader in the organisation. It is not a job you can hand to one department and then forget. A culture will form whether anyone designed it or not, so the real decision is whether you set it up on purpose. He breaks that into three things a leader has to do. People need something to believe in, which means the purpose has to be plain enough to say out loud. They need to know that you believe in them. And they need a picture of where you are taking the organisation, clear enough that they can look at it and decide they believe you. He has spent a career saying versions of this in other people's boardrooms. This film is that argument with the examples taken out, so the three moves are all that is left.