Leadership Means Showing Up
There is a difference between saying a cause matters to you and standing in it.
By Eric J. Dalton · · 7 min read
There is a version of corporate community involvement that requires almost nothing from a leader.
You approve a sponsorship. Someone in marketing sends the logo file. The company name appears on a banner, a photo goes up on social media, and the entry lands somewhere in the budget between software licenses and office supplies. Nobody has done anything wrong. Money that was needed got where it needed to go.
But I have come to believe that this version, on its own, is a missed opportunity, not for the cause, which genuinely benefits, but for the organization writing the check.
Because supporting a cause and participating in one are different acts.
Why this is not abstract for me
My professional life has been built around dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, aging, and homecare. That is the work. It is also, unavoidably, the thing I think about.
When you spend years in this field, you are not dealing with a category. You are dealing with families in the middle of the hardest stretch of their lives, making decisions they were never trained to make, often while exhausted. You watch spouses become caregivers. You watch adult children try to hold a job, a marriage, and a parent's safety together at the same time. You watch people love someone through a disease that keeps taking things away.
So when a cause connected to that work asks for participation, the question of whether to show up is not really a business question for me.
The Walk
Angels on Call Homecare participates in the Walk to End Alzheimer's every year. But the way we participate is what I actually want to talk about, because the structure of it is what makes it work.
We do not enter as a single company team with a sponsorship line. We divide our people into two internal fundraising teams, and then those teams compete with each other to see who can raise the most.
I will be honest: the competitive element was not conceived as a profound cultural intervention. It started because it is fun. People like to win. A little rivalry gets attention in a way that an all-staff email requesting donations never will.
But it worked far better than fun. It changed what the event meant inside the organization.
When there are two teams, participation stops being passive. People recruit. People strategize. Someone in scheduling starts talking to someone in billing about a bake sale. Employees who would never have thought of themselves as fundraisers start asking their families and neighbors. The competition creates a reason to talk about the cause every single day in the run-up, which means the cause is not something the company mentions once a year. It is something the company lives with for weeks.
The result has been that our combined effort consistently places us among the stronger fundraising teams in our local walk community. I am deliberately not going to claim a specific ranking here, because I would rather be accurate than impressive. What matters more than the placement is what the placement is made of: dozens of individual people who chose to care out loud.
A check is a transaction. Presence is a statement.
What I see on the day
Here is what actually happens at these events, and it is the reason I keep going.
You stand in a crowd of people who have been touched by the same disease from every possible angle. Families who are in it right now. Families who are past it and came back anyway. Researchers. Advocates. Professional caregivers who spend their working lives doing this and then spend their Saturday doing it again on their own time.
Nobody is in a hierarchy. Nobody is presenting. There is no title on the shirt.
For a leader, that is a genuinely useful experience, and I think an underrated one. Most of an executive's week is spent above things: above the workflow, above the decision, above the org chart. Community events put you beside people instead. You are one participant among thousands, and the cause is much larger than your contribution to it.
That does something to your perspective that no amount of strategic planning can replicate.
What the team sees
The other thing I have observed is what happens to our own people.
Every organization has values written down somewhere. Most employees can find them if asked. Very few experience them.
An event like this is one of the rare occasions where a staff member gets to participate in the mission outside the boundaries of their job description. The billing coordinator is not doing billing. The scheduler is not scheduling. They are simply part of an organization that showed up, and for a few hours the thing the company says it cares about is visible, physical, and shared.
That creates something I do not think you can manufacture internally: a shared identity built on contribution rather than on process.
If the mission only exists inside your business, it is probably not much of a mission.
The objection worth taking seriously
There is a reasonable challenge to everything I have written so far, and I want to address it rather than avoid it.
The challenge goes something like this: a homecare company participating in Alzheimer's fundraising is not exactly disinterested. The cause and the commercial interest overlap. Isn't this just marketing that happens to feel good?
It is a fair question, and I think the honest answer is that the overlap is real and it is not a problem, provided you are clear about the order of things.
The overlap exists because people generally end up working on problems they care about. Nobody spends twenty years in dementia care by accident. The alignment between what I do professionally and what I support personally is not a coincidence to be embarrassed about; it is the reason the involvement is credible rather than performative.
What would make it a problem is inversion: choosing the cause because of the business benefit rather than choosing the work because of the cause. That inversion is visible to everyone eventually, especially to your own employees, who have an exceptionally accurate sense of what leadership actually cares about.
The test I use is simple. Would we still do this if it produced no visibility at all? If the answer is yes, the marketing benefit is a byproduct. If the answer is no, you have built a campaign and called it a commitment.
If you are not the founder
Most people reading this do not control a company's community involvement budget, and I do not want this to be a piece that only works from the top of an org chart.
The version of this available to a mid-level manager or an individual contributor is smaller and, in some ways, more powerful. You can organize a team for an event without institutional sponsorship. You can bring three colleagues to something you already do. You can be the person who makes participation possible for others by handling logistics nobody else wants to handle.
Leadership behavior does not require a leadership title. In my experience, some of the most effective culture-building in any organization comes from people with no formal authority who simply decided to organize something and invite others into it.
The rules I try to hold myself to
If a leader is going to do this, I think a few principles matter.
Cause before branding. If the primary purpose of your community involvement is content, everyone will eventually be able to tell. Support things you would still support if nobody photographed it.
Pick what is actually yours. Leaders should not go looking for a cause that polls well. The involvement that lasts, and that employees find credible, comes from something genuinely connected to the leader's life, the organization's work, or the community it serves. Manufactured passion has a short shelf life and an obvious smell.
Awareness counts as impact. Fundraising is the measurable output, and it matters enormously. But the conversations that happen because of the event matter too. Somebody learns what early symptoms look like. Somebody discovers that support exists. Somebody who has been quietly struggling realizes they are not alone in it. That is real, even though it never appears in a total.
Be present, not featured. There is a difference between a leader participating and a leader being the story. The day is not about you.
The part that stays
Leadership is usually discussed in terms of what happens inside an organization: strategy, execution, people, results. All of that is real and I spend most of my time on it.
But over time I have become more convinced that what a leader builds is measured partly by what exists outside the walls, the contribution, the relationships, the awareness, the culture that outlives any particular quarter. Revenue is necessary. It is not what survives.
Leadership becomes real when people can see what you are willing to show up for.
So here is the only thing I would ask of another leader reading this.
Identify one cause you genuinely care about. Not the one that fits the brand. The one that keeps your attention when nobody is watching.
Then go stand in it. Bring your team. Let them see you there.
