A beautiful, blond woman in an elegant evening dress was receiving an award in a glitzy ceremony on TV. It could have been any celebrity moment. But to universal surprise, she brought out a blue beanie and pulled it down over her perfectly coiffed hair. It made an incongruous yet moving image.

The star was Carrie Bickmore, and she was collecting a Gold Logie for being voted Australia's most popular TV personality. She told the audience, ‘I want to use my two minutes up here to talk about something incredibly close to my heart: brain cancer'. Having lost her husband, Greg, to brain cancer in 2010, she urged Australians to wear a beanie in order to get the nation talking about the disease.

And Australia responded. TV hosts across networks sported beanies all through the next day. People around the country showed their support by uploading photos of themselves wearing beanies on social media using the hashtag #beaniesforbraincancer. In that moment Carrie Bickmore became a cause leader in the fight against brain cancer.

Finding purpose

Cause leaders create seismic shifts in influencing people around their cause.

Ronald Alexander, author of the widely acclaimed book Wise Mind, Open Mind: Finding purpose and meaning in times of crisis, loss and change, is the executive director of the OpenMind Training Institute in the United States. He thinks of cause as an emanation point.

‘If one was to look back in history, the truly great leaders [who] attempted in some way to improve conditions in their zone of influence [all] share this common quality of causation.'

So what does it take to become a cause leader? Cause leadership is purpose driven. The cause needs to inspire you or your organisation. As Alexander says, ‘The mark of a wise and mindful leader is his or her ability to extend an intention into space and become CAUSE'.

Cause leadership is personal and people need to know your back-story: Why this cause? Why you? Carrie Bickmore shared how brain cancer touched her own family; this wasn't another product or service she was promoting, but a loss she had experienced personally and felt compelled to do something about. A personal experience made her determined to make a difference.

Cause leadership can never be a purely commercial proposition. If you work in marketing, you cannot make marketing your cause. You can enlist marketers to help promote your cause, but it cannot be the cause or you risk perceptions of opportunism and cynicism.

Cause leadership may be hard for brands and organisations to personalise; your audience will easily distinguish congruence from populism or hitching a ride on the bandwagon.

TOMS shoes does this without any hoo-ha. The company's American founder, Blake Mycoskie, was distressed to see the hardships faced by poor, often bare-footed children he encountered as he travelled through South America. He decided to set up a for-profit company that would donate one pair of shoes for every pair sold. The TOMS website states simply: ‘With every product you purchase, TOMS will help a person in need. One for One®'.

Today TOMS's cause leadership revolves around improving lives. TOMS believes business is a force for good. It started with the gift of shoes, but it soon realised that one-for-one model provided the foundation for a broader mandate for improving lives.

As a result TOMS has branched out into wider philanthropy with the gifts of sight, water, safe birth and even kindness. This is how it explains its cause leadership around the gift of kindness: ‘In the United States, nearly 1 out of every 3 students reports being a victim of bullying. Purchases of the TOMS StandUp Backpack Collection will help provide the training of school staff and crisis counselors to help prevent and respond to instances of bullying'.

While it may be hard for your brand or organisation to come up with a cause from scratch, it makes sense to search for and support a cause that is congruent with your values.

Australian fashion retail brand Witchery has developed a partnership with the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation (OCRF) over 14 years. Witchery runs an annual White Shirt Campaign and silver gift collection. The success of the campaign rests in part on its simplicity, with 100 per cent of proceeds from the sale of each white shirt going directly to the OCRF. The funds raised have enabled the OCRF to appoint full-time research scientists and to buy vital medical equipment.

Head, heart and hands

In a world crowded with worthy causes, all vying for a share of your heart and your wallet, cause leaders have to give people a reason to care. Carrie Bickmore said, ‘Everyone thinks brain cancer is rare but it's not. It kills more people under 40 than any other cancer. It kills more kids than any other disease'. Most of us would be unaware of this statistic. It's frightening but, communicated effectively, it spurs us to want to do whatever we can to change it.

Japanese art is imbued with tradition, craftsmanship and history. Traditional artisans subscribe to the Japanese i-shoku-jyu approach, according to which three key elements are necessary to enjoy your personal environment and bring happiness and balance to daily life. These translate as head, heart and hands. This is a wonderful metaphor for thinking about cause leadership, where your heart engages with both the cause and your audience's emotions, encouraging them to care.

Opportunities for cause leaders to connect with and make their audiences care can emerge from the most unexpected quarters.

In March 2015 the social media community was split into two vociferous factions — all over the colour of a dress. Not since Monica Lewinsky's infamous 1998 sex scandal dress has a garment generated such controversy.

The online debate about the correct colours of a Scottish wedding dress went viral globally. About 70 per cent of people declared emphatically that the dress was white and gold. They took comfort in two arguments: it looked and felt right, and they had the numbers — how could so many people be wrong? But an equally vocal 30 per cent of people were emphatic that the dress was black and blue. 

Even scientists weighed in on the debate, which began trending under #thedress, and received the kind of mainstream and social media coverage that would be the envy of any PR company.

For anyone seeking nirvana under a banyan tree in a non-wifi zone who missed the headlines all over the world, the dress turned out to be black and blue.

What happened next in ‘dressgate' was sheer genius. The Salvation Army in South Africa commissioned an advertisement featuring the dress and asked on Twitter: ‘Why is it so hard to see black and blue?' The image showed a beautiful woman in the same dress, her face and body covered in black and blue bruises.

The charity took a fun, frivolous issue and made a profound, succinct statement about an important social issue: domestic violence against women. It's a great example of brave, responsive cause leadership that shines new light on a pervasive problem. As Lauren Tuck, news editor at Yahoo Style, noted, ‘Domestic violence is a serious issue that deserves the same kind of fevered attention that was paid to #thedress'. 

Call to action — the ask

Once people are on board, with their heads and hearts engaged, you have to give them an opportunity to act, to do something. It could be as simple as clicking Like on a Facebook post, forwarding and sharing a link, signing a petition or using only fair trade products. It may be to think differently about an issue or to support the cause in some concrete way, sometimes through financial donation. The call to action or ‘ask' does not always have to involve money, and often it doesn't.

Carrie Bickmore requested a simple, symbolic response — that we don a beanie in recognition of the cause — and Australians did so while rallying behind the #beaniesforbraincancer hashtag.

Cause leaders often find the ask difficult, especially when it is vague or complex. On the other hand, you'll know people are ready for the ask when they besiege you with questions on how they can help. And the ask doesn't always have to be big. As a cause leader, you can also sometimes achieve results by yourself demonstrating the behaviour you would like to see your followers adopt.

Leading by their actions

What if you look out of your window and see acres of unmown parkland? It's overgrown because the city has run out of funds and can no longer afford the upkeep of its public spaces.

If you are Tom Nardone the answer is obvious. You jump on your lawnmower and start mowing the public parks yourself. Before you know it, an army of volunteers has joined you and you soon form the Detroit Mower Gang, with members volunteering their time to mow Detroit's public parks so the kids have a decent place to play.

For Nardone, ‘Doing something is way more than doing nothing'.

In an era where leadership can sometimes seem like a hollow promise — we've witnessed leadership failures across many significant public institutions — the rise of cause leaders such as Nardone offers a beacon of hope.

Glen's Espresso in Brisbane, Australia, is another example of this kind of leadership. Glen runs a coffee cart where conventionally you would expect to see a barista making the coffee and someone looking after the till.

Glen decided to base his coffee leadership on trust. Customers write their coffee order on the take-away cup, put their money in the open cash-box and take their own change. A simple instruction sheet tells you how. It's about old-fashioned honesty, and it works.

Neither Nardone nor Glen has a formal leadership title or mandate, but each has chosen to make a difference through their actions.

Cause leadership can be a lifetime's work, or it can arise from a set of circumstances that demand a leader stand up.

In 1944, when the Nazis in Eastern Europe were deporting Jews to the death camps, Raoul Wallenberg, a young Swedish diplomat, would climb on top of the human cattle trains and move along the cars handing out documents. They were fake, but looked real enough to convince the Nazis that the holders were under Swedish protection. Wallenberg would then leave the train and demand that these people be released to him.

On one occasion, according to an account in Wikipedia, German soldiers were instructed to shoot Wallenberg on sight, but impressed by his courage they fired over his head instead. 

How Wallenberg, a young man from one of Sweden's most prominent families, ended up risking his life to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews is a story of ingenuity, courage and chutzpah. Sadly, his own fate remains uncertain. He disappeared during the Red Army's siege of Budapest and is presumed dead.

Every day on my way to work I pass a small park called Raoul Wallenberg Reserve. I'd never thought much about it until I heard his story when the Australian government feted him as Australia's first honorary citizen in 2013.

Wallenberg would never have known or used the words ‘cause leader'; he just did what he thought was right, thereby saving many people from certain death. He made it his purpose, and in the end paid the highest price himself.

Closer to home, in 2002 Sydney-based marketer Carolyn Tate had come to feel her profession was meaningless. She closed down her business, sold or gave away most of her possessions and went to live in Aix-en-Provence, France, with her 12-year-old son. After much soul searching, and writing two books, she returned to Australia and became involved in the Conscious Capitalism movement.

In May 2012 she heard Raj Sisodia, co-founder of the movement, make a declaration that brought her to tears. He said marketing could be a force for good that could heal the world. His words re-inspired her towards her profession. She discovered her purpose and her brand of cause leadership.

Carolyn went on to found the Slow School of Business (Slow School) in Melbourne. It teaches business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs how to build purpose-driven, profitable businesses that make a difference on and for the planet. Cause leadership helped Carolyn find her true calling.

Watch for the pitfalls

Cause leadership, like any other vocation, can have its pitfalls. When you initiate or take up a cause you face the risk of becoming a zealot or fanatic, and you can be driven to anger when people display ignorance or apathy. As a cause leader, you should avoid the kind of passion or evangelism that disconnects you from your audience.

This is a hard truth. As a cause leader you may often have to fundraise, and you need to recognise that your audience may have compassion fatigue — there are so many demands on our charity dollars and so many worthy causes to support.

Ask, because if you don't ask people don't know what you want, but please don't badger. Also never use guilt to sell or promote your cause. Of course guilt can work — marketers and charities have always known this. But guilt in a transaction makes us feel resentful and sullied. Instead of making us feel good about ourselves, giving because of guilt can make us feel worse. Guilt giving creates a one-off transaction instead of a lifelong transformation.

Cause leaders have to think about and plan for a persuasive present and an enduring future, even when they're gone.

Most of all, cause leadership has to rest firmly on authenticity and your truth, so it lights up both you and the world. Beanies optional.