As leaders we often lament the need for authentic leadership and the need to empower others to bring their full selves to work. It’s become a global industry of coaches, frameworks, and keynotes. Yet in small and medium organisations, genuine leadership still feels scarce.
The verdict is in that businesses with genuine leadership see improved retention, greater satisfaction, lower burnout, and importantly, stronger alignment. So why are so many leaders still stumbling at the first step - turning up human?
The myth of professional distance
In the past two decades, the idea of “professional distance” has evolved. No longer are leaders expected to detach their emotions and store them in a box, or maintain an artificial neutrality. Our role is to be authentic. And to do it in a way that maintains respect and trust - which comes from our ability to show presence, not blanket restraint.
This change has been driven by the sensible recognition that life is complicated, and our working lives are a reflection of that. We spend nearly half of our time each week at work. It’s inevitable that our interactions with others become more than just another to-do.
Our job as leaders is to help our team keep half of their life on track, and that often means helping them keep the other half of it on track too. As customer heralds, we must turn up similarly for our customers because they’re human beings with their own challenges, needs, and stressors.
It’s not easy, but our team members and customers expect us to give a s#*t about them and their needs, and that requires us to embrace our empathy and turn up with a full range of emotions, not hide from them.
This is the only way we can unlock human-led outcomes and drive our organisations forward.
Modern leadership requires emotional fluency
As AI and technology continue to disrupt the industry we need to focus on what can’t be captured in an algorithm: empathy, human understanding, and navigating emotional complexity. Enter emotional fluency, the skill of recognising, acknowledging, and interpreting the human landscape in front of you.
Modern leaders need to know they’re allowed to turn up human, and so are the people around them. This means there’s good days, and bad days. The key with emotional fluency is reflecting on how we’ve operated on either day, and applying the same empathy and understanding for the people around us. Failing to do this leads to rash character judgments or punishing people for having a bad day, which lowers trust and leads to surface-level relationships.
Fluent leaders will find that they build high-trust environments where they and the team can reflect, recalibrate, and grow. Coaching new leaders and team members toward greater self-awareness doesn’t just strengthen relationships, it creates teams that are comfortable challenging ideas and experimenting together. That safety not only bolsters alignment and outcomes, but helps each person grow their career while building a stronger, more resilient team.
Scaling humanity
So what’s the best way to scale humanity in an organisation? It is art as much as science requiring a thoughtful, habit-led approach across organisations. It unavoidably starts with leaders - the higher up you can embed it into an org, the further and faster it spreads.
This means staying mindful of and reflecting on how you’ve responded and reacted to situations. It asks us to take a conscious approach to understanding what our own and others’ emotions are signalling. Operationally it starts with building high-trust environments in weekly 1:1s between managers and direct reports, where discussions are focused on the things that matter.
When done right, this will ripple through the team into cross-functional and peer-to-peer conversations.
When there’s disagreement, always start by assuming positive intent - even when people are a bit grouchy - and being able to let the water flow under the bridge when we and others don’t get it right 100% of the time. If there’s real grit in an interaction, get on a call with the person. Calls are a quick and easy way to smile, negotiate around the middle ground, and defuse tension. Make sure you avoid carrying frustrations for weeks (or months) - this means no four-month-later “feedback” sessions. Leave it in the past, and encourage others to do the same.
As humans we can operate with a level of healthy tension. It often shows there are passionate and caring people in your organisation who want to find the best outcome. There is a balance that needs to be monitored here though, too much tension and you tilt into toxic behaviours, too little and you’ve created a beige-flag culture without realising it.
Wrapping up
Leadership in today’s world isn’t about being less human - it’s about being fluent in it. As our world continues to become more complex technically and socially we’re required as leaders to keep pace with the evolution and maintain the heart and humanity in our organisations.
Scaling with humanity is a recognition that trust, empathy, and reflection are critical to helping our teams to remain aligned, retained, and successful. The future of leadership belongs to those of us who can balance achieving outcomes and staying human at the same time.