IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Rachel Barr on recall:

“When we switch from books to screens, we’re also changing how we interact with information. Which introduces a new variable time. Online searches deliver results instantly, but this speed can flood our working memory—the brain’s sketchpad for holding and manipulating information in real time. Working memory has its limits, and scribbling too many notes too quickly can mean the ideas get muddled and lost. By contrast, the slower pace of searching through a book naturally aligns with the brain’s capacity to absorb information. The act of searching creates a pause that allows working memory to empty its contents, shuffling some of those items onto the next stage of processing to become short-term memories. The lesson here isn’t thar the internet is a threat to memory; it’s that it operates at a faster pace than we do.”

Source: How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend

Robert Greene on learning by doing:

“The problem with formal education is that it instills in us a passive approach to learning. We read books, take tests, or maybe write essays. Much of the process involves absorbing information. But in the real world, we learn best by doing, by actively trying our hand at the task. The brain is designed to learn through constant repetition and active, hands-on involvement. Through such practice and persistence, any skill can be mastered. Find the deepest pleasure in absorbing knowledge and information. Feel like you never have enough. Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion.”

Source: The Daily Laws

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Nir Eyal on change:

“Positive thinking alone so often fails to create lasting transformation. Simply telling yourself you have control isn’t enough. Your brain needs direct evidence that change is possible. Every small victory that proves our actions matter helps build beliefs that override our default passivity.”

Source: Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results

Paul Ingram on values-based leadership:

“Individuals are more motivated when they are responding to intrinsic motivations, such as when they are acting in accordance with their values. Leaders who affirm their values tap into this benefit, but they also invite others to think about their own priorities. Good leaders know that it is better to explain your thinking, and let followers reach their own conclusions as to how to behave, than to issue commands. Values-affirmed leaders are more likely to give their followers this opportunity.”

Source: What Do You Really Stand For?: The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

YOU can have an amazing business plan and strategy, but if there are issues with recruiting and keeping your people, your strategy will fail. Finding the right people and incorporating essential elements so that they will stay, are key to managing your organization’s greatest asset — your people.

It starts with hiring for fit. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you could have two companies in the same industry in adjacent buildings. They may have very similar business models and customer bases; however, the two owners have very different values and personal philosophies — which lead to very different cultures and, therefore, very different strategies and plans.

The target candidates for each company will be very different given the values and cultural differences. The way candidates are sourced, hired, trained, deployed, engaged, and evaluated might be very different. I know of two competing companies in which one has a strict uniform policy, and the other doesn’t. Can you see how that would affect everything?

Looking back at my career, I can remember working for companies where I didn’t fit in. I can also recall places where I felt fully engaged. From a talent management perspective, it’s necessary to clearly define — and relay as early in the recruiting process as possible — what it means to “fit in” with your company. Strategies and plans can then be formulated to increase the company’s chances of attracting and hiring the candidates that fit that definition.

Some organizations think that fitting in somehow happens by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you successfully define the criteria and apply it in the selection process, employee retention will go up. As a result, all the associated time, effort, and costs of employee turnover will evaporate.

This is how you begin to build your amazing culture based on sincerity and integrity.

One way to define the culture fit for your organization is to ask employees their top three reasons why they work here. In one organization where we asked the question of the employees, one word, “community,” came up in every response even though they hadn’t discussed the assignment with each other.

We then crafted an employer brand with the word “community” as the centerpiece. From the top to the bottom of the organization, everyone agreed that the employer brand was them. From that point forward, candidates could review the employer brand and know whether they’d fit in. If not, they knew not to bother applying.

Aligning the 7 Elements for Success

From my years of experience, I’ve identified seven elements associated with exceptional talent management: plan, attract, invest, deploy, engage, reward, and retain.

Each of the seven elements must have a strategy that fits with the other six to provide the needed talent results. Too many organizations try to implement strategies for each element as if they were silos and essentially end up canceling each other out. Whenever conflicts exist among the seven elements, you won’t get the overall talent results you want and need.

As you examine the seven elements, think about how each connects to the others.

1. Plan: This involves creating tactical plans that define what skills are needed, when, where, and their associated cost. This is a huge area of opportunity in most companies. Many organizations trade planning for fighting fires. Don’t overcomplicate it —keep it simple.

2. Attract: What avenues or sources will you use to attract talent? I’ve found that many companies have no idea about the variety of avenues available. They don’t understand or use their employer brand, or know how to recognize their target candidates when they walk in the door.

3. Deploy: Onboard employees in the organization, establishing employee connections and maximizing the opportunity for success. It’s critical that organizations do this on a consistent basis over time and across departments.

4. Engage: Define the norms, principles, and behaviors that your company embodies and reinforce them within the organization.

5. Invest: Analyze new skills and competencies you must develop in your people and know how they’ll be delivered. Your greatest asset is made even greater when you invest in them. Knowing what needs to be taught and the best way to do so provides personal and professional development — a key component in reducing turnover.

6. Reward: Establish how you will measure and reward success, alongside identifying future leaders. This, when combined with the earlier elements, enables your organization to realize infinite advantages.

7. Retain: Finally, agree on the strategies and processes used to retain employees who perform at the desired level. This element is the final scorecard of the other six elements. The more you can get each element to work well and work together with the other elements, the more your employee turnover rate and associated costs will nosedive.

Together, the seven elements provide the formula for effectively managing your greatest asset — your people. And the end result: your people are as invested as you in building your business.

* * *

IN MANY organizations, productivity is flat while stress and burnout are climbing. While many blame the unmanageable workload, the problem is really the overwhelming thoughtload. Thoughtload is the invisible tax on performance and productivity that comes from a treacherous triad of rising cognitive demands, escalating emotional burdens, and declining energy reserves. As thoughtload increases, it’s less likely that team members will be productive, creative, or collaborative.

Managers need to support their teams in reducing each component of thoughtload, but first, they need to address their own chaotic experience. It’s impossible to manage the madness if you’re creating it.

Focus Your Distracted Attention

While the endgame is for you to reduce your team’s thoughtload, you cannot manage the madness if you’re caught up in it. Just think of all the ways your thoughtload impacts your team members. If your attention is diluted across a vast range of issues and initiatives, your team won’t know what to prioritize. If you’re nervous, impatient, demoralized, or hostile, you’ll pass that emotionality on to your people. If you’re run down, exhausted, and uninspired, how do you expect your direct reports to have pep in their step?

You need to tackle your thoughtload first. But where to start, given that your attention, emotions, and energy are so intimately intertwined? I always tackle attention first, because you have no hope of taming emotions or restoring energy if you don’t manage your attention.

The Achievable Ambition: Focused and Flowing

Before we talk about how to effectively focus your attention, let’s agree on what “good focus” would look like. I’m not promising you that you can achieve Zen master status, but I’m promising you that you can create a world where you experience periods of deep concentration, leading to productive work and a sense of accomplishment. What if you could experience this:

• Delivering multiple high-quality pieces of work you're proud of each week
• Feeling the satisfaction of accomplishing something worthwhile
• Creating enough slack to accommodate urgent issues and disruptions to your plans
• Strengthening connections and engaging fully in conversations at work and home
• Falling asleep quickly because the intrusive thoughts have simmered down

Science Synopsis

What’s going on in your body and mind when your attention is distracted?

To put it simply, your brain is a mono-tasker, not a multi-tasker. For the most part, you can pay attention to only one thing at a time. Sure, you can walk and chew gum, but that’s because you don’t need to pay conscious attention to do either. If you switch out gum chewing for walking and texting, you’ll get a different result. Your attention goes to texting, not walking, and you’re okay until there’s a bump on the sidewalk.

While you feel like you’re multitasking, what you’re actually doing is toggling—switching your attention from one thing to the other. It turns out that toggling is inefficient:

• Your productivity decreases
• It takes longer to complete both tasks
• The quality of your task suffers as well

And multitasking doesn’t just slow you down; it gets you down. Attempts to multitask are associated with increased stress, heightened anxiety, and even temporary depressive symptoms.

When it comes to thoughtload, multitasking is part of a vicious cycle. When you’re anxious about how much you have to do, you tend to multitask to alleviate anxiety. Ironically, instead of helping you plough through more work, multi-tasking can make you less productive, leaving you with more to do, which in turn makes you even more stressed. Brutal! If multitasking doesn’t work, why do we keep attempting it? That’s another aspect of the vicious cycle. The more tired and overwhelmed you are (the energy component of thoughtload), the poorer your brain is at calibrating what you should attend to and what you should ignore. Instead of focusing on the most important thing, you prioritize based on more primal criteria like recency (What was the latest notification to ping?), fear (Who’s the scariest person breathing down your neck?), or comfort (What’s the easiest or most fun thing you could strike off your to-do list?) When you make one of these suboptimal prioritization decisions, you dig yourself into a deeper hole. Bad attention choices lead to poor outcomes for your emotions and your energy.

A Better Alternative

What does science tell us about a better alternative?

Most of us work more effectively when we focus on one thing at a time and work uninterrupted for 30 to 45 minutes. Between blocks, we need a 5- or 10-minute rest to reset, and then we’re able to do another sprint. After two or three blocks, we need a longer break. One series of studies showed a range in the most productive durations with sprints ranging from 52 to 112 minutes with the accompanying rests of between 17 and 26 minutes. Working this way, in a series of sprints and rests, we get more done, with higher quality, and less stress.

But before you start hacking productivity like a tech bro and thinking that your goal should be eight (or eighteen) hours a day of uninterrupted, heads-down focused productivity, note that you’re probably built for at most four hours a day of this quality of work. Your brain doesn’t stay at peak performance for longer than that.

Another thing to understand about your brain is that different tasks require different brain processes. Task batching, that is grouping similar activities, reduces the cost of switching and decreases errors. When speed is the goal, put like with like. In contrast, to increase creativity or provide some mental relief, deliberately switch tasks to something with an entirely different vibe.

Armed with that understanding of the value of focus, let’s talk about what you can do to reduce your thoughtload by managing your attention.

Here’s what I’ve seen when it comes to your focal point: Focus on activity, become a busy person. Focus on outputs, become a productive person. Focus on outcomes, become an effective person.

Sure, being productive is better than being busy, but if your productivity isn’t leading to changes in your outcomes, what’s it worth? Being effective is what it’s all about. When you pay attention to being effective, you don’t need to be as productive because all those things you were churning out that weren’t making a dent aren’t required anymore. When you don’t need to be as productive, you can be less busy because fewer outputs mean fewer tasks. That’s the first step in managing your thoughtload—choosing your quest and aligning your attention to accomplish it.

Once it’s clear, find a way to keep your quest top of mind.

The work to confront how your environment and even your own delusions direct your attention to all the wrong things can be intense and excruciating. And it’s not lost on me that your boss, who is slagging you for not making more progress, is the person most likely to be swamping you with low-value activities. (If that’s the case, your boss needs this process as much as you do. Work through it together.) You have things to accomplish. Real things. Meaningful things. The better defined they are, the easier it is to see what’s essential versus what’s trivial and wasteful. When you do more of the former and less of the latter, your team will benefit and both you and your boss will get kudos.

* * *

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Greg Satell on change:

“It is never enough to merely state grievances to challenge the status quo. To create meaningful change, you must put forward an affirmative vision for what you want the future to look like. This is not about messaging. It’s not enough to merely express your grievances more artfully. You have to define an alternative that is actually better, not just for those who agree with you, but for the vast majority of those who will be affected by the change you seek.”

Source: Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change

Richard S. Tedlow on seeking truth:

“Denial is a powerful impulse, but we are not entirely powerless to resist it. Through self-knowledge, openness to criticism, and receptivity to facts and perspectives that challenge our own, we can arm ourselves against denial. This is easier said than done.”

Source: Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face—and What to Do About It

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Frank Barrett on Provocative Competence:

“Leadership as design activity means creating space, sufficient support, and challenge so that people will be tempted to grow on their own. The goal is the opposite of conformity: a leader’s job is to create the discrepancy and dissonance that trigger people to move away from habitual positions and repetitive patterns. I’ve come to think of this key leadership capacity as ‘provocative competence.’”

Source: Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz

Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske on self-awareness:

“Developing your sense of Self-Awareness not only helps you gauge how you are likely to react in a given situation, but it can also provide some in-sight into the people around you. Having a stable sense of self can therefore ground you in situations when many other circumstances are beyond your immediate control.”

Source: The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in April 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business by Marcus Buckingham

Think about the last time you said, "I love that." Maybe it was about a product that exceeded expectations, a service experience that built instant loyalty, or a moment when your work brought out the best in you. That reaction isn't just emotional—it's electric. In the organization, it fuels engagement, strengthens performance, and drives lasting success. Yet most leaders don't even acknowledge it, let alone measure or make use of it. In Design Love In, leading researcher on human performance and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham reveals how love—the deep connection that makes people feel seen, valued, and inspired—isn't just a soft feeling. It's a measurable driver of performance and growth. He shows how leaders, as experience-makers, can intentionally "design love in" to everything we do: our interactions with team members, our company policies and practices, the products and services and experiences we create for those we lead and serve.

Leading in Chaos: A Clarion Call To A New Future From Two Pioneers In Leadership Development And Transformational Change by Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox

Increasingly today we find ourselves surrounded by chaos, turbulence and existential threats. We are at a destiny-shaped moment for humanity that calls for a next level of consciousness, courage and compassion from business leaders, who have a chance to contribute to the common good. In this context, and building on the main themes of Janni’s first book, he has come together with another pioneering leadership expert, Amy Elizabeth Fox to create Leading in Chaos, based on their mutual recognition of the unique demands the world faces today. Together, they encourage leaders to take one step further on the journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. Today’s fast-changing, uncertain times call for leaders to develop new capacities of consciousness and to view leadership as a sacred vocation – to become a blessing in the world through presence, coherence and deep human connection.

Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs by Jennifer Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll

Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line? This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The authors draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.

Fearless Persistence by Adam Leipzig

Fearless Persistence is about the systems that quietly shape creative success and why so many talented people struggle without ever understanding why. Drawing on decades inside film studios, creative institutions, and leadership classrooms, Adam Leipzig reveals the hidden systems that support and constrain success-how power, pressure, time, belief, and structure shape whose work travels and whose work stalls, regardless of talent. Rather than offering inspiration or hustle culture, Fearless Persistence reframes persistence as design. It shows how creators and leaders build structures that allow their work to continue when conditions change, as they always do. Clear-eyed, deeply practical, and grounded in real experience, this book helps readers see the system beneath the story and redesign their creative lives for endurance, integrity, and impact. Creative success is shaped by systems. This book shows how to design a life that thrives inside them.

The Core: 8 Principles for Building Strong, Authentic Leadership by Matt Paden with Dr. L. Ken Jones

Every leader reaches a moment when skill isn’t enough.When the challenge cuts deeper and tests conviction, humility, and heart. The Core takes readers into that defining space, introducing us to Clint Smith and his mentor, Dr. Bill Jackson, and revealing that the foundation of lasting influence doesn’t come from power or position—it comes from the strength of one’s core. Through the journey of a young man whose plans are upended by tragedy, The Core blends a compelling story of mentorship with timeless principles of leadership. Under Dr. Jackson’s guidance—a hospital CEO who leads with quiet strength and deep conviction—Clint discovers that great leadership grows from the inside out.

Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways by William R. Brody with Mike Field

Why do some of the most successful people in the world―from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey to Ralph Lauren―never finish college, while others with every academic advantage still struggle to find their way? For William R. Brody, a renowned physician-scientist and the former president of Johns Hopkins University, the answer lies in a truth higher education all too often overlooks: life, unlike textbooks, has no answer key. Most of the truly important questions we face rarely have a ready rubric and a simple solution. In Uncommon Sense, Brody distills lessons from decades in medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship, and academic leadership into a thoughtful, surprising, and often humorous exploration of how to think―and live―beyond the syllabus. Born from his popular Johns Hopkins seminar aimed at graduating seniors, the book exposes the gap between classroom achievement and real-world wisdom, offering readers a practical framework for navigating the unpredictable opportunities and sometimes contrarian decisions that define success and fulfillment.

Here is a selection of Posts from March 2026 that you will want to check out:

• Difficult Conversations Don't Have To Be So Difficult by @davidburkus
• Why Your Leadership Training isn't Working by @stopyourdrama Marlene Chism
• Lindy Library: The 0.1% Of Ideas I've Found by @george__mack
• Excellence Is Not a Performance Target via @AdmiredLeaders
• Beneath the Surface of Leadership Development by @DanReiland
• The Quiet Signals Every Great Leader Notices (That Others Miss) by @WScottCochrane
• Why Being Good, Fast and Cheap Is the Most Radical Thing a Brand Can Do via @MusebyClio by John Stapleton
• If Your Email Is Too Long, Your Thinking Isn’t Finished by @PhilCooke Before hitting send, ask yourself a simple question: What is the one thing I’m trying to say?
• Be Better by @James_Albright The world we live in needs it. The people we serve and lead need it. Be better.
• Monomaniacal by @KevinPaulScott Obsessive focus on a single idea, goal, or pursuit
• Why AI May Lead to More Work, Not Less by Jacqueline Isaacs via @FaithWorkEcon In many cases, AI tools are actually expanding human work.
• Are You Empowering or Controlling? by @samchand 2:27 VIDEO
• AI Makes Designing Faster. But Are We Thinking Less? by @gokhankurt This applies to leadership as well.
• The Psychology of Prediction by @morganhousel 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made
• POV: The creative agency model is dead – that’s why I shut mine down by Madison Utendahl via @itsnicethat
• When the Crisis Isn’t Your Fault—But It’s Still Your Responsibility by @PhilCooke
• Why Gifted Leaders Still Fail: Lessons from 25 Years of Ministry with Allen Holmes with @richbirch
• The Right Plane by @KevinPaulScott
• The Two Paths Leaders Take After Success: Death and Destruction or Sustainable Success? by @BrianKDodd on Leadership
• Be the Person that People Want to follow by @James_Albright
• Visibility Versus Credibility. Two Different Things and Why It Matters. by @PhilCooke
• Resolve Your Personal Dilemmas with Greater Confidence by Haywood Spangler
• What Your Conversations Reveal About Your Culture by @stopyourdrama Marlene Chism

See more on Twitter.

BEST practices are often viewed as the key to success in the business world. Certifications to prove practitioners are competent in accordance with a best practice make sense at the surface. However, they’ve become psychological cover that create mediocre results at best. It’s reassuring to be able to point at the protocol and say, “I followed the best practice. It’s not my fault.”

Take project management, for example. Most project managers I’ve met (my younger self included) come from technical backgrounds who love best practices. I genuinely thought project management was about following the best practice and forcing people to follow my plan. Spoiler alert: That didn’t work.

With today’s disruption and volatility, “business as usual” means little when there’s no “usual” anywhere in sight. Although Disruption and Volatility would make great names for a law firm, they require an adaptive approach to ensure survival and sustainability.

Best practices bring a false measure of certainty for keeping threats at bay. However, they’re largely irrelevant as they’re developed by looking in the rearview mirror according to what worked under the conditions at that time.

The solution is enhancing critical thinking to navigate complexity in real time.

These days, to be successful, you need to be adaptable. This requires developing the critical thinking skills to solve the unique challenges your situation presents. To do so, follow these tips:

1. Don’t Mistake Motion for Mastery

Attending endless meetings, always agreeing with leadership, escalating decisions, and “checking the boxes” that show you observed the best practice are all compliance-based behavior. You feel like you’re providing value but are really providing only a superficial benefit. Busy work consumes energy. It moves the needle little in terms of value delivered. This puts your organization and yourself at risk.

Mastery comes from thoughtful distillation to what matters. Condense your work down to its essence — the 1 percent that really moves the needle. This involves having the important coaching conversation to shift the thinking of a team member, sharing the contrarian viewpoint that no one else sees, or carving out time for learning and growth to build new thinking. These are all leverage plays that return far more over time than they consume.

2. Understand That Best Practices Become So in Hindsight

I started my career in engineering and realized early on that the work I did was a “good enough” approximation of the real-world physics my designs operated in. This allowed me to build things that consistently worked at a reasonable cost.

Best practices are an approximation of what works in the real world. However, they’re only a snapshot of what worked at one point in time in the past. The business environment evolves rapidly at an ever-increasing rate of change. Best practices are backward-looking and largely irrelevant to the modern environment in which we try to apply them.

This is why we talk of “better” practices and not “best” practices. You should always be getting better in the system in which you operate. Once you think you’ve arrived at the “best,” there’s no point to continue getting better. That leads to complacency.

3. Realize That Value Lies Beneath the Surface

Understand what the organization you work within truly values. I often find when working with clients, whatever leadership thinks provides value in terms of outcomes are in tension with what leaders actually show they value day to day. For example, they may say the organization needs to be the top innovator in its industry globally. Then, leaders micromanage, reinforce compliance, and criticize mistakes. You can’t get to innovation if you value compliance, shame risk-taking, and make it intimidating for people to pursue efforts that might come up short.

Success comes to those who are brave and can push back against the behavioral norms despite the daily rhetoric. Speak up when it feels uncomfortable. Have one high-leverage conversation tomorrow that you’ve been putting off. I rarely meet leaders who don’t value results when you show them you can achieve them.

People who can do this write their own ticket. That means you need to be ready for some social discomfort on your journey to delivering the results your organization truly wants.

Best practices are misaligned with the needs of the modern business environment because they’re rooted in yesterday’s logic and provide convenient psychological cover. In a world that previously rewarded compliance, many professionals were never required to develop strong critical thinking. That world has shifted. Leaders must move beyond the comfort those practices once provided and focus instead on the high leverage work that creates real outcomes.

The willingness to think, question, and adapt is now what separates compliance from true leadership.

* * *

EVERY year, organizations spend billions of dollars developing leaders in strategy, finance, and operational execution. Organizations sponsor employees through MBA programs, leadership academies, and executive coaching. They teach how to read a balance sheet, build a competitive moat, and manage a P&L. What rarely makes the curriculum is the inner work — the cultivation of self — that actually shapes how leaders make decisions under pressure; how they treat people when no one is watching,

The word "spirituality" makes most boardrooms uncomfortable. It conjures images of incense and meditation retreats, not quarterly earnings calls and market strategy. And yet, the qualities that spiritual traditions have long cultivated — integrity, empathy, hope, purpose, a sense of something larger than oneself — are exactly what research increasingly shows drives long-term organizational performance. These are not soft skills sitting at the margins of leadership. They are the foundation.

The real question isn't whether these principles belong in business. The evidence has settled that debate. The question is why we have kept them out for so long — and what it is costing us.

The Cost of Leading Without Coherence

The numbers are striking. According to Deloitte research, three global companies lost a combined $70 billion in market value as a direct result of trust failures — not market disruption, not technological obsolescence, but the erosion of trust. Meanwhile, Gallup's 2024 data reveals that employee engagement has hit a ten-year low, with just 31% of workers actively engaged and approximately 8 million fewer engaged employees than in 2020. These are not abstract statistics. They represent organizations hemorrhaging talent, productivity, and competitive advantage.

The pattern beneath these numbers is consistent: leaders who default to authority, control, and short-term metrics create cultures of disengagement and, eventually, cynicism. Innovation slows. Collaboration becomes transactional. The best people start looking for exits.

This is the coherence gap — the distance between what leaders say they value and how they actually lead. It is where organizations quietly break down, long before the crisis becomes visible on a balance sheet. And it is, at its core, a spiritual problem: the failure to integrate who we are with how we lead.

What High-Performing Leaders Do Differently

In researching this question through extensive interviews with CEOs, investors, and senior leaders across sectors, four qualities emerged with striking consistency among those who built genuinely high-performing, resilient organizations.

These qualities — Hope, Empathy, Abundance, and Legacy thinking (HEAL) — are not personality traits or leadership styles. They are practices. Disciplines. Things you cultivate, not things you simply have.

• Hope as a practice, not a feeling. Most leaders think of hope as an emotion — something that rises and falls with circumstances. High-performing leaders treat it as a discipline. Data from meQuilibrium shows that employees with high hope are 74% less likely to burn out. Shiva Dustdar, at the European Investment Bank Institute, offers a compelling example of what this looks like in practice: deliberately cultivating hope as an organizational discipline, not simply as a byproduct of good news. This means communicating a credible vision of the future, acknowledging difficulties without catastrophizing them, and modeling the belief that obstacles are navigable. In a climate of chronic uncertainty, a leader who can hold and transmit genuine, grounded hope is an organizational asset of the highest order.
  
  
• Empathy through brave spaces. The leadership conversation has spent years emphasizing "psychological safety," and rightly so. But the most effective leaders have moved beyond safe spaces to what might be called brave spaces: environments where people are both genuinely heard and genuinely challenged. Where vulnerability is not only permitted but becomes a catalyst for creativity and ethical clarity. This is empathy in its fullest form, not the softening of standards or the avoidance of difficult conversations, but the capacity to hold another person's reality with enough presence and care that they can bring their full self to the work. Leaders who build brave spaces don't just reduce turnover. They unlock the discretionary energy that drives breakthrough performance.
  
  
• Abundance as generosity, not scarcity. Leaders who lead from abundance do not just create more engaged teams. They create cultures where people bring their full creativity and commitment to the work because they trust that there is room for everyone to succeed. An example of a company that cultivates abundance is Devoted Health. They follow a practice of all of their employees, before engaging with their patients, imagining that the patient is a beloved family member. They credit their success as an organization to this simple practice.
  
  
• Legacy as a decision-making filter. Niren Chaudhary, during his tenure at Chairman of Panera, used what he called a "triple accretive test" for every significant decision: Is this brand accretive? Is it people accretive? Is it culture accretive? This is legacy thinking operationalized, a concrete method for keeping long-term organizational health at the center of day-to-day decisions rather than allowing short-term pressures to erode the foundations that make performance sustainable. Leaders who ask "what kind of organization am I building?" alongside "what are our numbers this quarter?" make fundamentally different choices and build fundamentally different organizations.

The Business Case is Settled

For those who still need the data before the philosophy, purpose-driven companies outpaced the S&P 500 by 10.5 to 1 over a fifteen-year period.

These are not the results of luck or favorable market conditions. They are the compounding results of leaders who chose to build organizations with coherence, trust, and genuine purpose at their core.

The Choice Every Leader Faces

Leadership begins in the mind. The way a leader thinks, what they attend to, what they believe about people and about their own purpose, shapes every decision they make. The inner work of cultivating hope, empathy, abundance, and a long-term view is not separate from the hard work of building organizations. It is the hard work. It is the work that determines whether all the other work blossoms or collapses.

Every leader faces a choice, often unconsciously: to lead from default, reactive thinking — the accumulated habits of a career spent optimizing for the next result — or to cultivate the spiritual and moral qualities that create lasting impact. The first path is easier, at least at first. The second is harder, but it is the only one that builds something worth building.

That choice defines not just your organization's performance. It defines your legacy.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Jenna Nicholas on hope:

“Real hope is not a spectator state of mind but rather a passionate mobilization to get up and join forces with the world around us. This kind of hope dares us to transcend fear and indifference by taking deliberate steps toward building a better future through our relationships and our work. Optimism is not just a nice feeling; it’s a courageous pledge to action, a belief in the possibility of change, and a summons to support solutions of hope-whether they’re grand and sweeping or just a tiny next step in the direction we want to go. This kind of hope keeps us going and inspires those around us.”

Source: Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing

Jane Goodall on hope:

“Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen, but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.”

Source: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

A former rancher turned finance leader explains why the “costume of conformity” is costing you clients, credibility, and the career you actually want.

EARLY in my finance career, a client and I hit it off over the phone. We had a natural personality match — easy conversation, good rapport, real trust building in real time. When he came to my office for a face-to-face consultation, he saw me from across the room before we’d been formally introduced. He walked out. Didn’t say a word. He wasn’t going to trust the largest transaction of his life to what he saw as an immature individual who didn’t look the part.

At the time, I was doing everything I’d been told to do. I’d come into finance from cattle ranching, welding, heavy equipment, truck driving, and underground mining — environments where you dressed for utility, not appearances. When I entered the corporate world, I was subjected to constant scrutiny: how I talked, how I groomed, how I dressed, how I stood. All of it presented as a necessity of success. So I conformed. I put on the costume. And I lost a client anyway — not because I was being myself, but because I wasn’t. That experience, and several like it, taught me something that changed the trajectory of my career: authenticity isn’t just a feel-good buzzword. It’s a business strategy. Here’s why.

The People Who Told Me to Conform Didn’t Stick Around

Not long after I started dressing and grooming the way I was told to, every single one of the people who insisted their way was the path to success had disappeared. They left the business. They weren’t successful. And there I was, sitting alone in an office, “dressed for success” according to the standards of people who had failed. That forced a hard question: if the people prescribing the formula couldn’t make it work for themselves, why was I following their playbook? The advice we accept about how to present ourselves often comes from people who haven’t achieved what we’re trying to achieve. Before you take someone’s word on what success looks like, check whether they’ve actually built any.

The Costume of Conformity Creates a Mismatch — and People Can Feel It

Here’s what I figured out from losing that client: the problem wasn’t that I didn’t look like a finance professional. The problem was that I looked like one on the outside and sounded like something completely different on the inside. My words and personality created one impression. My appearance created another. The mismatch made people uneasy, even if they couldn’t articulate why. I was essentially lying with my appearance. When your outside doesn’t match your inside, people sense it — and any trust you built through conversation gets undermined the moment they see the disconnect. Conformity doesn’t build trust. Consistency does.

Authenticity Is the Fastest Way to Sort Through People

When I finally made the decision to let my outward appearance match the person inside, something unexpected happened: I started saving an enormous amount of time and resources. If someone took issue with the honest representation of who I am before we ever discussed business, neither of us invested time that would result in a loss. No deep personal analysis across multiple meetings just to discover we weren’t a fit. No weeks of small talk built on a false first impression. Showing up as yourself is the most efficient filter in business. The people who can’t get past how you look were never going to be the right clients, partners, or colleagues anyway. Better to find that out in the first thirty seconds than the first three months.

Walls Come Down When the Costume Comes Off

The flipside was just as powerful. When I stopped conforming, the people who were a fit connected with me faster and deeper than they ever had before. Walls came down. Conversations were more open and relaxed. There was no scripted small talk, no rehearsed objection-handling techniques taught by industry trainers. Just two people having a real conversation. I’ve found that the greatest way to overcome objections is to develop an actual relationship with a person — to truly care about them. And the best way to evidence that care is by being authentically yourself. Any sort of fakeness, no matter how polished, brings everything into question. If someone suspects you’re performing, they’ll wonder what else you’re hiding.

Being Yourself Is a Risk — Take It Anyway

I won’t pretend this is easy. When you stop conforming, you will lose people. Some clients will walk. Some colleagues will judge. Some opportunities will close before they open. That’s the cost, and you have to be willing to pay it. But here’s what I’ve learned over decades in this business: the opportunities you lose by being yourself are always smaller than the ones you gain. The clients who stay are better clients. The relationships are deeper. The referrals are stronger. And you get to wake up every morning without dreading the performance you have to put on. If you’re going to be judged for your appearance either way, you might as well make sure what people are judging is actually you.

Drop the Costume

The choice is simple, even if it’s not easy: you can keep hiding behind the costume of conformity, hoping it earns you approval from people who may not even be around next year. Or you can show up as the best, most honest version of yourself and let the sorting happen naturally. Be authentic. Be kind. Be excellent at what you do. And if someone can’t get past the packaging to see the substance, that’s not a client you lost — it’s time you saved.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

John Kenneth Galbraith on power:

“An important tendency in all modern political comment is to exaggerate the role of personality in the exercise of power. What rightly should be attributed to the property or organization surrounding them is thus accorded to their personality. Vanity also contributes to the exaggeration of the role of personality. Nothing so rejoices the corporate executive, television anchorman, or politician as to believe that he is uniquely endowed with the qualities of leadership that derive from intelligence, charm, or sustained rhetorical capacity—that he has a personal right to command. Divorced from organization, the synthetic personality dissolves, and the individual behind it disappears into the innocuous obscurity for which his real personality intended him.”

Source: The Anatomy of Power

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld on bouncing back:

“William Shakespeare penned the immortal words ‘Some men are born great, some men achieve greatness, and some men have greatness thrust upon them.’ But perhaps what marks greatness above all else is the ability to be great again؅—to reachieve greatness when greatness, however initially gained, is torn from our possession. It is the ability to bounce back from adversity—to prove your mettle once more by getting back into the game—that separates the lasting greats from the fleeting greats.”

Source: Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

LEADERSHIP clarity rarely comes from comfort. More often, it’s found in moments of disruption, when certainty disappears and only what truly matters remains.

For more than four decades, I’ve helped leaders learn through experience rather than theory. Across more than 50 countries, I’ve designed leadership development programs built around challenges: ropes courses, night orienteering, search-and-rescue scenarios, scuba expeditions, and even dogsledding in remote environments. The approach draws heavily from the experiential leadership model used by Outward Bound, where I served as both an instructor and board trustee.

The premise is simple: place people in unfamiliar situations, require real decisions, and then reflect deeply on what happened and what they learned from the experience. Over time, however, I began asking a more personal question: What if the most powerful leadership lessons don’t come from simulations at all, but from our own lives?

When I was 18, I traveled across 11 African countries on an overland expedition. What was supposed to be a four-month journey stretched into six as we navigated breakdowns, border delays, and unpredictable conditions. Along the coast of Cameroon, on the volcanic sands of Batoke Beach, I contracted malaria.

I was living in tents in a swamp, thousands of miles from home, with no nearby hospitals and little certainty about treatment. The situation was frightening and uncertain, and the small group of travelers around me suddenly depended on one another in ways we hadn’t anticipated.

Years later, I realized that experience had quietly shaped how I approach leadership challenges.

The lesson was simple but powerful: If I could get through that, I could get through anything.

That belief didn’t make me reckless. It made me grounded. It changed how I viewed risk, adversity, and uncertainty.

What struck me later was how often leaders overlook the insights buried in their own experiences. We rush past difficult moments and move on. But leadership growth doesn’t come from the experience itself; it comes from the meaning we extract from it.

4 ways leaders can turn difficult experiences into clarity:

1. Start with a moment of real disruption: Think about a time when certainty disappeared, and the outcome wasn’t guaranteed. Leadership insight often begins in moments when familiar assumptions no longer apply.
2. Ask what the moment demanded of you: What instincts, behaviors, or values helped you navigate the situation? Difficult experiences often reveal capabilities we didn’t know we had.
3. Identify the belief that stayed with you: Most defining experiences leave behind a quiet conviction: I can adapt. I can endure. I can lead through uncertainty.
4. Apply that belief to current challenges: Leadership growth happens through transfer. The lessons from past adversity can shape how you approach today’s decisions, risks, and unknowns.

When leaders take time to reflect on difficult moments, they build an internal library of insight that is far more powerful than any case study. Every challenge becomes a potential leadership lesson.

In today’s volatile environment, marked by rapid change, economic pressure, and constant disruption, that perspective matters more than ever. The ability to remain steady doesn’t come from having all the answers. It comes from knowing that you’ve faced uncertainty before and learned from it.

Your defining leadership moment doesn’t have to involve malaria. But it does require reflection. When leaders take time to revisit the experiences that shaped them, they often discover that the clarity they’re seeking is already there.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Tim Elmore on balancing confidence and humility:

“Leading today requires combining these two attributes—confidence and humility. Reality changes so quickly, leaders cannot become arrogant, but must remain in a learning posture. At the same time, team members long for their leader to inspire them with confidence. Bob Iger said, “There’s nothing less confidence inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.”

Source: The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership: Embracing the Conflicting Demands of Today’s Workplace

Hasard Lee on decision-making:

“When we rashly turn over our decision-making to external aids, such as committees or computers, we lose the ability to bring the full power of our brain to bear on a problem. We, in essence, have carved out a hole in our understanding and replaced it with someone else’s solution. If we don’t learn the underlying concepts behind that new infor-ation, then we’re blindly trusting that it’s correct. We lose the ability to quickly reconfigure concepts into creative solutions, which is one of the great strengths of the human mind.”

Source: The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot’s Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.