Leaders are not short of pressure. They are being asked to grow, transform, digitize, decarbonize, absorb artificial intelligence disruption, respond to geopolitical volatility, manage diverse or dispersed teams â all while somehow remaining calm, clear, creative, decisive, and available.
The paradox is that leaders are being asked to do more â and to become more human â at precisely the moment work is pushing them to become less so.
The World Economic Forum finds that leaders must increasingly manage two horizons: running their organizations today and preparing their workforce for the demands of tomorrow â all of this underscored by the imperative to remain analytical, agile, creative, and resilient as well as empathic, inclusive, and human-centered â and the cracks are showing. Microsoftâs 2025 Work Trend Index describes a growing âcapacity gapâ between leaders who want more productivity and workers who donât have the energy to comply.
A recent IMD survey suggests that even as many senior executives feel a âpull toward long-term, more human-centered leadership,â they are constrained by operating systems that are fixated on short-term performance and control.
The pressure is on to be all things to all people, players, and parties. And itâs a problem.
Under pressure, many leaders do not become more curious, connected, or inspiring. They default to control; they typically narrow the conversation and end up dividing rather than uniting their followers. As a result, relationships falter, trust erodes, and people withdraw. The system may keep moving, but the human capacity inside it begins to degrade, diminish, and disengage.
So, what do you do?
A leader can win the game and still lose the human capacity that made them worth following.
In a world where you are being asked to be more productive, more responsive, more resilient than ever before, are you content to see your humanity erode?
Or are you prepared to use your human advantage?
The leaders who best balance the demands of the role while sustaining the engagement of their followers deploy what I call the human advantage. What do I mean by this?
To be very clear, the human advantage is not sentimentality. Nor is it a plea for softer leadership or lower standards.
The human advantage is what I have observed in action, working with hundreds of highly effective, resilient, and inspirational leaders in more than 130 countries, across every major industry sector â from fast-moving consumer goods to oil and gas, power generation and luxury goods, and almost everything in between.
What differentiates these leaders is the ability to sustain three operating capacities under pressure â and to create conditions in which others can do the same.
These three operating capacities are:
I’ve seen the human advantage at work and in practice in diverse organizations, industries, and contexts. Often it shows up in routine and unexceptional leadership moments and cues: how a leader enters a room; whether they look up from the phone; whether they remember a name; whether the first two minutes of a meeting are human or purely transactional. And whether people leave interactions clearer, braver, or smaller.
Micro-moments create macro-culture.
In a senior team I recently supported, one of the most powerful examples was not structural; it was behavioral.
Leaders would purposefully open meetings by asking, âWhat is taking most of your bandwidth right now?â They did this consistently before moving to the tasks ahead.
That small question changed the emotional data available to the team. It revealed overload, ambiguity, hidden dependencies, and unspoken risks. It did not lower performance. It made performance more intelligent.
Small talk is not small. It builds trust through repeated moments of safety. It builds belonging by signaling, âI matter here.â It creates voice because we know that people speak more honestly when they feel seen.
The more senior you become, the more symbolic your ordinary behavior becomes. People experience your state before they process your strategy.
In that simple act, the three operating capacities were visible at once. The question created clarity by surfacing what was really occupying peopleâs attention. It protected energy by acknowledging the load people were already carrying before adding more. And it strengthened agency by giving people permission to name reality, rather than pretend everything was fine.
The human advantage can also show up in the way that work is designed.
In one manufacturing leadership team I worked with, leaders were frustrated that people were not surfacing problems early enough. The formal message was âspeak up.â But the lived experience was different.
People had learned that raising issues slowed meetings, invited challenge, and sometimes made individuals look unprepared.
The solution wasnât another slogan about openness. Instead, they purposefully redesigned the meeting rhythm. They began opening with âweak signalsâ â carefully inviting the room to share worries and concerns, thereby recognizing and acknowledging early escalation and explicitly separating problem identification from blame. Here too, clarity, energy, and agency became leadership behaviors, not abstract ideals. Clarity came from making weak signals discussable early. Energy was protected because people no longer had to carry concerns silently or spend effort managing fear. Agency increased because people had a legitimate, expected way to raise issues, influence decisions and act before small problems became serious ones.
Many of the worldâs most forward-thinking organizations deploy the human advantage to forestall issues and problems before they become serious.
Toyotaâs Andon system is a great example.
Every Toyota member is viewed as an expert in their field and is therefore empowered and proactively encouraged to stop the production line if they see something they perceive to be a threat to vehicle quality â and they do so by using the Andon cable.
Originating from the Japanese word for a paper lantern, Andon refers to an illuminated signal that notifies colleagues of an issue or risk within Toyotaâs quality-control or production streams.
When the alert is activated â typically by a pull-cord or button â it will automatically stop production so that the team can create a solution.
Warning lights are built into a visible, overhead signboard, which pinpoints the area or specific workstation where the problem has arisen. The process is streamlined, clear, and accepted by all. Flagging problems becomes easy and automatic â as easy as pushing a button.
On the surface, this is a quality process. Underneath, it is a human system: people must believe that raising a concern will lead to help and learning rather than punishment.
Develop key leadership capabilities and accelerate your impact as a leader
The human advantage doesnât posit some kind of nostalgic return to a simpler workplace â that world is gone. Nor is it an argument against AI, ambition, speed, or performance. Leaders do not need to choose between technology and humanity, or between performance and wellbeing.
The real choice is sharper. Do we use technology to accelerate a version of work that is already exhausting attention, weakening trust, flattening relationships, and turning talented people into high-functioning machines? Or do we use it to make work more intelligent, meaningful, and human?
Technology can accelerate work, but it cannot decide what is worth accelerating. AI can generate responses, but it cannot carry responsibility for the consequences of those responses. Dashboards can show what is happening, but they cannot sense what people are afraid to say. And while systems can measure activity, they cannot create meaning.
Efficiency can help an organization move. It cannot tell people why movement matters.
It is down to your leadership â to your clarity, energy, and agency â to create the conditions, the culture, and the context in which human beings can connect with work, feel purpose, find meaning, and contribute fully without fear of reprisal.
Here are five simple things you can do today to nourish clarity, protect energy, and strengthen agency â in yourself and in the people you lead.
The future will ask whether you helped people do their best work without becoming less human in the process.
The future will not be impressed by leaders who were merely busy. No one will ask whether you answered every message, attended every meeting, hit every productivity target, or kept every machine running.
The future will ask something harder of you. Did you create the conditions for people to think clearly when the world became noisy?
Did you build enough trust for people to speak before the risk became obvious? Did you protect enough energy for creativity, judgment, and courage to survive pressure? And did you use technology to amplify human capacity â or to disguise human depletion?
The future will ask whether you helped people do their best work without becoming less human in the process. This is the leadership test for the next decade. It wonât be about whether we can keep up with machines. The real test is whether we can remain human enough to lead wisely in a world increasingly shaped by them.
Remember that we are human beings, not just human doings.
Lead from there.
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