Are you using your human advantage or not?

The 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 – 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 – and to create conditions in which others can do the same.

These three operating capacities are:

• Clarity: The ability to think well when the world is noisy.
• Energy: The ability to sustain performance without consuming the person.
• Agency: The ability to choose deliberately rather than live on autopilot.

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, “What is taking most of your bandwidth right now?” 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, “I matter here.” 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 people’s 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 “speak up.” But the lived experience was different.

People had learned that raising issues slowed meetings, invited challenge, and sometimes made individuals look unprepared.

The solution wasn’t another slogan about openness. Instead, they purposefully redesigned the meeting rhythm. They began opening with “weak signals” – 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.