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Leadership
Do you care enough to see your business win?
Combating disengagement means reframing leadership as a care-based performance system that lets people do their best work without burning themselves out. Here’s how.
Rapid read:
- Almost 80% of the workforce today is disengaged, while 40% experience daily stress at work. This isn’t just a well-being issue. It’s a performance warning.
- Care-based leadership is a system of behaviors, decisions, rituals, and safeguards that empower people to contribute fully without burning out.
- In a world of burnout, disengagement, AI disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and continuous change, five key calls to action will determine those organizations that win – and those that don’t.
The surveys have been run, the data analyzed, and the message is clear: organizations are facing a quiet crisis of human energy.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report finds that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, with 64% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged. The same report estimates that low engagement costs the global economy around $10tn in lost productivity, while 40% of employees globally reported experiencing significant daily stress.
Put differently, four out of five people in the global workforce are not strongly psychologically attached to their work, their team, or their employer. Many are present but not fully committed. Connected, but not truly engaged. Busy, but depleted.
This is not simply a well-being concern. It is a performance warning.
Now imagine the opposite.
Gallup’s research shows that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement outperform those in the bottom quartile across multiple business outcomes, including 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity, 63% fewer safety incidents, and 78% lower absenteeism.
The implication for leaders is profound. When people feel seen, trusted, supported, and safe, they do not simply feel better. They perform better. They contribute more fully. They speak up earlier. They collaborate more generously. They bring more effort, energy, creativity, and judgment to the work.
That is why I believe we need to rethink care.
By “care,” I am not referring to a warm sentiment. Care is not a personality trait. It is not a vague feeling leaders express when everything else is going well. Care is a performance system: a visible, repeatable set of leadership behaviors, decisions, rituals, and safeguards that create the conditions in which people can do their best work without burning themselves out.
In my work with FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organizations across more than 100 countries, I have seen the consequences of leadership systems built largely on compliance and control. Control can create short-term order, but it often produces brittle organizations: organizations where people withhold concerns, hide mistakes, protect themselves, and wait for permission.
Care-based leadership does something different. It builds resilience, trust, accountability, retention, and long-term performance. It does not replace ambition. It makes ambition sustainable.
In Who Cares Wins, the book I wrote with behavioral scientist E. Scott Geller, we argue that care should be understood not as a soft virtue, but as a leadership capability. It is the capability to create environments where people feel safe enough to speak, stretched enough to grow, and supported enough to perform.
The title consciously echoes “Who Dares Wins,” the motto of the British Special Air Service, personally chosen by David Stirling in 1941. But the leadership lesson is not that business should become more militaristic. Quite the opposite. The lesson is that performance under pressure depends on trust, discipline, loyalty, preparation, and the willingness to put the team before the ego.
In today’s organizations, that means care must become operational.
Five principles of care-based leadership
In Who Cares Wins, we set out five principles for leaders who want to move care from intention to impact. These are not abstract values. They are practical leadership disciplines: ways of building trust, strengthening teams, improving performance, and creating the conditions in which people can do their best work.
My advice, as you read them, is to reflect not only on whether you agree with them, but on whether they are visible in your own leadership system. Are they embedded in your rituals, decisions, conversations, and trade-offs? Or do they remain aspirations?
Extreme ownership means asking a different question: what are the conditions we are creating?
1. Extreme ownership and team loyalty
Leadership begins with ownership. Not ownership of every task, every answer, or every decision, but ownership of the environment in which people are expected to perform.
In the Special Air Service, leaders are responsible for the lives of those around them. Their role is not simply to command, but to create the conditions in which the team can survive, adapt, and succeed. The business context is different, but the leadership principle still holds: people need to know that their leaders are in it with them when it matters.
Too often, leaders ask people to be resilient while leaving intact the very systems that exhaust them: unclear priorities, meeting overload, poor handovers, fragile communication, inconsistent decision-making, and cultures where asking for help is quietly interpreted as weakness.
Extreme ownership means asking a different question: what are the conditions we are creating?
Are workloads realistic? Are priorities clear? Do people have the resources, recovery, autonomy, and support they need? Are leaders visible when pressure rises, or only when results are due?
Team loyalty is not blind allegiance. It is built through consistent, reliable, visible care for people’s welfare, growth, and morale. Leaders who demonstrate that they have their people’s backs earn something deeper than compliance. They earn commitment.
The Brazilian company Semco is often cited as an example of what happens when trust, autonomy, and employee voice are designed into the operating model. Under Ricardo Semler’s leadership, employees were given unusual freedom over working hours, production quotas, work design, and even elements of salary structure. The broader lesson is not that every organization should copy Semco. It is that leaders should be willing to challenge inherited assumptions about control.
Taking ownership of people’s well-being does not mean lowering standards. It means recognizing that performance standards and human conditions are inseparable.
People watch what leaders tolerate.
2. High performance is built on trust
Trust is not a communications strategy. It is not created by a speech, a values statement, or a leadership off-site. Trust is built through repeated evidence.
People watch what leaders tolerate. They watch what gets rewarded. They watch how bad news is received. They watch whether commitments are kept. They watch whether leaders admit uncertainty, invite challenge, and respond with curiosity when someone raises a concern.
High performance depends on this kind of trust because people rarely speak up in environments where candour is punished. They stay silent. They comply. They work around problems rather than naming them.
Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as one of the core dynamics of effective teams, alongside dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Google’s own workplace guidance frames psychological safety through questions such as whether mistakes are held against people, whether team members can raise tough issues, and whether it is safe to take risks.
That matters because many organizational failures are not caused by a lack of intelligence. They are caused by silence.
Care-based leaders understand that trust is built before the crisis. By the time the pressure is extreme, it is too late to manufacture psychological safety. The team either believes it is safe to speak, or it does not.
Trust is not soft. It is the foundation of speed, learning, innovation, accountability, and performance under pressure.
Care-based leadership recognizes that growth is not a perk. It is a duty.
3. Investment in team growth
Many organizations want more from their people: more agility, more innovation, more ownership, more pace, more resilience. But leaders often underinvest in the development required to make those demands reasonable.
Care-based leadership recognizes that growth is not a perk. It is a duty.
This means creating opportunities for learning, mentoring, challenge, feedback, and progression. It also means creating the psychological conditions in which people can say, “I don’t know,” “I need help,” or “I made a mistake,” without fear of embarrassment or punishment.
The caring leader is not the leader who protects people from difficulty. Growth requires challenge. But there is a profound difference between stretching people and abandoning them. One builds capability. The other creates anxiety.
Leaders who invest in team growth make room for others to take initiative, solve problems, test ideas, and assume greater responsibility. They do not hoard expertise. They multiply it.
When employees grow, the organization grows with them.
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4. Standing up for what’s right
Care is not passive. It is not simply being kind, available, or supportive. Sometimes care requires confrontation.
It means calling out behaviour that damages trust. It means refusing to normalize disrespect. It means stopping work when safety is compromised. It means protecting people from unreasonable demands, even when those demands come from powerful stakeholders. It means drawing visible red lines around dignity, fairness, health, and safety.
This is where leadership becomes uncomfortable.
It is easy to talk about values when they cost nothing. The real test comes when doing the right thing carries a price: delay, conflict, reputational risk, financial pressure, or personal inconvenience.
Standing up for what’s right is not a side issue. It is central to the credibility of leadership. People do not judge leaders only by what they say they value. They judge them by what they defend when it becomes difficult.
Patagonia offers one example of a company that has tried to make its values operational. In 2022, founder Yvon Chouinard announced that “Earth is now our only shareholder,” with future profits directed toward fighting the climate and extinction crisis. Not every organization can or should make the same choice. But every leadership team can ask whether its stated values are visible in its hardest decisions.
Care-based leadership does not avoid commercial reality. It insists that commercial reality should not erase ethical responsibility.
Care becomes a competitive advantage when it is designed into the rhythm of work.
5. Care as a competitive advantage
The real test of care is whether it survives the calendar.
Many leaders demonstrate care in moments: after a crisis, after a resignation, after a poor engagement survey, after someone burns out. But care that only appears after damage has been done is not a system. It is a reaction.
Care becomes a competitive advantage when it is designed into the rhythm of work.
It shows up in how meetings are run. How decisions are made. How priorities are clarified. How people are recognised. How conflict is handled. How workloads are reviewed. How performance conversations happen. How recovery is protected. How leaders check in before the task, not only after the result.
It is visible in small practices: asking better questions, listening without rushing to fix, following through on promises, noticing who has gone quiet, inviting dissent, recognising effort, and making it safe for people to tell the truth early.
These practices may sound simple. They are not always easy. Under pressure, leaders often default to control. But the best leaders learn to treat care as a discipline, not an instinct.
That is when care becomes more than a value. It becomes an advantage: a source of trust, energy, resilience, retention, innovation, and sustained performance.
The human advantage
Care is not optional. It is not a nice-to-have. It is one of the most important leadership capabilities of our time.
In a world of burnout, disengagement, AI disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and continuous change, organizations cannot afford cultures where people are too exhausted to think clearly, too afraid to speak honestly, or too detached to contribute fully.
Technology will continue to transform work. AI will automate tasks, accelerate processes, and reshape entire industries. But it cannot replace the human conditions that make performance possible: trust, meaning, courage, connection, judgment, and care.
The leaders who understand this will not treat care as a soft alternative to performance. They will treat it as the system through which performance becomes sustainable.
Ask yourself the following questions and reflect deeply on what the answers reveal.
- What kind of performance system am I really creating?
Am I building an organization where people perform because they feel trusted, supported, clear, and committed – or one where performance depends too heavily on pressure, control, and exhaustion? - Where might control be masquerading as leadership?
Which of our current processes, meetings, reporting rhythms, or approval routines genuinely create clarity – and which simply signal mistrust, slow people down, or drain energy from the system? - Is it genuinely safe to tell me the truth?
Would people bring me bad news early, challenge my thinking, raise concerns, or admit uncertainty – or would they manage the message until the issue becomes impossible to ignore? - What am I tolerating that quietly damages trust?
Where am I allowing poor behaviour, chronic overwork, disrespect, silence, ethical compromise, or avoidable ambiguity to continue because confronting it feels uncomfortable or inconvenient? - Am I asking people to be resilient in a system that makes resilience harder?
Do I understand where energy is being drained in the organization – through workload, pace, complexity, meetings, unclear priorities, or constant connectivity – and what am I prepared to redesign? - What would change if care became a strategic discipline here?
If we treated care with the same seriousness as financial performance, risk management, innovation, or customer experience, what would we stop, start, measure, reward, or redesign first?
In the end, the real question is not whether you care. The question is whether you care enough to build an organization that can truly win.
Authors
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