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By William Arruda

Leadership styles must evolve to stay relevant. Yet often, there’s a gap between what’s needed and the way many leaders operate. During the Industrial Revolution, a directive, command-and-control approach made sense. That style was aligned with the needs of the era. Despite today’s vastly different landscape, though, many leaders remain focused on KPIs, hierarchy, and top-down control. That has created a leadership crisis that’s impacting productivity, loyalty, and engagement.

Successful Leaders Are Human Leaders

The most successful leaders are authentic leaders who take a human-centered approach to motivating and engaging their people. That involves leading with empathy, collaboration, and connection. As technology continues to reshape the workplace and change accelerates across virtually every industry and job function, being human isn’t just a differentiator, it’s a leadership superpower.

These nine defining characteristics describe the most effective and respected leaders in today’s world of work. The common thread among these impactful leaders is their focus on humanity and their commitment to the people they serve. Successful leaders are:

1. Authentic

Strong leaders are authentic leaders and are crystal clear about who they are and what they stand for. They are self-aware. They know their values, vision, purpose, unique strengths, and differentiators. You never have to guess what they’re about. Although they might model behaviors of other successful leaders, they stay true to who they are, are comfortable in their own shoes, and don’t try to be someone they are not. That’s what makes them magnetic.

2. Consistent

Strong leaders are easy to follow because their behavior is steady and reliable. You don’t have to wonder about what’s important to them or how they will react to different situations. They’re both reliable and predictable. Every interaction, whether it’s a one-on-one meeting, a keynote, or a LinkedIn post, reinforces their core message and qualities. Consistency is one of the all-important three Cs of branding, and it’s core to today’s effective leaders. That’s because consistency builds trust among team members and with other internal and external stakeholders.

3. Differentiated

Great leaders don’t fade into the background. They stand out by being unapologetically themselves. They know their personal brand differentiation. Whether through a distinct point of view, a powerful skillset, a signature catchphrase, or a unique leadership style, they are recognizable because they are unique. Differentiated leaders embrace what makes them unique and use it to their advantage. Self-proclaimed irreverent CEO Sir Richard Branson is known for being non-conforming, unforgettable, and always true to his brand.

4. Relevant

Successful leaders evolve with the times. They stay attuned to the needs, challenges, and aspirations of their audiences, ensuring their message always feels current and needed. They have a growth mindset and are lifelong learners. They never rest on their laurels, remaining open, curious, and committed to remaining relevant. While being focused and present, successful leaders are also thinking about what’s next. Their mindset is expansive, and they encourage others to stretch beyond their comfort zones.

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Story by Joe Galvin

For CEOs, putting on their oxygen masks first means prioritizing their mental, physical, and emotional wellness.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, it brought unprecedented uncertainty, including a break in a 10-year run of economic stability. CEOs had cozied into a relatively consistent and predictable business environment; they thought they knew what to expect and how to plan for it. However, the pandemic ushered in a new era marked by rapid disruption, unpredictability, and uncertainty.

The state of burnout among CEOs

Looking back at Q2 of 2020, Vistage’s quarterly survey tracking CEO sentiment suddenly dropped 19.2 points from the previous quarter. A state of uncertainty and fear left many CEOs frozen in place while the specter of a sci-fi pathogen loomed. As the pandemic continued to wax and wane for years, the index experienced significant volatility. It whipsawed from its Q2 2020 low to a peak just four quarters later in Q2 2021, only to plunge back down exactly a year later in Q2 2022.

CEO sentiment subsequently bottomed out at the low end of its range. After remaining relatively stable—albeit sluggish—it peaked again in December 2024 with the entry of a new administration into the Oval Office, only to reverse its gains when the federal government introduced its “on again, off again” tariffs and trade policy changes in Q1 2025.

The effects of uncertainty and rapid change 

Over the last five years, CEOs have been forced to open their aperture of uncertainty and embrace rapid change. They’ve had to throw out every book on business and reimagine what success looks like and how to achieve it. Over time, this prolonged state of disruption and uncertainty has, unsurprisingly, taken its toll on the workforce, customers, and CEOs themselves, who often shoulder the brunt of the rapidly changing business environment while trying to project a demeanor of calm and decisive leadership.

It’s no wonder that nearly a quarter of CEOs report experiencing feelings of burnout daily or frequently in Q2 2025, with a whopping 44 percent stating they occasionally feel the pressure. In open-ended responses about the causes of burnout, CEOs cited overwork, lack of delegation, long hours, and working “in” the business rather than “on” it. Many say they are being stretched thin due to insufficient support from their leadership teams or being responsible for too many roles.

Some choose to bury their stress and move on, but many more are taking proactive steps to condition their body and mind to deal with the volatility and uncertainty of 2025 and beyond. Here are five of their essential resilience training tactics.

1. Physical activity  

Nearly 73 percent of CEOs prioritize regular physical activity, which is known to relieve stress, especially during times of uncertainty. However, while 83 percent agree that movement plays a meaningful role in improving their patience, mood, and decision making, 50 percent find that their schedule often interferes with their ability to exercise. CEOs must be willing to protect their calendars to ensure physical fitness is non-negotiable.

2. Preventative medical care

Proactive health measures are key to maintaining optimal health, with 71 percent of CEOs saying they proactively address minor health concerns before they become significant issues. Additionally, 81 percent report staying current with preventive health measures, including annual physicals, blood work, and screenings.

3. Diet and nutrition 

Sixty-four percent of CEOs say vitamins are a key part of their preventive health routine.

4. Mental health  

Mental health is a priority for CEOs. It’s just about finding what fits best into their schedules consistently. Forty-two percent of CEOs intentionally build time into their schedules to mentally recharge. Some report engaging in spiritual practices (daily prayer, attending mass), while others highlight cognitive recovery, therapy, or meditation. These practices help them find a sense of groundedness, especially in moments of rapid change and uncertainty.

5. Sleep and recovery  

While 40 percent say they struggle to get the right amount of sleep, leaders widely emphasized the importance of adequate sleep and structured rest. Many CEOs are using sleep technology (e.g., Chilipad, Oura, trackers), while others rely on recovery tools (e.g., massage, sauna, cold plunge) or dedicated time to disconnect.

The business landscape is unlikely to become more predictable anytime soon. Airline flight attendants have long emphasized the importance of securing one’s own oxygen mask before assisting others. For CEOs, this means prioritizing their mental, physical, and emotional well-being to ensure they are ready to lead their business—and their people—through perpetual uncertainty.

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

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by Marissa Fernandez and Frans van Loef

As a leader, you’ve noticed something feels off with your team. After years of remote work, your company has shifted to a hybrid or fully in-office model—but the return hasn’t been seamless. Meetings feel clunky, casual collaboration is inconsistent, and relationships that once felt natural now require more effort. Hoping to rebuild connection and alignment, you decide to plan a leadership team offsite.

With more organizations mandating in-office time, this is a pivotal moment to strengthen teamwork and redefine how your team works together. Offsites can be a powerful catalyst for this—but only when designed with clear intent. Many leaders assume that starting with the end in mind is enough to ensure a successful offsite, but in our experience, that’s just the beginning.

As executive coaches with extensive experience designing and facilitating offsites for corporate clients, we have seen that the most impactful offsites go beyond setting objectives—they address the deeper questions that drive real change. While clarifying your goals is an obvious first step, this article offers five additional—often overlooked—outcome-oriented questions that will help you design an offsite that delivers lasting results.

1. How do you want your team to feel?

Considering how you want your team to feel has meaningful implications on the design and delivery of the day. Take a utilities company leader who planned an offsite for her newly established leadership team. When one of us (Marissa) asked how she wanted the team to feel, she said “cozy, comfortable, and connected.” This intention led to a shift in venue—from a sterile hotel conference room to an inviting rental home. The informal setting fostered deeper connections, achieving the desired emotional outcomes.

An animal health leadership team was planning an offsite with the focus of strengthening collaboration. When asked about how she wants the team to feel, the CEO reflected and said, “valued, celebrated, and supported.” Recognizing the team’s resilience through a challenging year, we reshaped the agenda to begin with a collaborative strengths exercise. Everyone had the opportunity to acknowledge each of their peers’ strengths. The exercise immediately boosted morale and reinforced the emotional impact she aimed to achieve. Not only that, the feeling lasted, fueling intensified collaboration in a more systematic way. Being really intentional about the emotions you want to create is very valuable in crafting the right type of experience.

2. What is getting in the way of your team’s success?

A large retailer’s leadership team was consistently struggling to make decisions efficiently. This flaw was preventing the team from operating to their fullest potential and contributing to unnecessary delays on key initiatives. Diagnosing the issue, the leader disclosed that the team lacked clarity on how decision-making works and who to include in which decisions.

At the offsite, specific decision-making tools to support decision-making were discussed and specifically applied directly to three real-time situations. By providing the right tool and using it directly on actual situations, the team immediately clarified their decision-making process going forward.

3. What shift in behavior will set your team on a new trajectory?

Consider in what ways you hope things will be different when examining the “before” and “after” of the offsite. A great offsite is a memorable milestone in the team’s story, after which, it is on a new trajectory. That different trajectory can only be created with different behaviors after the session.

For example, an education non-profit leadership team wanted to transform their meetings from passive status updates into dynamic discussions that harnessed everyone’s best thinking. The team had historically avoided conflict, resulting in surface-level conversations and missed opportunities for robust problem-solving. At the offsite, they discussed the need for more productive debate and co-created a set of operating norms for navigating conflict, such as encouraging diverse perspectives and practicing active listening. To reinforce these behaviors, they scheduled time in each leadership meeting to tackle complex issues and actively practiced their norms during the session. This shift led to more engaged and impactful meetings post-offsite.

4. What do you want your team to stop doing?

Offsites always generate new actions to the team’s to-do list. Less commonly do leaders think about what can be subtracted. In order to create capacity to operate effectively and implement new ideas, exceptional leaders know they need to create room for it.

One of Frans’s clients is the CEO of a financial services organization. After a recent restructuring, she knew the current resource allocation wasn’t in line with the strategic focus of the business. The question of how her team allocates internal resources was paramount. In a specifically focused offloading session at the beginning of the offsite, the team identified ways-of-working and friction that could be eliminated to free up capacity. Dozens of ideas were generated. The team selected three items as a team and each selected one item as an individual to immediately offload. The feeling of release was palpable, and the exercise turned out to be a fire starter for the whole organization—inspiring more offloading, creating capacity for highest value work.

5. How are you going to make it stick?

An offsite offers people a pause in their regular routines to connect and reflect before they often default back into the daily busyness trap. But lasting adjustments and changes are possible and have the greatest significance. Making it stick has to be considered as part of the planning, not as an afterthought.

Allocate time at the end of the offsite to align with the team on a handful of commitments. Set expectations that all participants will be held accountable, and track the team’s progress vs. commitments on a quarterly basis. Intervene when progress isn’t demonstrated and reward continuing efforts when they are.

Another approach to ensuring follow through is to establish champions who will hold the team accountable for certain commitments. For example, a media company’s leadership team developed new operating norms at their offsite to improve decision-making efficiency. To ensure the norms stuck, they assigned a “norms champion” for each team meeting—a rotating role responsible for monitoring adherence and gently calling out deviations. They also scheduled a 30-day follow-up session to reflect on what was working, adjust the norms, and reinforce their commitment. These steps helped embed the changes into their daily routines.

Offsites aren’t just a day away from the office—they’re an opportunity to reset your team’s trajectory. By focusing on these five questions, you’ll transform a routine gathering into a catalyst for meaningful change. Start with the end in mind, ask the right questions, and design and deliver an offsite that creates connection, clarity, and momentum so your team walks away primed to thrive.

Source: HBR

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Story by Marcel Schwantes

A little introspection may alleviate the growing challenge of leadership fatigue.

What if corporate leaders took a moment to reflect not just on what they need to accomplish, but on who they aspire to be? It might seem a bit indulgent, but McKinsey research indicates that pausing for self-reflection can truly help alleviate the growing challenge of leadership fatigue—the deep exhaustion that many CEOs and top leaders feel from constant or overwhelming pressures.

Introspection is a wonderful way for leaders to develop important human skills such as empathy, generosity, vulnerability, and adaptability, which can help combat burnout. It sparks boldness and nurtures a leadership mindset that supports ongoing high performance. McKinsey’s research shows that organizations investing in human capital are 1.5 times more likely to maintain their high standards.

“It’s about how leaders navigate the unexpected events, and how they do it in a way that brings along the people they’re leading,” said Dana Maor, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company who is one of four authors of a book featuring the research.

Develop self-awareness

The book, The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, examines CEOs’ personal and professional growth amid leadership challenges. Maor and her co-authors—McKinsey partners Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan—discuss how leaders can develop self-awareness to foster change.

Using stories and strategies, they promote human-centered leadership, urging humility and continuous learning in a dynamic business environment. Success relies on self-reflection, generosity, mindfulness, and micro-practices—daily actions that reinforce purpose.

As leadership pressures continue to grow—from making tough decisions to dealing with the fallout of unmet goals—it’s no surprise that leadership fatigue is becoming more common. Last year, we saw a significant shift, with 2,221 CEOs in the U.S. stepping down, a 16-percent increase, and the average duration at Fortune companies dropping from six to five years.

Experts emphasize the importance of human-centric leadership, especially during these uncertain times, and highlight self-reflection as an essential starting point. Leaders are encouraged to seek honest feedback from trusted colleagues and to look inward by asking themselves vital questions. This practice helps build empathy, humility, and vulnerability.

As Ramesh Srinivasan beautifully put it, “What we realized is that the human-centric elements are the toughest questions to ask oneself.” These questions might include: How am I managing my time? What energizes me? How can I improve performance? And how can I inspire my team and make a positive impact in the world?

Develop trust through vulnerability

Leaders must recognize that essential human-centric skills aren’t necessarily developed on the way to the top. McKinsey found that 83 percent of leaders worldwide were unprepared for top roles, as being a strategist or a genius isn’t enough.

Human-centric skills enable leaders to connect with teams and foster motivation. A CEO’s willingness to show vulnerability by seeking input or admitting mistakes can build trust and promote a culture of openness and continuous learning, crucial for long-term success.

The art of balance is truly important: Leaders should embody qualities that might seem to be opposites, like courage and vulnerability, confidence and adaptability. Great leaders recognize that showing empathy and being generous help create a setting where everyone feels appreciated and empowered.

They also see that selflessness means focusing on creating value rather than just personal goals, and take time for themselves through activities such as meditation, deep breathing, and yoga to help reduce stress and stay focused.

Giving oneself grace is crucial for CEOs, as even experienced leaders struggle with inner work. It requires self-awareness, ongoing practice, and support from trusted advisers. McKinsey’s research shows that small, daily steps help reinforce purpose.

“The most successful approach we have seen for CEOs to reinvent themselves as human-centric leaders is to make numerous, small behavioral changes, which we call micro-practices. We often frame it as ‘unlearning’ management techniques and ‘re-learning’ human-centric attributes,” said Hans-Werner Kaas.

The payoff is clear: Leaders who develop personally can better inspire their teams, ensure well-being, and drive results. Inner work to develop human-centric skills helps leaders deliver better outcomes for organizations and their people.

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

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by Aytekin Tank

In Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun,” the two forces of nature argue over who is stronger. To settle the debate, they test their power on a passing traveler by trying to remove his cloak. The North Wind blows fiercely, but the traveler only clutches his cloak tighter. But the Sun shines gently, gradually warming the man until he willingly takes it off.

The story illustrates that persuasion is often more effective than force, but there’s also a lesson about leadership tucked inside it. When you lead with pressure, you create an environment of resistance and insecurity. But when you lead with empathy and humility, others are more likely to follow your direction.

That’s been my experience as CEO for nearly two decades. I often look to an unlikely team as a model for great leadership: our customer service team. Their work is grounded in empathy, responsiveness, and relationship-building—qualities that earn customer loyalty. When leaders apply the same principles, they foster more engaged, motivated teams, and that benefits the company at every level.

Here’s a closer look at what customer service taught me about leadership.

Empathy leads to better results

At my company, we carefully track customer service calls to continually improve the user experience. I’m consistently impressed by the complexity of these conversations and by how our team handles them with both tact and empathy.

We know that no one (well, almost no one) wants to spend their time calling customer service. So the team makes it a priority to truly understand a user’s needs and resolve issues as efficiently and thoughtfully as possible.

Leaders who take a similar approach—listening closely, responding empathetically, and aiming to meet employees’ needs—set the tone for a more engaged workplace with a greater sense of wellbeing. A recent review of studies on empathetic leadership found that it’s linked to higher employee engagement, lower turnover, and better performance, particularly during uncertain times. Even more compelling, the research showed a “pay it forward” effect: Empathy from leadership tends to inspire empathy throughout the organization.

Just like a great customer service team, strong leaders make it a practice to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully.

Transparency builds trust

Clear, transparent communication is essential to efficient customer service. It starts with active listening: Representatives must tune in to the root of a user’s question or concern, then summarize it to ensure both parties are on the same page. Then, they can resolve the issue or escalate it appropriately.

Leaders should cultivate this same dynamic with employees. Communication should be a two-way dialogue, where both sides ask questions, listen deeply, and aim for mutual understanding.

The old model—where employees operate in the dark while leaders hoard information—is no longer effective. Especially in times of rapid, unpredictable change, open communication is critical to employee wellbeing and performance. Take the advent of AI. In a recent YouGov survey, 49% of U.S. respondents said they felt concerned about AI, while 22% said they were scared. Transparent communication, like explaining the best ways to leverage the technology and continually checking in to see how they’re adapting to it, is a powerful way to quell ongoing concerns.

Adaptability isn’t optional

When we interview candidates for customer service roles, one of the top traits we look for is the ability to think on their feet. These employees face novel issues daily and must adapt in real time, finding creative solutions on the fly. So we might ask them to walk us through a conversation regarding a tricky issue. For example, a frustrated user is demanding a refund; the company policy says refunds are only given after 14 days, and it’s only been 7. How do you proceed?

Adaptability is likewise a requisite trait for today’s most effective leaders.  Try this adaptability mantra from Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn: first, stay focused on your goal. Then, when facing a challenge, ask yourself, how can I reframe this situation as an opportunity to get closer to my goal? This reframe—from adversity to an opportunity to grow—gives a window into becoming more adaptable.

It’s one thing to think quickly in the moment; it’s another to pause, zoom out, and reframe problems when the pressure mounts. For leaders, both skills are necessary.

It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of daily issues, especially when juggling the concerns of others. But keeping your broader mission in focus—your own North Star—can help reframe challenges as opportunities. By channeling the mindset of a great customer service rep, leaders can stay on their toes while guiding their teams through uncertainty.

This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com