Five Leadership Lessons for ‘Tough’ CEOs

The interpersonal skills that are integral to human-centered leadership are often called “soft” skills, but they’re what underpins the hard work of managing. Empathy, emotional regulation, taking time to read people: These are the skills associated with high emotional intelligence that enable leaders to build cohesive teams and successfully grow their businesses during uncertain times.

Today, though, effective modern leadership seems to be under siege, thanks to the high public profiles of “tough” leaders. As The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter recently put it, “Corporate America’s long-running war for talent sounds more like a war on the talent these days.” This is occurring despite the fast-evolving needs of digitally maturing organizations and workforces that are often being retrained for new tasks.

Misconceptions about what makes a leader strong distract executives from recognizing where their core organizational strengths come from. To explain why your organization’s future success depends on cultivating human-centered leaders, the authors look at why the tough-leader persona is not effective or sustainable for achieving long-term results. The authors shared the belief that human-centric and strong — not tough — leadership is inevitably what will win the day.

Tough talkers need to learn some hard truths about accountability and empathy. Here are five key truths about human-centered leadership that can help them adapt effectively to modern work environments.

1. Strong leaders know that being empathetic doesn’t mean being nice. Tough leaders mistakenly think empathizing means giving in, but it doesn’t. Human-centered leaders empathize to better communicate and collaborate. Empathizing means connecting with what others are thinking and feeling, and it’s the skill that cultivates safe spaces for creativity, builds strong team alliances, and gets to clarity on issues.
2. Strong leaders are both demanding and supportive. Human-centric leaders aren’t soft about employees’ performance. They don’t ask for less. Instead, they set clear goals and priorities. They monitor progress at the team and individual levels. And they align work with employees’ identified strengths and skills.
3. Strong leaders build trust by being dependable. Tough-talking leaders often fail to appreciate that reliability — the foundation of trust — is what builds results.
4. Strong leaders focus on what’s best for teams. Discussions about workplace flexibility often focus on the extremes — fully remote work with open-ended individual choice versus mostly office-based work prescribed by a tough-talking CEO.
5. Strong leaders allow themselves and others to be fallible. The concept of the infallible leader is seemingly in vogue. Even in our fast-changing world, tough-talking leaders won’t admit to ever being wrong.