For nearly two decades, I’ve worked in and alongside organizations at the most senior levels. And I see one clear pattern—your most technically brilliant people aren’t always your best leaders.
The organizations that retain their best people aren’t necessarily full of technically gifted employees. They do, however, choose leaders who make people feel that the work matters and they matter too. Technical expertise will often get you hired, but will not, on its own, make you a leader people choose to follow.
The data changing the conversation
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies social influence, resilience, flexibility, agility, motivation, and self-awareness as among the most critical skills for the coming decade. These are traditionally labeled soft skills, but they’re usually the hardest skills to develop, and the most difficult to maintain.
Gallup’s 2026 report points to managers as the primary driver of a global decline in employee engagement. The people responsible for holding culture together are the ones switching off first, and technical competence is not the solution. What determines whether a team stays engaged is whether people feel connected and seen. They also need to know that their work matters.
Organizations that promote employees based on technical output alone are building foundations that are unlikely to stay strong.
The gap
Something that I see repeatedly in my consulting work is companies promoting high-performing individuals because they have excellent technical knowledge and impressive work output.
But these qualities mean little in their new role. They have to influence others, navigate conflict, give challenging feedback, and make a disengaged team member feel valued enough to reengage. These are entirely different capabilities from the ones that earned them the promotion.
Those who promote leaders often neglect to mention the importance that the human side brings. They also don’t try to develop this quality. Yet this is crucial to gaining the respect of the people that these leaders manage.
When new managers are in this situation, they end up overwhelmed and with a disengaged team. Organizations start to wonder why their teams aren’t delivering the results they expect.
What human-centered leadership looks like
Human-centered leadership isn’t about avoiding difficult conversations or prioritizing feelings over performance. It’s about the ability to have high standards while making people feel they belong. Leaders also need to be explicit about the change they want to see while making it clear that they believe in the person’s capacity to make the change. They also need to be curious about what someone finds meaningful rather than just looking at what they can produce.
It is also exceptionally practical. Having the self-awareness to identify your triggers, how you react under pressure, and the impact you have on others is a powerful and practical skill. So is the ability to foster psychological safety, inclusive decision-making, and the kind of deliberate presence that shows a team that their leader is paying attention.
The leaders who build these capabilities are the ones who attract and retain their best people.
The business case
The Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis has confirmed what most leaders know, which is that engaged teams, more often than not, outperform on every metric. What many don’t often talk about is that the level of engagement often lies with the person leading the team.
When leaders lack humanness, their teams disengage. When teams disengage, performance suffers. What we then usually see is that organizations will default to technical problem-solving by creating more processes, key performance indicators, and reporting. However, the cause is almost always a leadership capability gap that everyone has been avoiding.
What you need to change
Organizations need to stop treating human leadership skills as a development priority for the few and start treating them as a baseline expectation for everyone. In organizations, it’s not just the leaders at the top who need this development. It’s the employees who are also leading themselves and projects, and supporting their peers.
Companies need to treat human-centered skills as a leadership baseline. It should be a quality that they look for when they recruit and look to develop internally. Most importantly, they need to hold leaders accountable for meeting that baseline.
This shift requires creating cultures where leaders feel safe enough to acknowledge what they do not know, ask for help, and prioritize human connection. They can’t have the fear that doing so will lead to the perception of weakness.
The leaders who will define the future of organizational performance are those who understand that the most complex system they’ll manage is their people. Not a process, a product or a portfolio. Leaders who don’t understand and practice this are going to find themselves left behind.
