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, we’ll look at why the tough-leader persona is not effective or sustainable for achieving long-term results. Our belief is that human-centric and strong — not tough — leadership is inevitably what will win the day.

From ‘You’re Valued’ to ‘You’re Replaceable’

First, a little scene-setting. Pre-pandemic, research had built compelling cases for human-centric leadership. A focus on purpose was found to drive employee motivation and outcomes, with evidence of its role in strengthening innovation and employee wellness. This data was reinforced during the crisis as many businesses survived despite dire circumstances.

Today, we’re seeing central corporate command try to reassert control to reinstitute old norms. As the pandemic receded, many CEOs felt that the social contract had become too employee-centric. These sentiments were combined with new concerns about AI-driven disruptions and the potential to “do (much) more with less.” Many CEOs decided to recentralize, returning everyone to familiar office settings.

The swing of the pendulum has been significant over just two years, particularly in tech. Employees recognized as valued contributors during the pandemic are being targeted as dispensable automatons. Wall Street leaders, lauded for their own culture of tough talk and late nights at the office, are again influencing executives. Some CEOs are returning to GE-style “rank and yank” layoffs despite their proven detrimental effects. Leaders are reinstating the fixed, centralized hierarchies of their own pasts.

This goes against the grain of what’s been working for so many businesses. Pandemic-accelerated digitalization has pushed many operations to decentralize. Integrating more technologies and responding quickly to customers’ evolving demands has elevated the need for cultures founded on trust, where employees have the necessary relationships and support to adjust and innovate while navigating ongoing change.

Tough CEOs don’t recognize the value of human-centered leaders who tap into their emotional intelligence as much as their intellectual intelligence to deepen relationships in all the ways that improve workers’ performance. These leaders often point to the success of Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s autocratic leadership style while ignoring the more human-centered styles of Apple’s Tim Cook and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella — CEOs of companies with valuations that eclipse those of Musk’s. Musk might be tough and endlessly in the news, but Cook and Nadella are strong leaders who exemplify the best of human-centric leadership.

Five Lessons for Tough Talkers From Strong Leaders

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. Research has found that managers who are rated as empathetic by members of their team are rated as high performers by their own managers. Leaders’ empathy helps team members sustain high performance when they’re under pressure, and it makes it possible for teams to align and advance more easily.

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. At Neiman Marcus Group, for instance, employees were given extreme flexibility, and in return, managers had “the right to hold you totally accountable for results,” as the company’s chief people officer, Eric Severson, put it. Human-centered leaders check in regularly with team members to coach them and course-correct as circumstances and tools evolve. They cultivate the fundamentals for exceptional performance, including a sense of belonging, by emphasizing outcomes over hours.

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. A study conducted by i4cp found that organizations where people trusted their leaders were 11 times more likely to be high performers. Human-centered leaders build environments where people know they can depend on each other. They cultivate workplaces that go beyond typical boundaries of responsibility: Teammates know they can ask questions, suggest wild ideas, and request help when unsure or overloaded. These skills make them enablers of change as well: In one BCG case study, generative AI use increased by 89% when managers took the time to adjust their training approaches to account for team members’ different adoption mindsets.

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. Strong leaders, like Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Allstate CEO Tom Wilson, recognize that one size does not fit all. They develop solutions that work for core functions, such as product development at Airbnb, or that allow leaders to set norms for specific functions, as Allstate does. Each team’s purpose and realities — such as people’s distribution across time zones — are adjusted for and can be modified when business conditions and the needs of both the company and team members change.

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 — despite unprecedented uncertainties and evidence from Berkeley Haas professor Jennifer Chatman that such leaders cause long-lasting damage to organizations through reduced collaboration and integrity. Strong leaders who recognize fallibility in both themselves and others acknowledge that they may occasionally make mistakes and give team members permission to take (reasonable) risks.

Challenging the tough-leader persona is essential for managing talent through volatility and ambiguity. Leaders need to nurture a sense of belonging to support strong performance. Training that emphasizes human understanding improves leaders’ collaboration skills, responsiveness, adaptability, and resilience.

Human-centered leaders are successful due to their ability to understand their customers and coworkers. Leaders need to practice more empathy in a tech-dominated world to balance the digitalization of work and life across the teams and machines. If you’re not investing in becoming a human-centered leader, you’ve got a hard road ahead of you.