We started a leadership development company 25 years ago with a core belief: Great leaders bring both business acumen and human empathy to their task.
Leaders need to make courageous, creative business decisions and nurture and empower their teams and organizations to bring those decisions to life. No leader is successful over time without both sets of skills. We intuitively believed that bringing a more human element into a business simulation experience without losing the rigor and challenges of systems thinking, strategic thinking, and business acumen would make it a powerful and real-world foundation for leadership growth and reflection.
That strategic bet, based on a hunch, has been proven correct repeatedly for 25 years. It has been validated by our clients, by research, and by the lessons we have learned in starting and growing a small business for a quarter century. It remains at the core of what makes us different.
Our experience has refined this core belief with additional insight. In learning from our clients and our own team, here are five truths that have emerged through smooth times and times of disruption, including the great AI disruption we are currently living.
1. Both/and beats either/or
Leadership is not only about being a great strategic thinker or having superior business acumen, operational skills, or technology skills. And it’s not only about being a visionary leader or having superb communication skills or deep empathy for others.
It’s about all these things in a balance that is appropriate to the needs of the business, while remaining authentic and true to yourself. Overindexing one way or the other can undermine your success.
2. Technology moves faster than people
When we started the business, the rise of the internet and the dot-com era raised the reality that humans could be connected to everyone everywhere all at once, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Twenty-five years later we are in many ways still grappling with the implications of this seismic shift—for when and where work happens; for managing global teams; for what is best done by AI agents and what is best done by humans; and for drawing the boundaries between work and personal time.
Since then, change has only accelerated, as indeed it has since the Dark Ages. For leaders, the profound implication is that it’s critical to recognize that the human side of change determines the actual speed of technology adoption and value. The ROI on today’s surge of investment in AI depends on human application of the technology.
3. Trust is solid ground during disruption
As we sought to incorporate the human side of leadership into our learning experiences, it quickly became apparent that we had to reflect the importance of trust in the leadership equation. The ability to earn and retain trust is central to a leader’s effectiveness. What we have learned from both our clients and work associates is that trust is especially critical in times of disruption and change.
Progress moves at the speed of trust, whether it is trust of a leader, trust of peer or partner organizations, or trust of agentic technology. When the ground is shifting underneath them, humans look for solid ground by finding relationships that are credible, reliable, and reciprocal over time. When everything is changing, who and what is not changing? In times of great uncertainty, who will you follow into the dark? Leaders who build trust build that solid ground.
4. Empathy is a multiplier
Inextricably intertwined with trust is empathy. Empathy as a leader is foundational to building trust. It can ensure that people feel heard, that a leader can understand their reality: how the world looks through their eyes. This provides the foundation for discretionary effort and can tap deeply into unrealized potential, unleashing a multiplier effect that can supercharge employee performance, unlock innovation, and speed change.
But empathy can do more than that. It also expands the inputs to the receptive leader and improves both the quality of decisions and the odds of successful implementation. It is critical to leaders living in a both/and world.
5. AI makes human judgment essential
The rise and rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is perhaps the most profound and disruptive change of our lifetime. The imminent reality of generative AI is raising the existential question: What is the role of humans in the age of AI? As has been discovered by companies wrestling with the implementation of AI into the workplace, human skills are, in fact, essential.
AI excels at providing compelling solutions to questions and problems with great apparent certainty, and it can be totally wrong. It cannot ask, Does this answer actually make sense? While it promises to do the work for us, it can lull our brains into complacency. Critical and strategic thinking matter more than ever, including the ability to step back and ask: Have I got the frame right? Am I even asking the right question?
These five truths, each of which we hope to explore further in future posts, are timeless lessons we have learned—and are clearly still learning—from the clients we have the privilege to work with and those we have had the privilege to lead over the past 25 years.
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Read Nick and Amanda's earlier post, The Perspective of Experience: 25 Years of Leadership Lessons.
