The Leader Mindset #45

Hi everyone,

As part of my business focus, I built a Succession Management Maturity Model Assessment (SM³A) to help organizations pressure-test a question most avoid: how strong is your succession planning, really? 

This short, free assessment cuts through good intentions and exposes whether your approach is truly mature, or quietly increasing risk.

Take the assessment yourself or forward it to your HR or talent team to get a more honest read on your leadership pipeline. In return, I will send you a comprehensive report specific to your organization.

Interested in learning more about the assessment, click the logo below.

We’ve Made Leadership More Human, But Have We Lost the Plot?

Since I started my consulting business, I’ve found myself on LinkedIn far more than I ever expected. I use it to share what I see in the field, respond to leadership trends, and test ideas about talent management.

One trend really stands out.

After spending the last week paying attention to what the algorithm was serving me, I noticed that roughly 95% of the content focused on how leaders treat people. There is a constant stream of advice about emotional intelligence, psychological safety, empathy, compassion, and trust.

That focus makes sense. I write about these topics myself and have built programs around self-awareness, trust, and healthier leadership habits. These skills have always mattered.

But when you see this content day after day, a quiet question starts to form.

Have we focused so much on the human side of leadership that we’ve lost sight of a leader’s core responsibility: delivering results?

Leadership was never meant to be a choice between people and performance. It feels like the pendulum has moved hard to the people side.

Leadership, for Better or Worse, Is Still About Results

I tend to rely on a simple definition of leadership.

Leadership is the ability to influence others through purpose, vision, and individual consideration to achieve results.

That final phrase matters more than many leadership definitions acknowledge. Without results, leadership loses its foundation. Good intentions begin to drift away from the outcomes leaders are accountable for delivering.

This is not an argument for caring less about people. It is an argument against treating results as secondary. Caring deeply about employees while consistently missing performance expectations does not build trust. Over time, it creates frustration.

Most people want to be part of a winning team—one that accomplishes meaningful goals and delivers on its commitments. Have you ever worked for a great boss while the team’s results continued to struggle? Eventually, even supportive environments start to feel unsatisfying and aimless. Certainly, they have for me.

Balance has always mattered. An employee experience that ignores people is just as risky as one that focuses only on results. Yet leadership development often leans too far in one direction, and many leaders feel this gap acutely as they need their team to achieve more as expectations continue to rise.

Why Team Leadership Is the Missing Link

Over time, we’ve quietly done leaders a disservice. Most development programs focus on individual skills like coaching, giving feedback, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. These are important, but they don’t address where performance really happens.

Performance doesn’t come from individual relationships alone. Teams get the work done, make decisions, and shape how results are achieved. Without team leadership skills, one may build compassionate individual relationships without the necessary capacity to achieve critical outcomes.

That’s why strong team leadership is the bridge between people and performance.

High-performing leaders rely on a few key fundamentals that directly support getting things done:

• Clear direction helps everyone focus on shared priorities and what success looks like, which cuts down on wasted work and speeds up progress.

• Clear roles make it obvious who owns what and who can make decisions. This establishes accountability and helps decisions move smoothly.

• Team norms create a clear set of expectations for making decisions, handling conflict, and following through. Norms reduce friction and wasted effort, especially under pressure.

• Trust, built through consistent actions and follow-through, allows for honest debate and helps spot risks sooner.

• Team capabilities make sure the right skills and enough capacity are in place, so performance is more reliable and not just dependent on individual efforts.

With strong team leadership, human skills become an accelerator for driving results.

Coming Back to Were We Started

So, are we too focused on the human side of leadership? Maybe. Or maybe it just seems that way if your algorithm works like mine.

What’s clear is that caring about people and delivering results were never supposed to compete. The real risk lies not in emphasizing qualities such as empathy or trust, but in failing to translate these actions into tangible performance outcomes.

What do you think—have we lost the plot? Are we prioritizing niceness in leadership and assuming performance will magically follow? Share your experience in the comments.

Andy Noon, PhD

Sent the article? Subscribe for free.

Interested in learning more about our solutions? check them out.

Thanks for reading and look forward to seeing you again next week.

Andy