Leadership in today's world

If you’re anything like the ambitious leaders I’ve crossed paths with in my corporate career, you and your team are chasing something bold.

You’re navigating a fast-moving, relentless VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) landscape—day in, day out.

You want your work to matter—to create real momentum, real impact.

Your team is smart, skilled, and serious about what they do.

Pressure is thick. Expectations from above, sideways, all around.

What is more, something feels off. “Business as usual” seems to be holding you and your team back from unlocking your full genius—for the business and the world.

The slow progress might even steal your sleep at night.

Getting to the next level? That would take developing strong mutual trust, robust collaboration, and navigating a jungle of stakeholders—many of them outside your direct line of sight.

Also, you suspect the way communication is currently happening is part of the problem.

More and more, you sense that resilience isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between burning out and breaking through.

And perhaps, more quietly, you miss a sense of real aliveness in your work.

I don't mean the constant buzz of firefighting or urgency—that you likely have more than enough of.

What I mean is the deep, steady resonance of your heart, mind, and soul aligning with the path you’re on.

"When work clashes with human biology, burnout wins and teams lose."

The way we run our organizations has still largely been shaped the industrial area. Not only was the nature of work very different - we had almost no knowledge about human nervous systems and what they need to be at their best.

In the meantime, neuroscience and psychology has caught up on what humans need - we just still mostly ignore that knowledge in daily business.

What that means is that our organizations waste massive amounts of human potential and energy on a daily basis.

This is not happening out of malice - it is just that we haven’t update the operating systems and protocols yet to reflect what science has discovered.

The 3 Leverage Points

In my experience, there are three powerful leverage points that are either ignored or not dealt with effectively in business as usual. However, they are essential for allowing leaders and teams to be at their highest level of effectiveness, resilience, and joy.

• Leverage Point 1: Leadership Presence
  Before a team can perform at its best, each person needs to be fully present. Leadership presence isn’t just for the formal leader (though their presence has outsized impact)—it’s about how every team member shows up. In adaptive, high-performing teams, leadership is shared: it’s about taking ownership, creating outcomes, and staying grounded under pressure. That starts with self-awareness—knowing what you feel, how you react, and how that affects the group. When individuals can regulate their internal state and bring full cognitive and emotional intelligence to the table, they lay the foundation for extraordinary performance.

• Leverage Point 2: Communication

  Presence enables powerful communication. It’s not just about what’s said, but how—and whether people feel safe to contribute honestly. Do our communication norms support transparency, constructive feedback, and real collaboration? Do our meetings, feedback loops, and decision-making forums allow people to engage with clarity and confidence? With the right protocols in place, communication unlocks trust, speeds up decisions, and drives outcomes that matter.

• Leverage Point 3: Strategic Culture
  Culture is often seen as intangible—but in reality, it’s the set of shared assumptions about how we work together. These implicit rules shape behavior, performance, and morale. Every team has a culture, whether by design or by default. But when culture is made visible and aligned with the business mission, it becomes a strategic lever. When built on presence and powered by effective communication, culture amplifies outcomes: stronger results, deeper resilience, and a team operating in its "zone of genius".

From what I've observed, these layers build and reinforce each other in a way where higher levels build on the lower ones. Allowing your team to break through to their next level of performance, resilience and joy then hinges on finding the "weakest link" in the system and focus on developing that next.

Can I just continue doing things the old way? We've come pretty far...

Honestly? Yes, you absoutely can.

In fact, my best guess is you and your team are delivering good or very good results already. And your drive for excellence and impact will likely continue to allow you and your team to perform.

From my experience, there is also a good chance they will come at significant cost:

• Continuous high energy expenditure by you and your team

• Results turn out good but will likely stay behind the real potential of the capable group of experts you have hired ... you are not reaching the "zone of genius"

• Retention might be average or even lower, with a real concern about retaining key talent long term

• Burnout for you and/or one of your team members might feel like a real possibility

Any of these might be a reality for you or not. And if they are not, even better. All I am saying is that as long as we continue to work against the biological reality of our nervous systems, we create large amounts of unnecessary friction that we need to compensate by pushing harder ourselves, asking everyone else to work harder, and/or throwing large amounts of additional money at the problem.

Business-as-usual sucks because it runs against what human nervous systems need to thrive.

So what can I do?

In my experience, and contrary to popular belief, this type of work does not lend itself well to a standardized, cookie-cutter approach. It will deliver some results but you will likely spend longer time and invest more money in the end.

Whether you work with me or not, I recommend you find someone who spends time understanding with you first where the biggest sticking points for you and your team are right now, and who knows how to assesess and develop the three leverage points outlined above:

1. Leadership Presence

2. Communication

3. Strategic Culture

Based on that diagnosis, you can identify the most impactful lever in your specifc context. And focus your investment where it results in the highest return.

Depending on the situation, the “right” solution(s) might involve:

• External facilitation of high stakes meetings and gatherings (e.g. leadership offsites or project kick-offs)

• 1:1 leadership coaching

• A targeted training intervention for your team

If you are interested to learn more, check out my Services Page or drop me an email.