“The simple act of caring is heroic.” — Edward Albert
Caring is a simple act. One that comes naturally to humans as we seek to belong. So why is it so scarce in today’s organisational landscape?
I hear this lip service constantly — ‘we need to be more human-centred’, ‘we need to put people first’. But when the pressure is on, when targets slip and the Board wants answers, individual survival instinct naturally takes over. The hardest thing to do when you’re stressed, pressured, or trapped inside your own bubble is to step out and genuinely care about someone else’s point of view, feelings, or position. And yet that capacity — that simple, difficult, and sometimes radical act — is the single biggest determinant of whether your team actually performs and thrives.
This is not a soft argument, 61% of US workers are languishing at work (Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026), 83% of business leaders say that psychological safety has a measurable impact on the success of AI initiatives (MIT Technology Review/Inofsys 2025). These are not abstract numbers. They are the reality of organisations haemorrhaging human potential, while simultaneously rolling out AI tools and hoping for transformation. You cannot automate your way out of a care deficit and this understanding is crucial for leadership and performance, as well as for creating the conditions for sustainable business results.
Care is not a nice-to-have. It’s a business driver.
When I talk about ‘cultures of care’, I am not talking about ‘yoga Fridays’, mental health posters in the lift, or an annual well-being survey— although these things can play a part in a bigger whole and have impact of course. I’m talking about the operating system of your organisation: how people relate to each other, how trust is built and broken, how decisions are made when the stakes are high, and how people regulate each other when the heat is on.
As I explored in my recent article in Developing Leaders Quarterly, the shift from competing and comparing to collaborating and caring isn’t aspirational — it’s operational. Organisations are complex living systems with layers of unwritten rules, hidden hierarchies, and power dynamics that are never formalised but deeply embodied as ‘the way we do things around here’. Those unwritten codes determine whether care takes root or gets quietly strangled.
The 2025 Workplace Culture Report found that visible leadership care is associated with 25% higher retention and 30–40% lower turnover costs. That’s not a fluffy HR metric. That’s money, talent, and institutional knowledge walking out or staying. The 2026 Global Culture Report from O.C. Tanner found that only 16% of employees are thriving in their roles and that workplaces with strong, supportive teams report the highest satisfaction, mental health, belonging, and inclusion outcomes. Quality conversations with co-workers are the top source of inspiration — ahead of leaders, strategy decks, or AI tools.
When we worked with one SME over twelve months to build their culture of care, engagement scores rose by 12% and powerful communities started to take root — not because we launched a programme, but because we shifted the system. We questioned the implicit assumptions underlying the cultural codes of conduct. We mapped the lived experiences of leaders and employees. And we deliberately redesigned what was rewarded, what was acknowledged, and what conversations were actually had. Care is inclusion and empathy in action. It is a strategic bottom-line subject. You cannot innovate, transform or adapt without it.
Why AI makes this more urgent, not less
Here’s the paradox at the heart of the AI-hybrid environment: the more we automate the cognitive, the more we expose the emotional and relational. AI is extraordinarily good at processing knowledge, spotting patterns and generating options. What it cannot do is sense that a team member is withdrawing. It cannot hold the tension of a difficult conversation long enough for something to shift. It cannot use sentiment and human connection to regulate a team’s nervous system.
A 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found that AI adoption has a significant negative impact on psychological safety, which in turn increases depression risk among employees. Meanwhile, 22% of leaders admit they’ve hesitated to lead an AI project because they might be blamed if it misfires. And 71% of workers are concerned that AI will put people permanently out of work. So we’re rolling out the most powerful technology in a generation into human systems that are already fraying at the edges. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a systemic human problem.
These figures sound bleak, but there are of course numerous opportunities that we can shape right now. The University of Illinois’ Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026 found something striking: in what they call ‘empowered squads’ — teams with high autonomy and high support — 68% of workers flourish. In neglected environments with low autonomy and low support, only 10% do. That is a nearly sevenfold difference, driven entirely by the conditions leaders have the agency to create. This isn’t driven by market shifts, budget, or technology, but by human-created conditions where we can influence and anticipate the need to reinvent constantly. It’s not enough to be nice to people or give them freedom independently. Employees need both the autonomy to make meaningful decisions and the support to know their organisation has their back. My recent conversations on the Let’s Talk Transformation podcast reinforced this notion from very different vantage points.
Meggi Rombach, whose work centres on mindset mastery and what she calls ‘mindful rebellion’, reminded me that the leaders most equipped for this new landscape are the ones who’ve done the inner work first — who know their non-negotiables, their triggers, their patterns of avoidance. You can’t create care around you if you haven’t first understood the parts of you that resist it (listen here)
Susanne Biro, with her decades of coaching C-suite leaders, brought us back to a deceptively simple truth: the most powerful thing a senior leader can do is learn to think thoughts that make them genuinely good for other people. Not ‘effective’, not ‘strategic’, but good. When you’re good for others, others are good for the organisation (listen here)
Carlee Wolfe, who oversees leadership development and organisational effectiveness at Hyatt across 125,000 employees, showed us what care-centred leadership looks like at scale in an organisation navigating AI transformation in real time. Her work demonstrates that this is not a boutique luxury for small teams — it is an operational imperative for global enterprises (listen here)
Three very different practitioners but one consistent message — you cannot scale care without scaling self-awareness and self-mastery first
The parts of you that show up at work
This is where it gets uncomfortable — and where the real work lies. I first discovered the language of ‘parts’ when I learnt about Internal Family Systems (IFS) — and realised I’d been using this lens unconsciously for years. IFS offers a beautifully practical framework for understanding that none of us shows up as one coherent person all the time. We are a collection of parts: the ambitious driver, the people-pleaser, the inner critic, the protector who learned long ago to keep things tightly controlled in order to be successful – and all parts are welcome. I also learnt how powerful it can be to understand, accept and acknowledge these multiple parts and that once you create a relationship with them, you create leverage for space and different perspectives in your internal system first and foremost.
This is the daily reality of almost every leader I know. When a leader snaps at a team member for ‘not being strategic enough’, that’s rarely about strategy. It’s a part of them — often a part that was once hurt or overlooked — running the show. When a leader avoids giving honest feedback because they’re scared of conflict, that’s not weakness. That’s a protective part doing what it learned to do in a system that once punished honesty.
Here’s the huge opportunity: these parts don’t just show up in individuals. They show up collectively. Teams have parts. Organisations have parts. Communities have parts. The team that refuses to challenge the CFO’s budget? That’s a collective protector. The department that hoards information to retain control? That’s maybe a collective exile, born of not being valued by the wider system. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding what this brings to the muscle memory of a system — what came before us and what will play out in the future. A culture of care requires leaders who can recognise these patterns in themselves, in their teams, and in the system. Not to fix them — that’s the old paradigm — but to understand them with enough compassion to create the conditions for something different to emerge.
Scaling care: the hardest easy thing you’ll ever do
I know. We’re obsessed with scaling — at any cost. It’s the only way to grow, we’re told. But what if there were different models? How do we equip people and teams so that care is collectively felt? How do we take something as fundamentally personal as care and make it work across departments, geographies, time zones, and hybrid setups?
The honest answer: you don’t scale care by rolling out a programme, just as you don’t create adoption through training. You scale it by changing the conditions in which people operate. And that means working at three levels simultaneously.
1. Leadership identity work
Care starts with leaders who have done enough inner work to lead from presence rather than performance anxiety. This means understanding your own trauma triggers, your default protective strategies, and the parts of you that hijack your leadership when the pressure mounts. The Leadership Circle estimates that 75% of leaders operate from a reactive stance — leading from threat, fear, or control rather than from purpose. IFS calls the alternative ‘self-leadership’: leading from a centred, curious, compassionate, and creative place rather than from a reactive part. As we move further into AI-augmented work, the need to understand and master your relationship with yourself is leadership development in its truest form. It is the foundation for the future of work.
2. Team systems design
I often discuss how hard it is to see, acknowledge, and make friends with your own patterns — never mind those of other people. Once you’ve seen them, that’s where the work starts: how can I create enough space to intercept them and anticipate conflict and tension? Once leaders understand their own patterns, the next level is the team. How do your team’s unwritten rules reward or punish care? What conversations are you not having? Where does the team protect itself at the expense of growth?
This is where we move from individual awareness to collective practice: designing team rituals that make care visible, explicit and expected, not just hoped for. Think regular check-ins that go beyond status updates. Think about deliberate practice in healthy challenge and feedback. Explicitly name what care looks like in your team — and what it doesn’t. When care and recognition are genuinely integrated into daily interactions, employees are over 15x more likely to say their workplace has a healthy performance culture — one with high expectations and high support. Not one or the other, but both. A huge lever for AI adoption in a human way.
3. System redesign
And finally, the system. Because you can have the most self-aware leaders and the most connected teams in the world, and if the reward systems, performance metrics, and promotion criteria still celebrate individual performance over collective contribution, this will far outstrip any intentions you had for collective cultures of care.
Scaling care means redesigning what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets acknowledged. It means embedding care into the quality of your conversations as a leading indicator of performance. The MIT / Infosys research is unequivocal: only 39% of organisations currently rate their psychological safety as ‘high’. That means over 60% are attempting AI transformation on cultural foundations that aren’t yet stable. And 60% of respondents said that clarity on how AI will and won’t impact jobs would improve psychological safety the most. This is a system design question, not a communications question. You cannot have high performance and thriving teams without courageous conversations and a culture of care. It is not about ‘what the system allows you to do’, but about how you intentionally design and redesign the system to allow people and the culture to evolve.
Here are some questions to nudge your daily reflection practice. Bring one to your next team meeting and see what shifts.
• On your leadership identity: Which part of you shows up most when you’re under pressure — the fixer, the avoider, the performer? What does that part need from you in order to let go, even a little?
• On your team’s care culture: If I asked every member of your team ‘do you feel genuinely cared for here?’ what would they say? How do you know — and when did you last actually ask?
• On the conversation you’re avoiding: What is the most important conversation you are not having right now with your team? What would it take for you to have it this week?
• On your system’s hidden rules: What behaviours does your organisation reward that actively undermine care? Who benefits from the current pattern staying in place?
• On AI and human collaboration: As AI takes over more of the cognitive work, what uniquely human capabilities are you deliberately developing? Or are you adding AI on top of an already frayed human system?
• On scaling care: What is one small, visible act of care you could model this week — something small, specific, and repeated — that would signal something different to your team?
The bigger picture
I keep coming back to something that connects all of this month’s conversations, and all of my own work over the past two decades: the shift from ego to eco is not only a leadership philosophy. It’s a daily practice. It’s choosing, again and again, to value your relationships more than your need to be right. To value growth more than your ego and to admit you don’t know, to say sorry, to ask how someone is really doing — and then to actually listen and hold the space for impact and understanding.
In an AI-hybrid world, the organisations that will thrive are not the ones with the best technology. They are the ones with the most caring human systems. Because technology amplifies what’s already there, and if what’s already there is distrust, avoidance, and ego-driven competition, AI will simply make those patterns faster, more efficient, and more visible. If you aren’t equipped to intercept those patterns, you’re already behind.
But if what’s already there is genuine care — leaders who know themselves, teams who hold each other accountable with compassion, systems that reward the collective over the individual — then you have something AI can truly enhance rather than erode. This doesn’t mean everything goes smoothly all the time. It means the environment can accommodate challenge, disruption, and tension, because the foundations for relational adaptability have already been anchored.
If your AI is amplifying whatever is already in the system — and it is — then the question isn’t how do we adopt AI, but moreso what is your AI amplifying and where do we need to strengthen the human system? Is it amplifying trust, curiosity, and collective intelligence? Or is it amplifying the patterns of control, avoidance, and ego that are in the hidden layers of your system and culture? Ultimately, is it serving as a base for making your team and organisation ‘human ready’ as well as ‘AI ready’?
Thank you for reading.
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