Friday Read: “The Human-Centric Leader or welcome to modern leadership”

It’s a chilly November Black Friday morning. Your inbox is full, the ecommerce website you've been following for a few hours is down again, the year-end reports are lurking, and someone has just scheduled a meeting titled “Quick Sync – 45 minutes.”

Welcome to modern leadership.

Navigating leadership with a touch of humor: "I'm not bossy, I just have better ideas." 🐤

Between deadlines, strategy decks, and the occasional identity crisis of “am I leading or just surviving?”, it’s easy to forget the one thing that truly keeps teams (and leaders) moving forward: being human.

Enter: The Human-Centric Leader

There was a time when leadership meant corner offices, crisp suits, and sentences that began with “per my last email.”

Today? The power suit has been replaced by emotional intelligence.

A human-centric leader doesn’t just manage numbers, she connects dots and people.

She knows when someone’s energy dips.She senses when “I’m fine” actually means “I’m overwhelmed.”And most importantly, she leads without pretending to have it all together, because let’s be real, no one does.

The new leadership metrics

Forget the old KPIs for a moment. The real indicators of great leadership in 2025 look a little different:

Empathy ROI – How often you show genuine care without expecting something back.🎧 Listening ratio – The percentage of meetings where you actually listen instead of mentally editing your next email.

💪 Authenticity index – How often you say, “I don’t know yet, but we’ll figure it out.”

😅 Eye-roll resilience – Your ability to handle corporate chaos with humor instead of despair.

🫶 Leadership isn’t a title, it’s a tone.

Human-centric leaders bring warmth into cold spreadsheets.They replace “targets” with “purpose.”They ask “How are you, really?” and stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.

They know that inspiration doesn’t come from another performance dashboard, it comes from feeling seen, trusted, and valued.

What does it look like in practice?

It looks like…

• Saying “I need help” and setting the tone for psychological safety.

• Letting your team log off early without guilt.

• Celebrating micro-wins, not just milestones.

• Laughing, especially when things go off-script (which they always do).

Because humor doesn’t make you less professional, it makes you more human.

The takeaway:

Leadership isn’t about flawless execution. It’s about creating a space where people can breathe, think, and belong.

So, as we wrap up this November week, here’s a thought: Don’t lead with pressure. Lead with presence.

Because teams don’t remember every target you hit. They remember how you made them feel while chasing it.