Humanising leadership is not a nice-to-have. Teams can tell when a leader is depleted or running on stress, and they adjust what they bring to work accordingly. The result is the difference between a team that complies and a team that commits.
That argument came out of a RISEUP conversation between Joseph Wong, Executive Coach at RISEUP Global, and Kathleen Kee, Head of HR at Santen. This article sets out what Kathleen said, why the usual objection to it is wrong, and a practice leaders can run to build the capability.
As with every piece in this series, what came from the conversation is separated from what is practitioner observation, so each claim can be weighed on its own basis.
About This Conversation
The RISEUP Conversation with Leaders series records discussions with senior leaders across the region about what they are actually learning in role, rather than what leadership content says they should be learning.
Kathleen Kee leads the HR function at Santen. That vantage point matters for what follows. An HR leader sees the pattern across an entire management population rather than a single team, which means she is describing something structural rather than anecdotal.
A shorter version of these reflections was first shared in Joseph’s original LinkedIn post. This article expands it into the practice below.
What Kathleen Kee Said
Three points from the conversation are attributable to Kathleen, together with one line that frames the whole discussion. Each is recorded here with its practical implication drawn out beside it.
| The insight from the conversation | What it means in practice |
| Leaders must model self-care, because teams feel it when a leader is depleted or running on stress. | Self-care is not private. It is transmitted to the team whether or not the leader intends it to be. |
| Expecting leaders to suppress personal challenges such as caregiving, burnout, anxiety, or loss is denial, not professionalism. | The professional standard being applied is not neutral. It asks people to pretend, and pretending has a cost. |
| Human-centred leadership produces genuine commitment and resilience, not merely compliance. | The business case is discretionary effort. Compliance can be mandated; commitment cannot. |
| Leadership is not tested when things are calm. It is revealed when things are hard. | Leadership capability should be assessed under pressure, because that is the only condition where it is visible. |
The last line is the one worth sitting with. It reframes leadership development from something delivered during quiet periods to something that only proves itself when conditions deteriorate.
Why Leave It at the Door Is Denial, Not Professionalism
The standard objection to humanising leadership is that work is work, and that personal circumstances should be managed privately. It sounds disciplined. Kathleen’s framing exposes what it actually asks for.
A leader caring for an ageing parent, recovering from loss, or running close to burnout does not stop carrying it when they enter the office. Instructing them to leave it at the door does not remove the load. It removes the acknowledgement of the load, which means the effects still arrive but can no longer be discussed or accommodated.
That is denial rather than professionalism, and it is expensive. The organisation gets the depleted judgement anyway, without any of the information it would need to respond. It also gets a leadership population that has learned to conceal difficulty, which is the same population it will later ask to speak candidly about risk.
There is a connection here to what RISEUP describes in humility in the workplace. A leader who can acknowledge limits is not weaker for it. They are considerably more accurate about their own capacity, and accuracy is what colleagues actually rely on.
Compliance or Commitment
Kathleen’s third point is the commercial one, and it deserves to be made concrete. Both compliance and commitment look like people doing their jobs. They diverge exactly when conditions get difficult, which is also when the difference matters most.
| Situation | A complying team | A committed team |
| A deadline slips | Reports it once it is unavoidable. | Flags the risk while there is still time to act. |
| An instruction looks wrong | Follows it, and documents that they followed it. | Raises the concern before executing. |
| Workload spikes | Delivers the defined scope, no more. | Reprioritises with the leader to protect what matters. |
| A mistake is made | Contains it and hopes it goes unnoticed. | Surfaces it early with a proposed fix. |
| The leader is under pressure | Withdraws and waits for the mood to pass. | Absorbs some load and checks what is needed. |
Read the right-hand column as a description of discretionary effort. None of it can be mandated, written into a job description, or produced by a policy. It is given, and it is given to leaders whom people believe would extend the same treatment in return.
Leaders Model Self-Care Whether They Mean To or Not
Practitioner observation rather than research: in coaching senior leaders, the modelling effect is consistently stronger than the stated policy. Teams read behaviour, not the wellbeing email.
A leader who sends messages at midnight has set a norm regardless of the disclaimer attached to it. A leader who never takes leave has communicated what leave means for anyone hoping to progress. A leader who describes their own exhaustion as commitment has defined what commitment looks like in that team.
This is why self-care at leadership level is not a private matter. It is a policy statement made through conduct, and it will be believed over any written policy that contradicts it. The same dynamic in reverse is examined in why rest is a leadership discipline, from a conversation with Lyn Lee of OCBC.
The Practice Loop: How This Capability Is Actually Built
Kathleen’s point in the conversation was that this is developed through continuous practice rather than through one-time programmes or workshops. The four movements below expand that into something a leader can run deliberately.
Treat it as a loop rather than a sequence. Most leaders find one movement is much harder than the other three, and that one is usually where their development actually sits.
1. Notice the Pattern Under Pressure
Everyone has a default under load. Some leaders become directive, some go quiet, some over-explain, some take on the work themselves rather than delegate it. The pattern is stable enough to be predicted once you know it.
The practice is to name your own. After a difficult week, ask what your team saw rather than what you intended. If you cannot answer, that is the first thing to find out, and asking one trusted colleague usually settles it within a conversation.
2. Choose How You Show Up
Noticing the pattern only helps if a choice follows it. This is the movement where humanising leadership becomes an act rather than a value: deciding, in the moment, to respond differently from the default the pressure is pulling you toward.
It is easier when the choice is made in advance. A leader who has decided beforehand how they want to behave in a crisis has a far better chance of doing it than one deciding while the crisis is running.
3. Repair When You Get It Wrong
This is the movement most leaders skip, and it is the one that builds the most trust. Repair means naming the moment specifically, without over-apologising and without explaining it away.
Something as plain as acknowledging that you were short in a meeting and that it was pressure rather than the person does more for psychological safety than most formal initiatives. It also models that mistakes are survivable, which is precisely what you need the team to believe before they will raise their own.
4. Build Capacity Before You Need It
Capacity built during a crisis arrives too late. The relationships, the candour, and the personal reserves all have to exist beforehand, which makes this the least urgent and most consequential of the four.
For leaders, that means the boring, unglamorous version: sustainable hours held consistently rather than heroically, relationships maintained when nothing is needed from them, and problems raised early enough to still be small.
How HR and L&D Teams Can Use This
The practice loop is individual. The pattern it reveals is usually organisational, and that is where HR gets leverage.
- Ask leaders which of the four movements is hardest for them. Concentration on one movement across a population is a design signal, not a coincidence.
- Where repair is the common gap, the culture is probably treating admission of error as a career risk. That is a systems problem, not a training one.
- Where building capacity is the gap, examine whether the operating rhythm leaves any room to build it.
- Measure the modelling, not the messaging. Leave taken, out-of-hours messages, and meeting load say more about your wellbeing position than the policy does.
- Stop buying one-off workshops for this. The capability is habit, and habits need repetition with feedback.
That last point is Kathleen’s, and it has a direct procurement implication. If leadership development is bought as an event, it will produce awareness and very little behaviour. Continuous Leadership Development exists because the interval matters more than the content.
What This Article Claims, and On What Basis
So you can weigh each claim appropriately:
- Attributed to the conversation with Kathleen Kee: the four insights in the source table, including the line that leadership is revealed when things are hard, and the point that this capability is built through continuous practice rather than one-time programmes.
- Practitioner observation: the modelling effect, the compliance-versus-commitment contrast, and the expansion of the practice loop into four movements. These are drawn from Joseph’s coaching work and are field-tested rather than research-derived.
- Not claimed: this article makes no clinical claims about burnout, anxiety, or grief. Where a colleague is genuinely unwell, that is a medical and duty-of-care matter, not a leadership development one.
No research is cited here. There is a real evidence base on psychological safety and discretionary effort that points in the same direction, but the argument in this article rests on the conversation and on practice, and approximate citations would weaken it rather than strengthen it.
Where This Fits in RISEUP’s Training Approach
RISEUP works with leaders and teams on performing under pressure without depleting the people doing the performing. Kathleen’s framing, that leadership is revealed when things are hard, is close to how we assess leadership capability in practice.
For organisations building this across a population, leadership resilience training addresses the individual capability and Continuous Leadership Development provides the repetition it depends on. Where the immediate gap is leaders avoiding the honest conversation, Managing Difficult Conversations Training is usually the faster intervention.
Readers wanting the underlying concept first will find it in what makes a resilient person and the traits of a resilient leader.
This article is part of the RISEUP Conversation with Leaders series. Our thanks to Kathleen Kee for the conversation. The original short-form version is on LinkedIn, where the discussion continues in the comments.
FAQs
What is humanising leadership?
Humanising leadership means leading in a way that acknowledges people as people rather than as roles, including the leader. In the RISEUP conversation with Kathleen Kee, Head of HR at Santen, the core argument was that leaders must model self-care because teams feel it when a leader is depleted or running on stress.
Is humanising leadership just being soft on performance?
No. The argument is commercial. Compliance can be mandated; commitment cannot. A complying team reports a slipped deadline once it is unavoidable, while a committed team flags the risk while there is still time to act. That difference is discretionary effort, and it is given rather than instructed.
Should leaders keep personal challenges out of work?
Expecting leaders to suppress caregiving, burnout, anxiety, or loss is denial rather than professionalism. The load does not disappear when it goes unacknowledged. The organisation still absorbs the depleted judgement, but loses the information it would need to respond.
How do leaders build this capability?
Through a repeated practice loop rather than a workshop: notice your pattern under pressure, choose how you show up, repair when you get it wrong, and build capacity before you need it. Most leaders find one of the four much harder than the others, and that one is where their development sits.
Why do one-off leadership workshops fail to change this?
Because the capability is a habit rather than knowledge. Habits change through repetition with feedback over months. A single event can create awareness of the gap, but it cannot supply the repetition that closes it.
Build Leaders Who Create Commitment, Not Compliance
Help your leaders stay human under pressure, and build the discretionary effort that follows from it. Contact RISEUP Global to discuss leadership resilience training customised for your organisation.
𝗝𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗽𝗵@𝗥𝗜𝗦𝗘𝗨𝗣 ـــــــــــــــــــہ٨ـ
Mobilising Resilient Performance
|| 𝖠𝖼𝗍𝗂𝗏𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖢𝗈𝗎𝗋𝖺𝗀𝖾𝗈𝗎𝗌 𝖫𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋𝗌, 𝖠𝖽𝖺𝗉𝗍𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖳𝖾𝖺𝗆𝗌, 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖳𝗁𝗋𝗂𝗏𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖢𝗎𝗅𝗍𝗎𝗋𝖾𝗌 𝖴𝗇𝖽𝖾𝗋 𝖯𝗋𝖾𝗌𝗌𝗎𝗋𝖾
A trailblazer in humanising leadership and building high-resilience teams. As a former United Nations Peacekeeper, he leverages his high-stakes experience to redefine leadership dynamics. With a career distinguished by numerous accolades, Joseph now helps organizations thrive through a human-centric approach, enhancing performance, productivity, and workplace culture.
