Why Warmth Wins: Leadership Lessons From the Boardrooms 

Over the last fifteen years, my work has taken me into more conference rooms than I can count — corporate offsites in Goa, leadership retreats in the hills of Coorg, town halls in Gurgaon glass towers, and quiet one-on-one conversations backstage before I walk up to speak. As a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, I don’t just deliver a talk and leave. I watch. I listen. I ask the quiet questions during coffee breaks that people don’t usually answer in the boardroom. And over the years, one pattern has repeated itself so often that I no longer consider it a coincidence — it’s a principle.

Every leader I have ever met gets evaluated, consciously or not, on two dimensions: competence and warmth. Competence is the ability to execute — to translate vision into strategy and strategy into results. Warmth is something softer but far more powerful — it is approachability, empathy, and a genuine interest in the people doing the work. And if you ask me which one determines whether people will actually follow a leader, I’ll tell you without hesitation: warmth wins.

The Manager I Never Forgot

Early in my speaking career, I was invited to facilitate a leadership offsite for a mid-sized IT services company outside Pune. Over dinner, one of the senior directors told me about two managers he had worked under earlier in his career. The first was brilliant — an engineer with an almost photonic grasp of systems architecture, who could out-argue anyone in the room. But nobody wanted to knock on his door. The second manager was, in his words, ‘not the smartest person in the room, but the only one whose door was always open.’ When this director had a family emergency, it was the second manager who rearranged the entire team’s workload without being asked. Fifteen years later, he still keeps in touch with her, not with the brilliant one.

That story has stayed with me because it captures something research has since confirmed at scale.

In their well-known Harvard Business Review article ‘Connect, Then Lead,’ social psychologists Amy Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinger argued that when we judge others — especially leaders — warmth is evaluated before competence, and it carries more weight in determining trust.

Their research suggested that a leader seen as warm but only moderately skilled will often be trusted more than one who is highly skilled but cold. Competence earns respect; warmth earns trust. And trust is what makes people willing to be led, rather than merely managed.

Warm Leaders Are Not Soft Leaders

I want to be careful here, because I have seen this insight misunderstood in almost every workshop I run. Warmth is not the same as being a pushover. The best leaders I have studied up close balance warmth with what I call ‘productive challenge.’ They support you and they stretch you, often in the same conversation.

I remember facilitating a session for a leadership team at a Bengaluru-based fintech firm, where the CEO — a soft-spoken woman who had scaled the company from thirty to over eight hundred employees — told her team something I still quote in my talks: she said her job was not to have all the answers, but to make sure everyone in the room believed they were capable of finding them. That is not softness. That is what leadership researcher Jack Zenger and his colleague Joseph Folkman found in their large-scale study of leadership effectiveness published through Harvard Business Review — leaders who combined high warmth with high results-orientation were rated dramatically more effective than those who were strong in only one dimension. Warmth without accountability breeds comfort zones. Warmth with challenge breeds growth.

This is precisely the combination Jim Collins described in Good to Great as ‘Level 5 Leadership’ — a blend of personal humility and fierce professional will. The leaders who left the deepest mark on the companies Collins studied were rarely the loud, larger-than-life personalities. They were quietly demanding and genuinely caring, often in the same breath.

The Psychological Safety Net

One phrase I use often in my keynotes is ‘chief nurturing officer,’ because I believe that is what a great CEO ultimately becomes — not just an operator of the business, but a custodian of the environment in which people are willing to take risks, admit mistakes, and bring their real problems forward. This connects directly to what Google’s own internal research, Project Aristotle, found when it studied over a hundred and eighty teams to understand what separated high-performing teams from the rest. The single biggest predictor of a team’s success was not the individual talent on the team but psychological safety — the shared belief that it was safe to take interpersonal risks. Warm leaders build that safety net almost instinctively.

I saw this play out vividly during a workshop with a manufacturing client in Chennai. A young plant supervisor admitted, in front of his entire leadership group, that a costly quality error earlier that year had been his fault — a fact he had never disclosed. When I asked why he was sharing it now, he said it was because his plant head had, months earlier, openly admitted his own mistake from years ago during a similar session. Vulnerability, it turns out, is contagious when it starts at the top.

Daniel Goleman, whose research on emotional intelligence has shaped how the corporate world thinks about leadership for nearly three decades, made a related point in his work: technical skill and IQ matter, but it is emotional intelligence — self-awareness, empathy, and social skill — that most reliably distinguishes star performers from average ones once you reach the leadership level.

Why the Old Playbook of Command and Control Is Dying

I often tell audiences, half-jokingly, that if you cannot manage your own teenager at home with orders and directives, you should not expect to manage a team of bright, opinionated professionals at work with the same approach. The old command-and-control model of management assumed compliance. Today’s workforce — across generations, not just the youngest ones — responds to inspiration, autonomy, and purpose far more than to instruction.

This is not just a sentimental observation;

Gallup’s long-running workplace research has repeatedly found that the relationship an employee has with their direct manager is one of the strongest predictors of engagement and retention, often mattering more than pay or perks.

Marcus Buckingham captured this succinctly in his influential book First, Break All the Rules, built on Gallup’s data: people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. I have seen this truth play out in nearly every organisation I have worked with. When attrition spikes in a team, the exit interviews rarely blame the company’s strategy. They blame the immediate manager’s inability to listen, appreciate, or genuinely care.

Simon Sinek makes a similar case in Leaders Eat Last, arguing that the leaders who inspire loyalty are the ones who make their people feel safe enough to trust each other and take on the outside world together, rather than compete with each other for the leader’s approval. That safety, again, begins with warmth.

From Managing People to Leading Them

My work as a facilitator is really about one transition: helping managers stop managing people and start leading them. Anyone can hold a title. Leadership, in my experience, is what happens when people choose to follow you even when they don’t have to.

I close most of my leadership workshops with the same challenge I gave that director in Pune all those years ago: think of the best manager you ever had, and ask yourself honestly whether people would say the same about you. If competence got you into the room, it is warmth that will determine whether anyone wants to stay in it with you. The leaders who understand this — who marry genuine care for their people with a relentless clarity of purpose — are the ones who don’t just run companies. They build the kind of teams that outlast them.