Human Leadership, Strategic Leadership, and Character: My Top 10 Leadership Lessons
By Jocelyn Little
July 2, 2026
Every leader recognizes, at some point, that leadership is much more complicated than making decisions alone. It is often said that an organization’s greatest assets are its people. Yet people are often the ones left behind or in the dark when difficult decisions need to be made.
Let’s create a scenario as an example: You have been tasked to lead the effort to complete a project. You have a few trusted team members that you are working with, and you all genuinely work well together. Then there is your boss. Scenario A has your boss contradicting decisions, not allowing you space to provide input, cutting you off when you try to speak, providing vague direction, speaking in a disrespectful tone, even at times hanging up on you. Yet boss A constantly tells people how much he or she appreciates you and even brags what a great asset you are to the company. Scenario B has your boss, asking thoughtful questions, providing clarity on the direction and expectations, giving input when necessary to keep the team working towards his or her vision, making space for necessary conversations, whether it be progress, challenges, insights, or questions, validating value and challenging assumptions. Though, he or she may not be very vocal with anyone outside the company about specific accomplishments or attributes to success. Which boss do you prefer?
If we have been in a professional setting long enough, we likely may have experienced similar leaders as the examples above. Everyone has their style of leadership and personalities. In my years of working and growing into my own style of leadership, I have found that certain leadership principles should be present regardless of a person’s style or personality. The way they present these principles may differ, but the underlying principle itself should remain consistent.
Here are my top 10 leadership principles, broken down into three categories of Human Leadership, Strategic Leadership, and Character:
Human Leadership:
1. Leadership is not only about making decisions. It is about balancing those decisions with the people who will experience them. Yes, making hard decisions are what is required of leaders. However, the decision alone isn’t what makes leaders great. Great leaders make necessary decisions without losing sight of the people that will be affected by the decisions being made. Keeping a balance of making hard decisions and the people that will experience the decision doesn’t mean abandoning the responsibility of making the decision — but if the decision being made keeps people in the forefront, it can enforce a wider viewpoint of the decision that challenges assumptions and ensures the best decision is being made.
2. Caring for people and ensuring they do not feel abandoned does not mean difficult decisions cannot—or should not—be made. When difficult decisions have been made, it is important not to leave people who are experiencing the decisions in the dark. Clear communication surrounding those decisions needs to be provided immediately. Human tendency is to fill in the gaps of the unknown when in uncertain times. It can leave people feeling fear, anxiety, the impression that they were left behind, or alone. Communication about decisions does not eliminate uncertainty or challenges ahead, but it can allow space for people to experience the decision from a different, healthier perspective. In the book, Compassionate Leadership, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter touch on this specific principle. Being compassionate doesn’t mean hard decisions are avoidable. It means that they are made and delivered to those experiencing the decisions with respect and understanding of the human being affected by the decisions. It means clearly communicating the decision while also understanding how the people around those decisions are experiencing them, and not avoiding those experiences.
3. The most effective difficult conversations begin with a genuine desire to understand before attempting to diagnose, persuade, or solve. Genuinely listening with the intent to understand can help a leader provide the communication needed for each individual. People process and understand information differently. While individual needs do not eliminate the need to communicate something that may be challenging or difficult, it can provide the optimal environment and comprehension by understanding each unique perspective before concluding anything.
4. Supporting people does not mean shielding them from reality. It means helping them face reality without feeling alone. In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, he speaks about the Stockdale Paradox, where Admiral James Stockdale’s account tells a story of those who tended to survive in the Vietnam POW camps. He said that those who had the best chance of survival were not the optimists or the pessimists, but those who were the realists that didn’t lose sight of hope. The best decisions are made when facing reality of any situation. When leaders support people by allowing the reality of the situation to be present, it allows people to face those realities feeling seen and understood. Supporting realities does not mean it changes the circumstances or challenges, but it does mean people don’t feel forgotten or unvalued.
Strategic Leadership:
5. Leadership requires hope and vision, as well as the courage to challenge assumptions and build strategy based on reality. Hope is necessary for any vision to become reality. The problem is when hope alone is the driving force toward a goal or mission. It is natural for visionary leaders to see the vision — the end goal — and have an unwavering faith that everyone can make it happen. But without respectful space to understand and challenge assumptions that build an effective strategy based on current realities, it makes reaching success harder. There needs to be a balance between critical systems thinking and moving forward with action plans that map out how to realistically reach the goal. This principle leads into the next.
6. Great leaders understand that everything—from people to organizations—operates within systems. Before making decisions, they seek to understand the realities, constraints, incentives, relationships, and environments shaping outcomes. To an extent, everything in life works as a system. Look at the different scenarios of leadership in the opening paragraph. There is leader A who contradicts, lacks clear expectations and communication, undermines team members. In contrast, leader B encourages team growth and autonomy, along with the guidance needed to nudge the team toward success. Both have positives and negatives about them, but the overall system they produce is as different as night and day. Strategic leaders understand the systems that are in play within their teams, the environment, and the organization, in order to make meaningful progress.
7. Leaders do not need to have all the answers. They need to surround themselves with people who help improve the quality of their thinking—and genuinely listen, especially when those perspectives challenge their own assumptions. It is nearly impossible for any single person to know everything. A wise leader surrounds himself or herself with a great brain trust where there is a diverse way of thinking, experiences and expertise. But it isn’t enough to just surround yourself with that brain trust — if a leader is unwilling to understand and consider different perspectives and challenges before making decisions, those decisions can become harmful, or worse, detrimental to the success of the team and organization.
Character:
8. Good intentions are never a substitute for good judgment or good behavior. A leader can have every good intention for their decisions, actions, and way they communicate. But if the pattern of their behavior and words demonstrate the opposite of their intent, the intent isn’t what affects the environment. Take the leadership scenario in the opening paragraph again. Leader A’s intent could very well be that he/she is pushing the team to live up to the potential the leader sees in them, or perhaps wants to ensure he/she is setting the team up for success as best they can. But leader A’s actions and words could make the team feel disrespected, devalued, undermined, and without autonomy to do the job while carrying all the responsibility. If the later is how leader A is making the team feel, how productive can the team truly be?
9. When circumstances become difficult, values should become a leader's compass. The harder the situation, the more important it is to lead with integrity, respect, and consistency. Leaders are human, just like everyone else. Leaders come with their own set of beliefs, fears, emotions, challenges, and areas for improvement. This can all come out stronger in times of difficulty or challenge, just as any other human experiences. When things get hard, a leader needs to look more towards their values to act as a compass in the dark times. I once read a concept that spoke to this very principle: When the water is high, the river is easy to navigate because the obstacles are hidden. But when the water level drops, the rocks are exposed, and that is when your true character and capabilities are tested. Difficult times push leaders to their limits. It is in those times that values ground them in making best decisions and allow their actions to be people centered, regardless of what the decisions need to be. Especially in hard times, values need to shine a path forward more than ever. When values conflict with what people see, it creates an environment of distrust, disengagement, lack of clarity, and ultimately an environment that people no longer associate themselves with. Often termed values incongruent, when talented people view a conflict with values and the actions of their leader, the leader risks losing valuable team members.
10. Great leaders balance confidence with humility. Confidence provides the courage to make difficult decisions; humility provides the wisdom to seek better answers while protecting the dignity and respect of others. There is no doubt that leaders have to make decisions, and often very hard decisions. Many times, those decisions require courage to make them despite the effect it will have on the people they lead. However, leadership humility is also required to allow leaders to consider different perspectives, challenge assumptions they may be making, and treat people with the dignity and respect they deserve. Humility doesn’t change the final outcome, but it does ensure that decisions are being made with objective facts and information rather than emotion alone. It protects team members’ humanness despite the difficult realities everyone may be facing.
Leadership exists in the tension between competing truths. Effective leadership rarely chooses one side. It learns to navigate them with hope, compassion, humility, grounding possibilities in reality.
Wise leaders lead on two horizons simultaneously. This allows teams to stabilize today's realities while intentionally building tomorrow's possibilities. Leaders shouldn't have to choose between building the organization and building the people inside it.
In Resonate by Nancy Duarte, she opens the book by presenting a bell curve of business transformation. She describes the transformation as the “ordinary world” or start of the business that grows to maturity and the “improved world” because of the growth of the organization. But once the organization peaks, there is a natural decline. Healthy organizations recognize this before the decline accelerates and shifts the path forward to create the next wave, and then the next, and so on. When leaders balance competing truths and apply the leadership principles, it makes it easier for the team as a whole to recognize the decline, develop a strategic solution grounded in today’s reality, shift the organization toward the next era of maturity, leading to the next improved world.
The most important question any leader should be asking is, what kind of leader am I, currently? Leadership is balancing complex realities. What philosophy of leadership do I need to become the leader I want to be?