he evidence from personality psychology suggests that our underlying tendencies are relatively stable, particularly as we get older. However, they are not permanently fixed. More importantly, the way we express those tendencies can change considerably according to our role, experience, confidence and environment.

The recently released UK based CIPD Good Work Index 2026 provides incredibly compelling evidence of the strong relationship that exists between organisational performance and the quality of your managers and leaders. Take a look:

Boards routinely examine organisational performance, financial results, risk and workforce capability. Yet one important area can receive far less systematic attention: the performance and effectiveness of the board itself.

A DISC workshop is designed to help people better understand their own behavioural style, recognise the preferences of others and adapt the way they communicate and work together.

Most teams are busy. Their members attend meetings, respond to emails, manage competing priorities and work hard to meet deadlines.

But being busy is not the same as being effective.

What would appear to be an ongoing shift towards more “human-centred” leadership is indeed a positive one and understanding and embracing empathy is a big part of that. People invariably want leaders who listen, understand individual circumstances and recognise that employees have lives beyond the workplace. But empathy without accountability can create its own problems and getting the balance right can be challenging. A book that I highly recommend on this topic is The Empathy Edge by Maria Ross.

Self-awareness is regularly described as one of the foundations of effective management and leadership and it’s easy to understand why.

Leaders need to recognise their strengths and limitations, understand their emotional triggers, appreciate how their behaviour affects others and remain open to feedback. Without this insight, even technically capable managers can unintentionally undermine trust, motivation and performance.

However, there is another construct that may be just as important—and perhaps even more directly connected to whether a leader succeeds.

That construct is self-efficacy: the belief that we are capable of taking the actions required to manage a particular situation or achieve a particular outcome. This raises an interesting question:

Emotional intelligence is widely recognised as an essential leadership capability and there is an enormous amount of data to support this. In short, it influences how we manage pressure, respond to feedback, navigate conflict, understand others and build productive relationships.

Yet emotional intelligence presents a difficult contradiction (or paradox) in that it those with the greatest gaps in this competency area that may also be the least able to recognise those gaps.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve been involved in many leadership development programs. While each program has had a different focus, one theme comes up again and again when participants reflect on what they’ve learned and what they will apply.

These learners regularly suggest that completing a behavioural style profile, such as DISC, has changed the way they understand their relationships and the impact is rarely limited to the workplace.

Feedback is not just a management tool. It is the fuel that helps leaders grow, adapt, and lead with greater self-awareness. When done well, feedback turns everyday experiences into leadership lessons and helps people move from good intentions to better results.

Management and leadership are often spoken about as though they are interchangeable. They sit side by side in job titles, capability frameworks and development programs. We ask people to lead teams, manage performance, show leadership and manage change as if they are variations of the same skill.

A high-performing team is not just a group of talented people working near each other. Talent helps, but it does not automatically create teamwork. The best teams have something deeper: trust, clarity, shared purpose, mutual accountability and the ability to work through problems honestly.

Mental health has become one of the biggest workplace conversations of the past few years. It is no longer a quiet HR topic, hidden inside an employee assistance brochure or mentioned once a year during a wellbeing campaign. It is now part of the bigger discussion about leadership, culture, performance, safety and retention.

That shift is welcome. But it also creates a risk.

For years, organisations have treated employee engagement as one of the strongest signs that people will stay. If employees are motivated, involved and positive about their work, surely they are less likely to leave. That logic still holds some truth. But it is no longer enough.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way people work. It can write, summarise, analyse, automate and answer at a speed no human can match. That creates a clear challenge for leaders: if technology can do more of the technical work, what becomes more valuable about human work? One answer is empathy.

Good leadership depends on self-awareness. Most managers understand this in theory. They know they should be aware of their communication style, their impact on others, their strengths, their blind spots and the way they show up under pressure. But self-awareness has a limit.

We cannot fully understand our leadership impact by looking only at ourselves. We need feedback from others. This is where the Johari Window remains a simple but powerful tool for modern managers and leaders.