How to Become a Human-First Leader in 2025

By Massimo Backus

Last week, I introduced the Self-Actualizing Enterprise (SAE)—a revolutionary framework for building organizations where people and profits thrive in harmony. The promise of an SAE is compelling: cultures that adapt effortlessly to change, teams that innovate fearlessly, and leaders who make bold decisions with clarity and conviction.

If that sounds like the leadership utopia you’ve been chasing, you’re not alone. Most leaders want these outcomes. They sound great on a slide deck, and they’re even better in practice. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can’t engineer these outcomes by sheer will or strategy alone.

The path to a Self-Actualizing Enterprise runs through you, the leader. Not your business plan, not your team’s performance, not even your vision. The SAE isn’t something you build from the top down—it’s something you cultivate from the inside out.

And that begins with self-compassion.

The Real Work of Human-First Leadership

Self-compassion might sound like a soft concept, but don’t be fooled. It’s the hardest, most transformative work a leader can do. At its core, self-compassion is about treating yourself with the same kindness and patience you would offer a trusted colleague or friend.

But here’s the kicker: self-compassion is not indulgence. It’s discipline. It’s choosing to confront the fear, self-doubt, and relentless perfectionism that keep you stuck in reactive, fear-based leadership.

Why does this matter? Because the way you treat yourself is the blueprint for how you treat your team. If you’re harsh, critical, or disconnected from your own humanity, it’s nearly impossible to create a culture of trust, psychological safety, or resilience.

The outcomes of an SAE—adaptability, innovation, trust—don’t emerge by accident. They are the natural byproducts of leaders who model what it means to be human first.

Why the SAE Outcomes Are Worth the Work

Let’s revisit what a Self-Actualizing Enterprise offers:

• Perpetual Relevance: Organizations that stay ahead of the curve by fostering adaptability and innovation.
• Resilience: Cultures that bounce back stronger from challenges, embracing failures as opportunities to learn.
• Bold Decision-Making: Leaders and teams that take calculated risks without fear of failure.
• Trust-Based Accountability: A shared sense of ownership that eliminates micromanagement and fear-driven control.
• Agile Structures: Teams that pivot seamlessly in response to change, grounded in shared purpose.

These outcomes sound like a dream, but they’re also deceptively difficult to achieve. Why? Because they require leaders to let go of control, embrace vulnerability, and trust their people. And none of that is possible if you haven’t first done the work of trusting yourself.

The Inner Mechanics of Self-Compassion

Self-compassion isn’t just a mindset; it’s a practice. It rewires the way you think, respond, and lead. Here’s how it transforms your leadership:

1. Clarity Through Curiosity Instead of reacting to challenges with self-criticism, self-compassion allows you to pause and reflect. When mistakes happen, you don’t spiral into self-doubt or overcompensate with control. Instead, you ask, “What can I learn from this? What does this teach me about what matters most?”
2. Emotional Resilience Leadership is messy. People disappoint you. Markets shift. Plans fail. Self-compassion helps you recover faster. By treating yourself with kindness, you build the emotional resilience to stay grounded and effective, even in the face of setbacks.
3. Authentic Leadership When you’re comfortable with your own imperfections, you stop pretending to be invincible. You show up as a human leader—vulnerable, real, and approachable. This authenticity creates psychological safety for your team, unlocking creativity and trust.
4. Empowered Decision-Making Fear-based leadership leads to micromanagement and indecision. Self-compassion liberates you from the need to control every variable. You trust your instincts and your team, empowering others to step into their full potential.

From Wanting to Doing: Becoming a Human-First Leader

It’s one thing to want the outcomes of an SAE, and another thing entirely to embody the kind of leadership that makes those outcomes possible. Becoming a Human-First Leader requires a willingness to challenge the habits, beliefs, and fears that have defined your leadership so far.

Here’s where the work begins:

1. Recognize the Cost of Fear-Based Leadership

Take a hard look at how fear shows up in your leadership. Do you avoid difficult conversations? Micromanage to maintain control? Overcompensate for self-doubt by pushing your team harder? These behaviors don’t just limit your effectiveness—they poison the culture you’re trying to build.

2. Commit to the Practice of Self-Compassion

This isn’t a one-and-done transformation. Self-compassion requires daily practice. It’s catching yourself in moments of self-criticism and choosing curiosity instead. It’s admitting when you’re wrong and forgiving yourself when you fall short. It’s trusting that progress—not perfection—is enough.

3. Model Vulnerability and Humanity

Your team doesn’t need you to be perfect. They need you to be real. Share your struggles. Admit when you don’t have all the answers. When you model vulnerability, you give others permission to do the same, creating a culture of trust and collaboration.

4. Align Your Leadership with Your Values

Ask yourself: Are my actions reflecting the kind of leader I want to be? If trust, growth, and purpose are your values, they should show up in how you lead—every meeting, every decision, every interaction.

5. Stay the Course

This work isn’t easy. You’ll face resistance—from within yourself and from others. But as I write in Human First, Leader Second, “Discomfort is the price of transformation. If it feels easy, you’re probably not doing it right.”

Unlearning Old Habits and Dealing with Resistance

When you set out to lead as a Human-First Leader, resistance is inevitable. It’s not just about confronting your own inner critic or perfectionist tendencies—it’s also about navigating a culture that may be deeply invested in the status quo. The challenge of unlearning old habits is compounded when the organization itself resists the changes you’re trying to embody.

Take Rachel, a senior executive in the healthcare industry. As the leader of a regional hospital system, Rachel’s focus had always been on operational excellence. She had built her career by maintaining tight control, ensuring every process ran with precision, and keeping a professional distance from her team. In an industry steeped in tradition, where outcomes are often measured in lives saved and efficiency benchmarks, the idea of shifting leadership style to one rooted in vulnerability and self-compassion felt like a risk—not just for Rachel, but for her organization.

Healthcare, despite being a “people business,” is often reticent to embrace change. The industry thrives on structure, protocols, and hierarchies—qualities that ensure patient safety but can also create rigidity. When Rachel began incorporating self-compassion into her leadership, the resistance hit hard.

Internally, she wrestled with the voice of her inner critic, which whispered, “If you loosen your grip, things will fall apart. Lives are at stake—this is no place for vulnerability.” Externally, the cultural resistance was palpable. Her leadership team, accustomed to her unyielding style, questioned the shift. “Why are you changing things now? The system works,” one manager told her during a tense meeting. Another said, “We don’t have time for this emotional stuff—we’re already stretched thin.”

But Rachel knew the “system” wasn’t really working. Morale was low, turnover was high, and her teams were burning out at alarming rates. She could see that fear and control, while effective in the short term, were eroding trust and stifling innovation.

Rachel and I worked together to navigate both forms of resistance. For her internal doubts, we leaned on self-compassion practices to help her confront the fear driving her need for control. She began to recognize that her perfectionism, though well-intentioned, was rooted in a desire to protect herself and others from failure. By softening this impulse, Rachel found she could make decisions with more clarity and confidence, even in a high-stakes environment.

Organizational resistance, however, required a different strategy. Rachel realized she couldn’t dismantle years of cultural rigidity overnight, but she could start by modeling the change she wanted to see. In one leadership meeting, she addressed the elephant in the room head-on.

“I know some of you are wondering why I’m asking us to rethink how we lead,” she began. “Healthcare is about people—patients and the teams who care for them. Yet our culture often treats our people like machines, focusing only on outputs and efficiency. That’s not sustainable. If we want to serve our patients at the highest level, we need to start taking better care of our teams—and that begins with how we lead.”

Rachel didn’t stop there. She introduced small but impactful changes: a regular practice of open-feedback sessions, where team members could safely share concerns without fear of reprisal, and a leadership workshop on trust-building and psychological safety. These initiatives were met with skepticism at first, but over time, her team began to see the impact. Employee engagement scores improved, and staff turnover decreased significantly within a year.

The shift wasn’t without its challenges. Rachel encountered pockets of persistent resistance, particularly among leaders who equated compassion with weakness. But she stayed the course, balancing empathy with accountability and consistently modeling the behaviors she wanted to see.

What Rachel learned—and what every leader should understand—is that organizational resistance often mirrors internal resistance. Just as individuals cling to familiar habits out of fear, organizations hold tightly to established norms because they feel safe. Breaking through that resistance requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to confront discomfort head-on.

“Healthcare is built on protocols, and for good reason,” Rachel reflected months later. “But when those protocols extend to how we lead and relate to people, we end up dehumanizing the very teams we rely on. Shifting to Human-First Leadership isn’t just about being nice—it’s about creating an environment where people can thrive so that we can deliver the care our patients deserve. That starts with me.”

Rachel’s journey highlights a crucial truth: resistance—both personal and organizational—isn’t a barrier to transformation; it’s a sign that the work you’re doing matters. When you confront it with courage and compassion, you lay the groundwork for a leadership style and culture that can adapt, innovate, and endure.

In industries like healthcare, where change feels particularly risky, leaders like Rachel show that embracing humanity doesn’t weaken performance—it strengthens it. And while the path isn’t easy, the rewards are undeniable: a team that feels valued, a culture that thrives, and outcomes that reflect not just operational excellence but a deeper, more sustainable impact.

The Stakes of Leadership in 2025

The world doesn’t need more leaders chasing quarterly metrics or managing by fear. It needs leaders who are bold enough to reject the toxic myths of hustle culture and lead with their humanity intact.

Self-compassion is not a nice-to-have—it’s the foundation for everything you want to achieve as a leader. It’s how you unlock the outcomes of a Self-Actualizing Enterprise. It’s how you build teams that thrive, organizations that endure, and a legacy that lasts.

The question isn’t whether this approach works—it does. The question is whether you’re ready to lead differently.

If you’re ready to stop chasing success and start building it from within, the path is clear. Be human first. Lead with self-compassion. And watch as everything else falls into place.