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Heart Based Leadership

The Missing Metric for Success


There’s a kind of intelligence that rarely appears in traditional leadership assessments, yet quietly determines whether teams thrive or fracture. It’s not IQ, technical skill, or even strategic thinking. It’s heart intelligence, the capacity to lead from awareness, compassion, and genuine human connection.


Heart Based Leadership

What is Heart Intelligence?


Heart intelligence is the skill of aligning thinking, feeling, and acting with integrity and empathy. It’s the leader’s ability to hold both the organisational mission and the human experience of their people in the same frame (Childre & Martin, 2000).


Physiological research has shown that the heart contains a complex intrinsic nervous system, often referred to as the “heart brain”, capable of influencing perception, decision-making, and emotional regulation (McCraty, 2017). In leadership practice, this translates into:

  • Reading emotional undercurrents before they derail a meeting.

  • Making decisions that balance short-term targets with long-term trust.

  • Remaining grounded under pressure, so the team takes cues from steadiness rather than stress.


Making the Case for Heart Intelligence as a KPI


Most organisations still measure leadership by revenue, retention rates, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Yet research suggests the most overlooked metric in leadership is not a number at all. It’s the ability to create an environment where people feel valued, understood, and inspired (Boyatzis et al., 2012).


In short, heart intelligence isn’t a distraction from results, it’s the soil that allows sustainable results to grow. The business world often treats compassion as a “soft” quality. Yet data show it is a driver of organisational performance:

  • Teams with leaders who demonstrate empathy have significantly higher engagement and retention (Catalyst, 2022).

  • Heart-intelligent leaders foster psychological safety, identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as the number-one predictor of team success (Rozovsky, 2015).

  • Compassion-led organisations report higher innovation rates because employees feel safe to experiment and take creative risks (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005).


Balancing Authority & Openness


I remember the last time I became a manager leading people. It had been a while and since then I was teaching the subject, which put some extra pressure to deliver. There was a meeting where I wanted to be totally open with people and let the room to be vulnerable. Many things were achieved in that meeting but people felt the meeting was chaotic and disorganised as it allowed for ugly group dynamics to surface.


In later meetings, where authorative-styles were used, the meeting looked perfect but everyone felt bad. What I learnt in that position was that there needs to be a balance of authority and compassion. Authority is needed to hold the presence and not let agendas dominate. When this happens, compassion has a safe container from which to open its door. Through this I started developing heart intelligence which supported me to:

  • Improved decision quality, balancing human and strategic factors without reactive bias.

  • Lower turnover, as employees feel connected to both leader and mission.

  • Increased resilience in change, with teams adapting faster and supporting each other.

  • Better stakeholder relationships, as empathy builds trust beyond transactional exchanges.


The Process of Adopting Heart Intelligence


Have you did something wrong and something told you that it was wrong but didn't listen. Adopting Heart Intelligence is being better able to listen to that voice. Developing this is a personal journey that depends cultural upbringing and their belief systems. What I find is that the more you work with what works and focus on experience rather than belief systems, the freer you are to grow.


Developing heart intelligence is not about being “softer". In certain cases heart intelligence may actually help you to bring in tough love. What we are talking about is to become more attuned and deliberate about your actions, emotions and thoughts. The process involves:

  1. Self Awareness Training: learn to notice emotional patterns and triggers whilst learning how to regulate yourself and find optimism.

  2. Discerning What You Feel: many times people believe that all that we feel is coming from us. In therapy we are taught that many times we can absorb the feelings of others. Learning to know what is your own stuff and what isn't is essential.

  3. Not This, Not This: the Vedanta tradition has this concept of Neti Neti or Not this, Not This. For instance if you feel sad but you know there is nothing to be sad about, you say I am not this sadness. This trains you to let go of what is not yours.

  4. Be Inclusive: the minute you judge others is the minute you reject yourself. When you hate someone, that hate is felt in your body. It is your body that feels bad not just the person your are projecting the hate towards. Judgement blinds from the truth.

  5. Be In Stillness: find time to be in stillness and connect to the space in the middle of your heart. There is an emptiness there that fills. Ask a question you have to that space and see what emerges. The answer might surprise you.


Practical Application in the Workplace


When leaders embed heart intelligence into their leadership style, it becomes part of the organisational culture. Teams move from operating in fear or competition to working in coordinated, human-centred alignment toward shared goals.


The next great leap in leadership metrics will not come from new dashboards or analytics platforms. It will come from recognising that the most powerful predictor of performance is not just how smart a leader is, but how deeply they connect to their people, their mission, and themselves.


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