Instinct vs. Frameworks

We've been teaching people to perform humanity instead of practicing it.

Nathan Eva and colleagues delivered a brutal reality check to the leadership development industrial complex in their 2024 paper. They tested twelve of our favorite leadership surveys—transformational, servant, ethical, transactional, the whole taxonomic zoo—and discovered something that should have been obvious but somehow wasn't. They all collapse into a single general factor.

Not "inspirational motivation" versus "intellectual stimulation." Not the elaborate style distinctions we've built entire consulting practices around. Just one thing that explains nearly all the variance in how followers rate their leaders: the affective quality of the leader-follower relationship.

People don't follow frameworks. They follow humans they trust.

Beneath all our sophisticated leadership theories lies something embarrassingly simple—the emotional bond between leader and follower. The trust. The genuine care. How someone feels about their leader, not how many competency boxes that leader checks.

I spent years teaching leadership capabilities and frameworks, and I always had this pit in my stomach. Something felt wrong about breaking human connection into competency models. About teaching empathy like it was a foreign language instead of our native tongue. We turned leadership into a performance instead of letting it be a practice.

Watch any toddler and you'll see the entire leadership development curriculum playing out in real time. They cry when excluded from play—social rejection activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. They demand to "do it myself"—autonomy and mastery drive from day one. They ask "why" about everything—curiosity and exploration need no encouragement. They know instantly when someone is being mean—moral intuitions precede any formal ethics training.

Every single impulse that makes great leadership already lives in us. We don't need to be taught to care about fairness. We need permission to act on that caring. We don't need to learn empathy. We need systems that don't punish us for showing it.

But somewhere between the playground and the corporate office, we convinced ourselves these instincts weren't professional enough. We labeled them "soft skills"—as if reading people accurately was somehow weaker than reading spreadsheets. We decided that natural human responses needed frameworks to be valid. That trust required a training module to create.

We took the most essential part of leadership—seeing people clearly and responding with care—and made it feel amateur. Unprofessional. Something you needed to upgrade with a certification.

The result? Managers who can recite the five elements of psychological safety but can't tell when someone on their team is falling apart. Leaders who know the feedback sandwich by heart but can't have an honest conversation about performance. Executives who can facilitate listening sessions but have forgotten how to actually listen.

We didn't make leadership better. We made it safer. And safety, it turns out, is the enemy of authenticity.

I've watched this happen over and over. Someone spots compliance issues with a client account—their gut screaming that something's wrong. But instead of trusting their instincts, they follow the escalation framework. Document concerns using proper templates. Build business cases with the right stakeholders. Perform the role of a concerned employee instead of being one.

Weeks later, their instincts prove right. Months later, investigators ask why no one acted on the obvious red flags. They had the right instincts. The system taught them not to trust them.

I've seen managers feel their team's energy dying weeks before anyone says anything explicit. They sense people checking out, going through motions, the spark dimming in real time. Their instincts tell them to address it directly—call everyone together and say, "Something feels different. What's happening?"

Instead, they deploy the engagement framework. Surveys, team-building activities, psychological safety workshops. They treat symptoms with techniques instead of addressing disease with truth.

When people quit in waves, exit interviews say the same thing: "Leadership stopped caring about us as people." They cared deeply. They just stopped showing it in ways that felt real.

Eva's research explains why every "revolutionary" leadership approach eventually feels the same. Why transformational leaders and servant leaders and authentic leaders all seem to produce similar results when they're actually effective. Because underneath the style differences, they're all doing the same fundamental thing: creating relationships where people feel valued, trusted, and empowered.

The delivery mechanism doesn't matter. The underlying human connection does.

You know this intuitively when you stop trying to be a "transformational leader" and start being yourself. When you trade inspirational quotes for honest conversations. When you stop facilitating psychological safety and start creating it through presence.

Performance doesn't improve because you mastered a new leadership style. It improves because people finally feel seen by someone who gives a damn about their growth. That's not a technique. That's humanity. And humanity doesn't need training—it needs permission.

We took the most human part of work—how people care for each other, build trust, create meaning together—and turned it into a learnable skill set with measurable outcomes. We made people doubt their instincts about other people. We taught them to perform connection instead of creating it.

But safety is the enemy of authenticity. And authenticity is what followers actually respond to.

Stop teaching people to doubt their instincts. Start giving them permission to trust what they see about the humans around them. Permission to respond to struggle when they notice it. Permission to address problems directly instead of channeling everything through proper processes.

You don't need transformational leadership training to see when someone is drowning in their quarterly presentation. You need permission to trust your instincts and say, "This seems hard for you. How can I help?"

That conversation changes everything. Not because you applied the right framework, but because you trusted your human ability to see someone struggling and did something about it.

Measure success not by how well someone executes inspirational motivation, but by how deeply their people feel valued. Not by their scores on servant leadership assessments, but by whether their team would choose to follow them without the title. Not by their mastery of frameworks, but by their willingness to be human at work.

The research is clear. The frameworks are noise. The relationship is signal.

Time to stop teaching people to perform humanity and start giving them permission to practice it. Because the people you lead don't need you to be a better transformational or servant or authentic leader. They need you to be a better human being.

And that's not something you learn in training. That's something you choose in moments.