For The Nelson Pages, our 2025 theme for the year was clear: 

leadership that works today is less about control, optics, or checklists—and more about care, clarity, and shared agency in messy, real conditions. 

Our newsletters pushed leaders to replace “performing leadership” with practices that help people make meaning, stay engaged, and move forward with integrity.

If there’s one thing to carry forward, it’s this: we don’t need more performance from leaders—we need more groundedness. More listening. More honest conversations. More shared ownership. The future belongs to those who can stay human in motion—who can live change with others, not impose it on them.

So as you step into the next year, the next meeting, the next hard conversation, keep it simple: be clear, be kind, and be brave enough to build with your people instead of around them. That’s how cultures shift. That’s how trust grows. And that’s how leadership lasts. Onward!

Like many of you, my leadership training reinforced the idea that change could be planned, managed, and measured—that if I built a thoughtful plan, people would move through each stage in sequence and success was more likely. Buy-in and momentum would build over time.

But organizations today require something different. And while systems are shifting, people are too. Employees are navigating the same uncertainty—grappling with exhaustion, rising costs of living, job insecurity, and questions of purpose and belonging. The ground keeps shifting beneath individuals and institutions, making the old playbooks feel obsolete.

Managing isn’t just for managers. Matter of fact, at some point in your career, you have come across managers who manage, managers who lead, some who balance both, and likely some who do neither. While you’ve been honing your skills, preparing for the next steps on your career journey, and growing your capacity, you keep running into people who seem to have skipped the honing, preparing, and growing and seemingly out of nowhere, just became a manager. And now, they’re your manager.

So, what do you do? Stay out of the way? Focus on your own work? Vent to colleagues? Manage up?