Go ahead. Search every leadership competency framework on the shelf. Scan the ones from Harvard. From Gallup. From your company's HR department. You'll find "strategic thinking." You'll find "communication." You'll find "drives results."
You know what you won't find?
"Gives a shit."
And it's the most important one on the list.
The Competency Gap Nobody Talks About
I've been researching leadership for years. I've talked to dozens of leaders, HR professionals, and coaches on my podcast. And the one thing showing up in every single conversation is this: the leaders who get results are the ones who care about their people.
Not in a performative, "my door is always open" kind of way. In a "I noticed you looked off in this morning's meeting and I want to check in" kind of way.
Ben Morton, a leadership coach with a military background, puts it bluntly: the number one leadership competency is genuinely caring about people. Not strategy. Not execution. Not your ability to build a roadmap or hit quarterly targets.
Caring.
And the data backs him up.
The Numbers Are Brutal
According to Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement has dropped for the second consecutive year, falling to its lowest point since 2020. The resulting disengagement costs the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity. Nine percent of global GDP. Gone.
Here's the part to scare you: managers influence 70% of team engagement variance. Not the CEO's vision statement. Not the benefits package. Not the ping-pong table. The manager. Your manager. You, if you're in a leadership role.
And manager engagement itself is collapsing. It fell from 31% to 22% between 2022 and 2025. The people responsible for engaging your teams are themselves checked out.
Meanwhile, 75% of voluntary turnover traces directly back to managerial issues. Bad managers cost US companies up to $360 billion annually in turnover, productivity loss, and decreased engagement.
In my own research at Step It Up HR, 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. Not a rounding error. Almost everyone. And when nearly every employee reports experiencing bad leadership, the problem isn't the employees.
What "Giving a Shit" Looks Like in Practice
This isn't about being soft. It's not about being everyone's friend. It's about treating people as people.
Catalyst's research surveyed nearly 900 employees and found something striking. People with empathic senior leaders reported 61% higher creativity compared to 13% for those without empathic leaders. Engagement jumped from 32% to 76%. And 50% of employees with empathetic leaders said their workplace was inclusive, compared to 17% under less empathetic leadership.
Read those numbers again. 61% versus 13% on creativity. 76% versus 32% on engagement. These aren't marginal improvements. This is a different planet.
So what does it look like in practice?
- Asking "what aren't you getting from me?" in every one-on-one. This single question flips the feedback dynamic on its head. Instead of judging your team, you're inviting them to judge you.
- Noticing when someone goes quiet. Not waiting for the annual review to learn they've been drowning for six months. Six months to tell someone they're struggling? Try six minutes.
- Knowing what matters to each person on your team. One person wants autonomy. Another wants visibility. Another wants to leave by 5pm because their kid has football practice. Know the difference. Act on it.
- Having the tough conversations early. Caring means telling someone the truth before it becomes a crisis. As Dan Greene puts it, if feedback feels mean, you waited too long.
- Fighting for your people up the chain. Removing obstacles, pushing back on unreasonable demands, getting your team the resources they need. Being the roadblock remover, not the roadblock.
None of this requires a certification. None of it requires a two-day workshop or a leadership retreat in the countryside. It requires you to pay attention to other human beings.
Why Leaders Resist It
Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
Plenty of leaders avoid caring because caring is expensive. Emotionally expensive. When you know your team member is going through a divorce, or struggling with anxiety, or burning out quietly in the corner... you have to do something about it. And doing something is harder than pretending you didn't notice.
Some leaders were promoted because they were the best engineer, the best salesperson, the best analyst. Nobody taught them the people part. As Zach Mercurio puts it, leading people is a separate occupation. It requires its own skills, its own quality indicators, and its own expectations. You wouldn't hire a plumber to do electrical work. Why do we keep promoting technical experts into people-leadership roles without giving them the tools to care well?
Others have been trained out of it. Corporate culture has spent decades telling leaders to be "professional," which somehow got translated into "emotionally absent." Being professional doesn't mean being a robot. It means showing up as a whole human being and allowing your people to do the same.
And some... some are afraid. Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of being too close to their teams. Afraid of the vulnerability required to say "I don't know" or "I got it wrong." But as we've seen time and again on our podcast, the leaders who show up with honesty and care don't lose authority. They gain trust. And trust is the only currency worth having.
The ROI of Caring (Since Apparently We Need One)
If the human argument doesn't land, here's the business case.
Harvard Business Review research shows incompetent leadership results in a 7-9% decrease in productivity and a 7-10% reduction in profitability across an organisation. Replacing an employee who leaves because of poor management costs between 30% and 200% of their annual salary.
The inverse is also true. At Step It Up HR, we've seen organisations with engaged, caring leadership post engagement scores well above the global average of 21%. When your people feel valued, they stay. They innovate. They bring their best thinking to work instead of saving it for their side projects.
Garry Ridge built WD-40 into a $3.6 billion company with 97% of employees saying they respected their "coach" (he banned the word "manager"). His formula was simple: care about people, give them clear values, and get out of the way.
You don't need a better strategy. You need leaders who give a shit about the people executing it.
Stop Treating Caring as Optional
Here's my challenge to you.
Next Monday, before you open your email, before you check your dashboards, before you look at a single metric... talk to a person on your team. Not about work. About them. Ask how they're doing and wait for the real answer. Not the "I'm fine" autopilot response. The real one.
Then do it again Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every day after.
It will feel awkward at first. You'll want to cut it short and get back to the "real work." But this IS the real work. Everything else you do as a leader is downstream of whether your people trust you enough to bring their best.
The data is clear. $10 trillion in lost productivity. 75% of turnover traced to managers. 61% creativity with empathic leaders versus 13% without. These aren't abstract numbers. They're the cost of leaders who don't give a shit.
Giving a shit isn't a soft skill. It's not a nice-to-have. It's the foundation every other leadership competency sits on top of.
Put it on the job description. I dare you.