I was reading some studies recently, that put into words what I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past months (even years !). Studies that put the focus on rather obvious findings : our work is becoming boundaryless (Deloitte’s latest Global Human Capital Trends). Roles, location, or employment models are fluid. Meaning that what makes the difference on organizations’ performance is profoundly linked to our human nature : the ability to give meaning to what we do (leveraging the use of technology and AI), our sense of empathy (to boost understanding and collaboration), or the ability to navigate and develop particular organization and team identities and culture.
Sustainable leadership goes a step further : it aligns economic results with people and society, creating organizations that are robust - able to adapt, collaborate, and endure. McKinsey notes that executive teams now juggle nearly twice as many critical priorities as a decade ago, making this dual focus on performance and resilience essential.
So far, no real big surprise. But how can leadership do this? Here are some thoughts on the way to sustainable leadership.
- Focus on meaning
I firmly believe in the vision of French leadership thinker Vincent Lenhardt, describing leaders as “bearers of meaning”: they articulate the purpose, values, and shared vision that bind individual and collective dynamics, and they adopt a coaching posture that develops people and teams. In practice: leaders catalyze team cohesion, nurture autonomy, and grow collective intelligence - key ingredients of sustainable performance.
Creating this meaning allows the microcultures to continue living, because it gives a clear vision that guides decision, whatever the particularity of each person, team, or subgroup.
- Assumptions are strategy : Assume potential
For those of you familiar with McGregor’s Theory X & Theory Y, you might know that a leader’s underlying assumptions about people becomes self-fulfilling. Theory X assumes people dislike work and need control - often leading to surveillance, rigid rules, and low trust. Theory Y assumes people seek responsibility and meaning - leading to empowerment, participation, and higher engagement.
Sustainable leadership is congruent with Theory Y: it invites autonomy, collaboration, and shared accountability. In complex environments, Y-oriented systems (coaching, distributed decisions, transparent goals) are more adaptable, and less brittle, than X-oriented ones.
- Leverage the system : the path to collaborative robustness
Inspired by the works of Arnaud Tonnelé, focusing on the how, leaders can also use systemic levers such as culture, roles, rituals, feedback, or problem-solving to orchestrate transformations across levels (individual, team and organization).
Tonnelé’s playbooks - The TeamBuilding Bible and 65 Tools to Support Individual and Collective Change - translate big ideas into repeatable practices leaders can deploy in the flow of work. This does not leaves cooperation to chance, but rather makes it repeatable.
- HR as the architect of sustainable, collaborative leadership
To support this leadership evolution, as well as the organization’s evolution, HR could show the example and redefine its place : not as the traditional HR department, but rather as a distributed discipline throughout each company. After having seen the rise of Ulrich’s business partnership model, the efficiency of HR lies now in a real embedding within the business strategy, not beside it.
Focusing on culture (the real one, not the one on posters), the change & agility capability, the leadership evolution, the strategic added value of HR systems & tools, and the human sustainability, will place HR at the right level.
To do so, some concrete actions can be :
- Prioritize leader & management development. Gartner places it as the #1 HR priority, urging organizations to reset role expectations and make the manager job manageable—a precondition for sustainable leadership behavior to stick. This will allow to develop leaders who can hold multiple priorities while still taking care of the human side.
- Institutionalize coaching (Lenhardt) and teamlevel practices (Tonnelé): I know that the coaching word is over/misused, but it stays crucial for me : integrate coaching, peer learning, team charters, and retrospective rituals into leadership development and talent systems.
- Blend human and tech responsibly. BCG shows that HR can unlock 20–40% productivity with GenAI while upgrading the employee experience - if HR redesigns its operating model, skills, and guardrails for responsible AI.
- Hold a Theory Y line. Bake autonomy, mastery, and purpose into job design and performance systems; use X-style controls sparingly for safety critical tasks only.
If we manage to focus on these elements, we could build organizations that would be prepared for our VUCA/BANI world. Robust organizations, not the most efficient but the most able to adapt and survive while bringing value to the people and the business.
In a nutshell, Sustainable leadership turns meaning into method.
By adopting Theory Y assumptions, coaching-based postures, and team level operating habits, HR can architect cultures where people and performance reinforce each other, today and over the long run.
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Sources (selection)
- Gartner, Top Priorities for HR Leaders (2024) -leader/manager development is priority #1; culture is top‑five.
- Deloitte, 2024 Global Human Capital Trends - boundaryless HR, microcultures, human sustainability.
- McKinsey, The art of 21st‑century leadership - leaders face a higher volume of simultaneous priorities.
- BCG, Executive Perspectives: Unlocking Impact from GenAI in HR - productivity and capability shifts in HR.
- Vincent Lenhardt, Coaching for Meaning / Les responsables porteurs de sens—leader as bearer of meaning; coaching posture.
- Arnaud Tonnelé—La bible du team‑building; 65 outils…; profile (organization‑level coaching).
- Douglas McGregor—Theory X & Y fundamentals.