Leadership today is still about achieving results, but it should also be about the motivations and values that guide how decisions are made. As the workplace evolves, the real test of leadership lies less in isolated achievements and more in the everyday choices that shape the relationships within teams. To reimagine leadership styles of the future, we must look beyond performance metrics and ask deeper questions about how ambition is defined and how care is valued.
A New Lens on Leadership and Decision-Making
As organizations face a world increasingly defined by hybrid work and digital acceleration, often resulting in emotional disconnection, the future of effective leadership is demanding a new set of parameters for guiding success. Equally important to managing performance at the workplace is understanding how decisions, especially those that touch the complex intersection of work and life, are shaped by what we value. In our article, Integrating the Decision-Making Process in the Work Family Field: An Action-Based Approach, we propose a new leadership model that centers on precisely this: how the inner life of a leader, their motivation, learning and ambition to care, informs the decisions they make and the relationships they build.
Our model draws on the largely underrecognized work of Juan Antonio Pérez López, whose theory of human action offers a powerful lens to examine how ethical quality is developed through interaction. According to Pérez López, every decision carries three outcomes: effects for the self (extrinsic and intrinsic) and effects for the other (transcendent). Ethical maturity is about recognizing how our decisions shape others' learning and well-being, and how those outcomes, in turn, shape us.
This approach feels especially relevant now. In a time when people are reevaluating what matters, when the experience economy increasingly rewards connection, and when loneliness is often named but rarely addressed in organizational life, we must ask what kind of ambition we are cultivating in our leaders. Too often, the ambition mindset is too narrowly defined, anchored in goals and performance metrics. In our article, we introduce the concept of caregiving ambition as a complementary, much-needed dimension. Caregiving ambition reflects the desire to support and nurture others, not because we must, but because we aspire to. This is not limited to the home. Managers can demonstrate caregiving ambition in the workplace, which can be translated to "family-supportive supervisor behaviors," such as offering emotional support, the opportunity for flexibility, or modeling work-life balance.
But how often do we recognize these behaviors as signs of strong leadership? And when we evaluate or promote our managers, are we just measuring what they achieve, or are we also attending to how they support others along the way?
From Performance Metrics to Caregiving Ambition
We argue that caregiving ambition must be explicitly valued if organizations wish to be genuinely human-centric. Practically, this means revisiting how we define and assess leadership potential. Do our systems reward trust-building and perspective-taking? Do our leadership programs help managers understand their motivational structure - what drives them to make decisions and why, and how do these decisions impact the learning and growth of others?
Why a leader acts is as consequential as what they do. Leaders driven primarily by extrinsic rewards or internal satisfaction tend to produce narrow outcomes; they risk developing what Pérez López termed negative motivational learning. In this self-reinforcing loop, the needs of others become invisible and interactions lose their capacity to generate mutual growth. Over time, work relationships are viewed from a purely instrumental perspective.
In contrast, when leaders act from transcendent motives and seek to contribute to the development or well-being of others, they experience positive motivational learning. They expand their ability to perceive ethical dimensions and anticipate broader consequences that enable to build trust-based relationships. This is the kind of learning we need to see more of in organizations.
However, this resonant type of learning does not happen by chance; it requires intentional reflection. We encourage leaders to ask themselves questions such as: How will this decision affect the learning or trust of my team? What am I learning from this interaction and what are my team members learning from how I handle it? Am I creating conditions that expand or reduce future options for collaboration and problem-solving?
To support this shift, we suggest the following recommendations:
- Recognize and reward caregiving ambition: Embed family supportive supervisor behavior indicators into leadership assessments and elevate stories of leaders who demonstrate care as a central part of their ambition.
- Develop motivational self-awareness: Include reflective tools in leadership programs to help managers understand their motivational structure and the learning they derive from key decisions.
- Make transcendent motives visible and viable: Encourage leaders to share what they achieved, who they helped and, more importantly, what they learned in the process.
- Encourage trust as an outcome, not just a condition: Recognize that leaders who act from transcendent motives create trust-rich environments, generating new possibilities for ethical and practical action.
As an example, a hotel GM under pressure to deliver results during a slow season learns in a weekly meeting that one manager has been quietly adjusting shifts so parents can attend school events while keeping service levels steady. She decides to recognize this effort publicly, pointing out its role in keeping morale high and reducing turnover. The situation also leads her to reconsider how she evaluates her own direct reports, realizing that she has often rewarded results without paying attention to how those results were achieved. By sharing this example in a later staff gathering, she makes clear that care is not separate from ambition, but an essential part of sustaining both performance and trust.
Towards Human-Centric Leadership Styles
These recommendations speak directly to the realities of hospitality organizations. When leaders are recognized for how they care, not only for what they deliver, the message spreads quickly across teams. Staff who feel supported are more likely to remain in their roles, which strengthens continuity and reduces the constant disruption of turnover. Developing self-awareness around motives also changes how managers approach decisions. A supervisor who sees that their drive is shaped by recognition alone will eventually exhaust their team. Whereas one who reflects on the wider effects of their choices can create conditions where service quality is sustained even under pressure.
Making transcendent motives part of everyday conversations in management meetings allows leaders to talk openly about the human side of performance, whether that is a scheduling decision or a gesture of flexibility. Hospitality depends on people showing up with energy and care, day after day. A culture that values transcendent motives and caregiving ambition ensures that this effort is not taken for granted but becomes a source of strength for both employees and guests.
Ultimately, our work invites a change in mindset: from perceiving leadership as a static trait to viewing it as an evolving practice of motivation and relational learning. From treating work and family as separate domains to recognizing the self as the interface through which values, behaviors and relationships flow. And from prioritizing outcomes alone to cultivating the internal capacities that shape how those outcomes are pursued and at what human cost.
Human-centric leadership goes beyond empathy. It is about the learning we enable in ourselves and others through our daily decisions. If we want to build organizations that are performant and deeply human, we must start by asking what kind of ambition we reward and whether we are brave enough to name care as one of its highest forms.
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