A few years ago, I coached a senior leader; Let me call him M, who opened one of our sessions with a confession. “I want to lead with heart,” he said. “But sometimes I have to make tough decisions. And those two things don’t feel like they belong in the same sentence.”

He wasn’t talking about ordinary trade-offs. He was talking about restructuring. About having to let people go. About sitting across from someone whose housing mortgage, whose kids’ school fees, whose sense of identity was tied to the job he was about to end. He carried that weight home every night, and he was starting to believe that leading with heart and leading effectively were two different jobs and at some point, you had to put the heart down and just get the hard thing done.

That belief is more common than most leaders admit. And it’s the wrong frame.

I kept coming back, in our sessions, to a book that’s shaped how I coach leaders for years: The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. One of their five core practices is “Encouraging the Heart” — the idea that recognizing people and celebrating together isn’t a soft add-on to leadership, it is one of the fundamental disciplines that makes everything else possible. M’s story became, for me, a living example of that practice in action, not just as a way to boost morale on good days, but as something that has to show up especially when the news is hard.

The reframe that changed everything

Over a few sessions, something shifted for M. He stopped calling them “tough decisions” and started calling them something else: a process to redesign.

It sounds like semantics, but it isn’t. “Tough decision” puts the leader at the center — his discomfort, his burden, his courage in “doing the hard thing.” Redesigning a process puts the people affected at the center and asks a completely different question. Not “how do I get through this?” but “how do we build this so that whoever goes through it comes out okay?”

For M, that meant a layoff was never just an announcement and an exit. Every person affected was connected with a career outplacement coach — real support to help them land their next role, not a token gesture on the way out the door. He treated the offboarding process with the same rigor most leaders reserve for onboarding. The decision itself didn’t get easier. But it stopped being something he did to people and became something he did for them, even in a hard moment.

And then he did something that surprised even him: he started celebrating people. Not performatively, not with a generic “great job team” email — but specifically, personally, often. He began to notice that the same discipline he’d applied to handling endings with care, he could apply to recognizing people while they were still on the team. Leading with heart, it turned out, wasn’t a single moment of kindness during a crisis. It was a practice, built into the everyday rhythm of how he led.

What “encouraging the heart” actually looks like in practice

Kouzes and Posner’s research points to two things great leaders do consistently: they recognize individual contributions, and they celebrate shared values and wins as a community. M’s shift lines up with that finding exactly — recognition and celebration aren’t soft extras bolted onto “real” leadership, they’re core practices that drive performance, retention, and trust. Here’s what I’ve seen work, both in his story and in others I’ve coached since.

1. Expect the best from people, out loud. People tend to rise — or sink — to the level of expectation placed on them. Leaders who quietly assume competence and communicate it clearly get more of it back. This isn’t blind positivity; it’s a deliberate stance that shapes how people show up.

2. Make recognition personal, not transactional. A bonus is easy to give and easy to forget. It has no “trophy effect” — no lasting story attached to it. The recognition that actually lands is specific: naming exactly what someone did, why it mattered, and doing it in a way that reflects who they are, not a generic template. Ask yourself honestly: is the recognition I give meaningful to them, or just convenient for me?

3. Build celebration into the calendar, not just the crisis. Don’t wait for a big win to mark a milestone. Celebrate birthdays. Show up during hard personal moments. Create small rituals like a shout-out at the start of a meeting, a public thank-you, a team tradition, that make celebration a habit rather than an event.

4. Redesign your hardest processes around dignity. This is M’s core lesson. If a decision is going to be painful for someone, that’s exactly when process design matters most. Ask: what support structure surrounds this moment? Who helps the person land safely on the other side? A tough call handled with real infrastructure around it stops being something you did to someone.

5. Know your people before you need to. The leaders who navigate hard moments well are usually the ones who were already paying attention. Regular, genuine check-ins — going beyond “how are you?” to specific questions about what support would actually help — build the trust that makes hard conversations survivable later.

6. Listen without rushing to fix. When someone brings you a struggle, the instinct is to solve it immediately. Often what’s needed first is simply to slow down, really hear them, and resist jumping to conclusions. People remember how you listened long after they forget what you said.

7. Take care of your own stress bucket. You cannot pour recognition, patience, and empathy into a team if your own reserves are empty. Leading with heart isn’t sustainable if it comes at the total expense of your own well-being. Know your own stress signature, and don’t be too hard on yourself when your tank runs low. Leaders who tend to their own resilience have more genuine capacity to tend to others’.

The real shift

What made the difference for M wasn’t a single big gesture, but it was that he stopped treating “leading with heart” and “making hard calls” as opposing forces. He built heart into the hard calls. And once that muscle was built, it showed up everywhere: in how he recognized wins, how he checked in, how he celebrated the ordinary Tuesday as well as the big milestone.

Leading with heart isn’t about avoiding difficulty. It’s about designing every process, including the hardest ones so that the people inside it are still treated as whole human beings when it’s over. That’s a practice, not a personality trait. And like any practice, it’s built one decision, one check-in, one moment of recognition at a time.