Five years ago, I published Dare to Care in the Workplace and launched a framework called Designed to Care this year which is built on a simple premise: the companies that win the talent war are the ones that treat care as infrastructure, not decoration.
Five years later, the framework has been tested across hundreds of organizations, refined through workshops, masterclasses, and thousands of conversations with HR leaders and executives. And one pattern has emerged as the single most persistent barrier to building the kind of culture that attracts, retains, and develops great people.
It is not compensation. It is not remote work policy. It is not AI disruption.
It is the leaders.
Specifically, it is the gap between what organizations expect from their leaders and what they actually equip them to do. Companies promote their best individual contributors into management roles, hand them a team, and expect leadership to happen. When it does not, they blame the person. They send the leader to a two-day training. They buy the leader a subscription to an app. And nothing changes.
I know this because I hear it in every audience I speak to. We asked our community directly: what is keeping you up at night? The responses were overwhelming, and they told one story. The majority of HR leaders who responded described some version of the same problem: leaders who cannot or will not lead.
One HR director said it plainly: “If we could help them shift from reacting to developing, coaching, and leading people, I believe we would see significant improvements in culture, engagement, accountability, and retention.”
She is right. And after five years of building, testing, and refining the Designed to Care framework, I can tell you that the leadership problem is not a training problem. It is an infrastructure problem. And solving it requires the same level of strategic commitment and intention that companies bring to their sales process, their financial controls, or their supply chain.
What Has Designed to Care Proven in Five Years?
The premise of Designed to Care has always been that care is not a soft skill. It is a business operating system. The IQ x EQ x AI equation captures this: organizations that combine intellectual rigor (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ), and the right use of technology (AI) create cultures that outperform on every metric that matters.
Decades of working with organizations across industries has confirmed several things.
Care drives retention. Companies that build care into their talent infrastructure, from recruiting through exit, consistently outperform on retention. The data is not subtle. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that organizations with highly engaged workforces are 23% more profitable. And engagement starts with how leaders treat people day to day.
Culture is a system, not a statement. The organizations that have successfully adopted the Designed to Care framework did not do it by updating their values page. They did it by redesigning their processes. They changed how they recruit, how they onboard, how they listen to their people, and how they handle departures. Culture is what happens repeatedly, not what gets printed on a poster.
The five steps work, but only when leadership commits. The Designed to Care framework has five steps:
- Build Your Brand. Your employer brand is either recruiting for you or against you. Every touchpoint a candidate or employee has with your organization tells a story about what you value.
- Grow Your Pipeline. Recruiting is a sales process. The organizations that treat it like one consistently attract better talent at lower cost.
- Create Your Onboarding Program. The first 180 days determine whether a new hire becomes a long-term contributor or a quiet quitter. As we explored in our June series on onboarding, this is where trust is built or broken.
- Shape the Employee Experience. Listening is not an event. It is a leadership system that requires ongoing investment which we covered this in our July series.
- Guide the Employee Exit. How you let people go defines your culture. Our August series on exits tackled why this is the conversation most leaders avoid and why it matters the most.
Each step has been validated through workshops, masterclasses, and real-world implementation. But the pattern that keeps repeating is this: the framework breaks down when leaders are not equipped to execute it.
Key takeaway: The framework is proven. The gap is execution, and execution depends on leaders to create the environment.. That is why this month, five years in, we are going back to the foundation: what it takes to turn people into leaders.
Why Is the Manager Problem Still the Biggest Barrier?
Because most organizations treat management as a promotion and leadership as a program. Until companies treat leadership development as core infrastructure, the gap will persist.
Here is what happens in most mid-market companies. A strong individual contributor gets promoted.. They were great at their job, so the assumption is they will be great at leading people who do that job. No one asks whether they have the emotional intelligence to navigate conflict, the communication skills to deliver hard feedback, or the strategic thinking to develop their team’s capabilities.
They get a title change, a pay bump, and a calendar full of meetings. And then they are expected to lead.
This is not a new observation. What is new is the scale of the problem. The labor market has shifted fundamentally in the past five years. Employees have more options, more information, and higher expectations. They are not willing to tolerate a leader who treats them as a task list. They want a leader who invests in their growth, communicates honestly, and builds trust through daily behavior.
McKinsey’s 2024 research on the employee experience found that the relationship between an employee and their direct manager is the single strongest predictor of both job satisfaction and intent to stay. Stronger than compensation. Stronger than flexibility. Stronger than company reputation.
And yet most companies invest less in manager development than they spend on their CRM software.
Our proprietary research with senior and key leaders reveals that 73% know they are insufficient in their investment in leadership development
The result is predictable:
- Managers default to firefighting. Without a framework for leadership, managers focus on what they know: tasks, deadlines, and problems. They spend their days reacting instead of developing their people.
- Top performers leave. Your best people do not leave companies. They leave people. When a high performer sees that their leader cannot coach, cannot advocate, and cannot create growth opportunities, they find someone who can.
- HR carries the burden. When managers cannot lead, HR becomes the default problem-solver for every people issue in the organization. This overloads HR teams, burns out your best HR professionals, and prevents HR from doing the strategic work that drives business outcomes.
One VP of Human Resources told us: “We are expected to drive culture and learning, but no one wants to spend the time doing the work, but they all want to blame it for not seeing results.”
Key takeaway: The leadership gap is not a talent problem. It is a systems problem. Companies invest in hiring, onboarding, and engagement tools, but they do not invest in the one role that determines whether any of those investments pay off: the frontline leader.
What Did Our Audience Tell Us About Their Manager Challenges?
We recently asked our community one question: what is keeping you up at night? The responses painted a clear picture. Leadership development is the dominant concern for HR leaders, and it is connected to nearly every other challenge they face.
Here is what we heard, in the audience’s own words.
“Turning managers into real leaders.” This was the most common theme across all respondents. Not leadership in the abstract, but the specific, daily challenge of getting managers to stop managing tasks and start leading people.
“Managers focused on day-to-day fires rather than leading.” One survey contributor described a pattern we see in almost every organization: managers who are so consumed by reactive work that they never get to the proactive work of developing their teams. The fire never stops, so development never starts.
“If we could help them shift from reacting to developing, coaching, and leading people, I believe we would see significant improvements in culture, engagement, accountability, and retention.” This single response captures the entire business case for leadership development. The HR leader is not asking for a training program. They are asking for a transformation.
“Title entitlement” and “being coachable.” A Vistage chair raised the problem of managers who believe the title alone qualifies them to lead. They are not open to coaching, not interested in feedback, and not willing to change how they operate. This is a selection problem as much as a development problem.
“Deeply toxic team dynamics.” One respondent described a small sales and customer experience team that has been divided for years, with a leader who is afraid to trust direct reports. This is what happens when the problem goes unaddressed: the dysfunction calcifies, and the cost compounds every quarter.
“Executives want results but will not invest in the culture work that drives them.” We heard this theme repeatedly. Executives set expectations for retention, engagement, and performance, but they will not invest the time, budget, or political capital required to build the leadership capability that produces those outcomes.
“Let’s stop pretending this is an HR problem. When managers are rewarded for hitting numbers but never held accountable for how they lead people, the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The answers from our community confirmed what I have seen for five years: you do not fix culture without fixing leadership.” Key takeaway: The data confirms what our years of work has shown. The manager problem is not a niche concern. It is the central challenge of building a high-performing culture. Every other investment, in recruiting, onboarding, engagement, and retention, underperforms when managers are not equipped to lead.
What Is the Real Cost of the Manager Gap?
The manager gap shows up in every line item that touches people: recruiting spend, turnover costs, lost productivity, and revenue per employee. Most organizations never trace these costs back to their source because they measure manager performance on task completion, not leadership effectiveness.
Here is how the math works.
Turnover. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs one-half to two times their annual salary. For a company with 500 employees and 20% annual turnover, that is 100 departures per year. At an average salary of $65,000, the replacement cost ranges from $3.25 million to $13 million annually. Gallup also found that 52% of voluntarily departing employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving. That means somewhere between $1.6 million and $6.7 million in avoidable cost, attributable to leadership failures at the manager level.
Disengagement. Only 31% of employees globally are engaged at work, according to Gallup’s 2026 data – “Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates”. The remaining 69% are either not engaged or actively disengaged. The Conference Board estimates that disengaged workers cost U.S. companies $450 to $550 billion annually. At the organizational level, this shows up as missed deadlines, quality problems, customer complaints, and the slow erosion of competitive advantage.
Recruiting spend. When managers cannot retain talent, the recruiting budget absorbs the impact. SHRM puts the average cost-per-hire at $4,700. For specialized or senior roles, the number exceeds $20,000 when recruiter fees, interview time, and productivity ramp-up are included. Every avoidable departure driven by poor management creates a recruiting cost that should not exist.
Lost institutional knowledge. When experienced employees leave because of their manager, they take relationships, context, and expertise with them. This is particularly damaging in mid-market companies where individual contributors often hold outsized institutional knowledge. The replacement hire may take 6 to 12 months to reach full productivity, and some knowledge is simply not transferable.
Cost of Disengagement Calculator
Key takeaway: The manager gap is a P&L issue. The numbers are large enough to justify significant investment in manager development, and the ROI is measurable through reduced turnover, lower recruiting spend, and higher productivity.
How Does the CARE Leadership Model Address the Manager Problem?
The CARE Leadership Model is Designed to Care’s answer to the manager gap. It gives organizations a framework for developing managers into leaders by focusing on four competencies that drive retention, performance, and trust: Courage, Accountability, Relationship, and Empathy.
Most leadership development programs fail because they treat leadership as a set of skills to be learned in a classroom. The CARE model treats leadership as a set of behaviors to be practiced daily, reinforced by systems, and measured by outcomes.
Here is how the four competencies map to the challenges our audience described.
Courage. The willingness to have hard conversations, make difficult decisions, and lead through discomfort. Courage is what separates a manager who avoids a performance conversation for six months from a leader who addresses it early, directly, and with respect. Every respondent in our audience survey who described “toxic dynamics” or “title entitlement” was describing a courage deficit.
- Leaders with courage address performance issues before they become team problems
- They advocate for their people to senior leadership, even when it is uncomfortable
- They make decisions based on what is right, not what is easy
- They are willing to be unpopular in service of the team’s long-term health
Accountability. Holding yourself and your team to clear standards, consistently. Accountability is not micromanagement. It is the practice of setting expectations, measuring progress, and following through. The survey contributor who described “managers focused on day-to-day fires” were describing an accountability gap: managers who are accountable for tasks but not for developing their people.
- Accountability means setting expectations clearly enough that success and failure are both measurable
- It means giving feedback regularly, not just during annual reviews
- It means holding everyone to the same standard, including yourself
- It means following through on commitments, even small ones
Relationship. Building genuine connections with your team members as individuals. Relationship is not about being friends with your direct reports. It is about knowing what motivates them, understanding their career goals, and creating an environment where they feel safe telling you the truth. The respondent who described a leader “afraid to trust direct reports” was describing a relationship failure.
- Relationships are built through consistent one-on-one conversations, not just team meetings
- They require genuine curiosity about each person’s goals, challenges, and strengths
- They depend on psychological availability: being present, not just physically in the room
- They are the foundation of retention. People do not leave leaders they trust.
Empathy. Understanding the human impact of every leadership decision. Empathy does not mean avoiding hard decisions. It means making hard decisions while acknowledging the human cost and treating people with dignity through the process. This is the competency that connects the CARE model to everything we covered in August’s series on exiting well.
- Empathy is listening to understand, not to respond
- It is recognizing that every policy, process, and decision affects real people with real lives
- It is the skill that makes accountability feel supportive rather than punitive
- It is what the audience meant when they said they want managers who can “develop, coach, and lead people”
“I chose Courage, Authenticity, Relationships, and Empathy because leadership is not what you know—it is what people experience from you. Courage helps you tell the truth, authenticity makes you trustworthy, relationships create connection, and empathy keeps accountability human. Together, they move care from good intention to daily leadership practice. “Key takeaway: The CARE Model that is used in the Designed to Care framework is not a training program. It is an operating system for leadership development. When organizations build Courage, Accountability/Authenticity, Relationship, and Empathy into their management culture, the manager gap closes, and every other investment in people starts to pay off.
What Should the Next Five Years Look Like?
The first five years of Designed to Care proved the framework. The next five years are about scale: moving from “care as a philosophy” to “care as a standard operating procedure” in every organization that wants to compete for talent.
Here is what I believe the next chapter requires.
Leadership development must become a board-level priority. As long as leadership development sits in the HR budget as a discretionary line item, it will be the first thing cut when revenue tightens. The companies that will win the next five years are the ones that treat manager development with the same strategic weight they give sales enablement, product development, and financial controls.
The IQ x EQ x AI equation must evolve. When I introduced IQ x EQ x AI, the AI conversation was still abstract for most mid-market leaders. That is no longer the case. Leaders in our community have raised AI implementation as their biggest people challenge, not as a technology question, but as a leadership question. Your AI problem is a people problem. The next evolution of the equation treats AI not just as a tool to be adopted, but as a leadership challenge to be managed with the same care and intentionality that every other people decision demands.
Organizations need to measure leadership effectiveness, not just leadership activity. Most companies track how many managers attended training. Almost none track whether that training changed behavior. The next five years should bring the same rigor to measuring leadership outcomes that companies already apply to measuring sales performance: clear metrics, regular assessment, and accountability for results.
Care must become the default, not the exception. The companies I work with that have fully adopted the Designed to Care framework do not think of it as a program. They think of it as how they operate. It is embedded in their selection criteria, their promotion decisions, their onboarding process, their feedback culture, and their exit practices. That is the goal: care as infrastructure, woven into every system that touches people.
Cultural Quiz
In the coming weeks, we will explore why your managers are fighting fires while your best people leave, introduce a new concept called Carefrontational leadership that combines accountability and care, and challenge the assumption that manager training programs actually develop leaders.
Five years of Dare to Care. One clear conclusion: care works when it is built into the system, not bolted on. And the system starts with your managers.
Book Kathleen for your next leadership event
FAQ
Q: What is the biggest change in the talent market since Dare to Care was published five years ago?
Transparency. Employees have more information, more options, and higher expectations than they did in 2021. Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and peer networks mean that how you treat your people is no longer private. Your employer brand is built by every manager interaction, every exit, and every broken promise, not by your careers page. Companies that built care into their infrastructure early are now seeing the compounding returns. Companies that did not are paying the compounding costs.
Q: Why leadership development might be more important than executive development?
Because leaders are where the work gets done. Executives set direction, but leaders deliver the daily experience. An employee might hear from their CEO once a quarter. They hear from their leader every day. That daily interaction determines whether someone is engaged, developing, and committed, or disengaged, stagnant, and looking. Investing in executive alignment is important, but without capable line managers executing that vision, the investment is wasted.
Q: How long does it take to see results from the Designed to Care framework?
Behavioral change takes time, but observable improvements in team dynamics typically appear within 90 days of implementing the model consistently. Measurable improvements in retention and engagement metrics take six to twelve months. The key word is “consistently.” A one-time workshop will not change manager behavior. Ongoing coaching, accountability, and system reinforcement will.
Q: Is the Designed to Care framework only for large companies?
No. In fact, the framework is often more impactful in mid-market companies (100 to 1,000 employees) because individual managers have a proportionally larger influence on the culture. A single under-equipped manager in a 200-person company can affect 10% or more of the workforce directly. The framework scales down as well as it scales up.
