Being a high-performer CEO isn’t enough. True leadership involves empathy

The CEO’s role is evolving. Private equity is playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the expectations, performance, and tenure of CEOs. The financial environment is also changing, with influence increasingly moving from public markets to private capital. As private equity grows in importance as the dominant form of value creation, executives who excel at driving EBITDA and delivering outsize returns have become the winners. 

In this landscape, CEOs are increasingly being measured by their ability to generate financial returns. But true leadership requires hitting more than financial targets. The most effective leaders understand that long-term success depends on balancing financial acumen with empathetic leadership. Those who fail to adapt risk becoming transactional managers rather than transformational leaders. Understanding this shift and defining one’s leadership approach is more critical now than ever.

How Did We Get Here?

To grasp the challenges facing today’s CEOs, we must examine the forces reshaping corporate leadership. Over the past few decades, venture capital and private equity firms have evolved from peripheral participants to key drivers of corporate investment. Alongside this shift, executive compensation has moved from salary-based models to equity-driven structures, directly linking a CEO’s financial success to company performance. As a result, C-suite decision-making has become increasingly data-driven, prioritizing quantitative analysis over traditional intuition-based management.

However, prioritizing financial capital over human capital creates a leadership challenge: Employees do not share the same motivation for growth and profitability as CEOs. As PwC identified in a study on purpose in the workplace, employees and business leaders prioritize very different things. Employees today are driven more by meaning, community, and impact, while business leaders are motivated by growth, innovation, and differentiation. Human capital intangibles—like meaning, trust, community, respect, and culture—don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and they’re hard to quantify.

What Teams Really Need

A few years ago, Google researchers put together Project Aristotle to better understand what makes teams successful. They analyzed 50 years of academic research and studied 180 teams within Google to uncover the factors behind high-performing teams. Expecting to find a formula for optimizing employee performance through data, they were surprised by the outcome.

The most significant factor they found wasn’t quantitative at all. Instead, it was psychological safety—a climate of trust and mutual respect in which employees feel comfortable being themselves. This insight, coming from one of the world’s most data-driven companies, highlighted the human side of leadership. Great teams and great leadership are more than metrics. They are about fostering an environment where people feel safe and valued.

CEOs Feel the Strain

While data-driven decision-making dominates the C-suite, the emotional and human aspects of leadership remain vital. And many CEOs feel the strain of this disconnect deeply.

In our 2025 survey of 150 CEOs, we explored their perspectives on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of leadership. When asked about their top business priorities, 73% of CEOs prioritized growth, and 70% focused on profitability. These are expected answers, in line with the hard metrics driving today’s corporate world.

But when we asked what they personally worry about, the responses shifted toward the human side of leadership. CEOs were most concerned with issues like employee morale (65%), burnout and work-life balance (58%), board relations (53%), and ethical dilemmas (48%). These factors are crucial to maintaining a thriving, sustainable business culture.

Balancing Profit with People

Today, CEOs face the challenge of balancing their company’s financial performance with their employees’ well-being. This balancing act has never been harder. CEOs are increasingly navigating complex and charged political environments.

Employees notice when their leaders prioritize profit over people or avoid taking a stand on moral or ethical issues. In some cases, the company’s reputation becomes so entangled in external politics that it begins to affect employee morale and the perception of leadership.

This leaves CEOs balancing the demands of external stakeholders and their employees’ needs. When CEOs fail to take a stand or are seen as “playing both sides,” it diminishes their credibility as true leaders.

Integrating Data and Humanity

To succeed in today’s business landscape, CEOs must do three things.

First, leaders must navigate this fundamental shift in the CEO’s role as private capital increasingly shapes market dynamics. Leaders need to align their leadership style with more quantitative-led private capital expectations.

Second, leaders must better connect financial capital + human capital. There is a real opportunity to implement a leadership approach that measures and values emotional intelligence, and cultural metrics alongside financial metrics.

Finally, leaders need to focus on creating psychological safety to create high-performing teams. Psychological safety across the employee base will increase engagement, collaboration, innovation, retention, productivity and ultimately performance.

In 2025, this balance is not just a “nice-to-have”—It’s the entrepreneurial superpower that will separate the disruptors from the disrupted. CEOs who blend quantitative financial acumen with data-driven team management will cultivate high-performance cultures that excel in times of uncertainty.

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