You Don’t Need a KPI to Show You Care

The quiet power of compassionate leadership

At the start of a new year, leadership reflections often focus on goal setting, ambition, and impact — and understandably so. I’ve been thinking about something quieter; something I don’t hear talked about as much in professional settings.

The impact of simply caring.

I don’t mean caring in a vague or overly sentimental way, but in the kind of intentional, everyday actions that never show up in a dashboard. Staying late to walk a student through a process, rewording a policy statement so it lands more kindly, holding a silence in a meeting so someone doesn’t have to rush to find the words. Noticing when someone isn’t okay — and doing something about it.

These moments aren’t glamorous. They don’t win awards. But they’re often the reason someone stays.

Compassion isn’t fluffy. It’s strategic.

I’ve always found the suggestion that inclusive, compassionate leadership is somehow ‘soft’ quite revealing. If anything, it takes more clarity, more courage, and more conscious decision-making to lead with care — especially in a sector driven by metrics.

The truth is, if I didn’t care, I’d be a lot less effective.

Care helps me stay alert to nuance — to the real reasons students disengage, or the patterns staff aren’t saying out loud. It helps me make better decisions, not just faster ones. It keeps me human when pressure would prefer a process.

But care also comes at a cost.

The invisible work of doing the right thing

Sometimes the most impactful work is the work no one sees.

It’s the student who never made it to a disciplinary because you quietly intervened four weeks earlier, the new staff member who felt like giving up, but stayed because you made space for them to be imperfect. It’s the systemic fix you pushed for — unpaid, undocumented — because it was the right thing to do.

These aren’t performance objectives. They’re not on any annual report. But they are why people feel like they belong. They’re why they stay. and why they succeed.

It’s easy to celebrate success when it’s quantifiable. It’s harder to protect the kind of work that lives between the numbers; the work that turns a policy into a lifeline, or a conversation into a turning point.

A different kind of leadership metric

So much of the change I’ve led has come from asking one simple question:

What would this look like if we actually cared?

Not theoretically — but practically. Would the language be the same? Would the systems be more flexible? Would people feel safer, earlier? Would the data even look different?

It’s often not the bold statements that change cultures; it’s the boring forms, the emails, the frameworks, the tone.

Equally, it’s often not a major intervention that makes the difference — it’s the moment someone feels believed.

What I’m taking into 2026

This year, I’ll still care about impact. I’ll still track outcomes. But I’ll also keep making time for the things that aren’t always measurable because they still matter – sometimes more than anything else.