It is always good to discover new ways of looking at how we humans get on with each other.  As a new leader, inheriting an existing team, the first thing you discover is very few of the team are like you and that they are motivated individually, rather than as an amorphous group.  Understanding people is certainly a key to successful leadership.  I recently came across Ms. Shade Zahral in an interesting video, explaining a four quadrant intersection of courage and humanness.  In this format, courage is shown from bottom “low” to “high” on the left vertical and humanness on the right horizontal from left “low” to right “high”.  I thought this was a useful tool from which to examine the human dimension of work. So if you are high in humanness, but low in courage, you are in the bottom right quadrant.  This quadrant is labelled as “People Pleasers”.  We meet this type of person don’t we.  They are often empathetic types who genuinely like people. They do everything they can to be accepted and avoid any criticism.  If they are critiqued at work by their boss or by colleagues, they take it personally and they retreat within themselves, never pushing higher and further to reach their potential. The low courage element makes it difficult for them to drive performance because they want to make everyone happy and focus on feelings rather than results and are rarely put into leadership positions. The opposite quadrant, the top left, are high courage, low humanness and labelled Agitators.  It refers to people who are risktakers, super confident, self-assured, but lack empathy.  They climb over the bodies to get to the top to grasp the brass ring of success.  They are ready to push everyone hard to make sure their own career is a glorious success and don’t care about the team.  Everyone else is a tool to be used for their own self-aggrandisement.  This type is often successful in becoming a low level leader. They rise to a certain height in the organisation, but have difficulty getting to the top, because they don’t attract the required support of their teams.  Those low in courage and low in humanness are labelled Apathetic and Toxic and in the bottom left quadrant.  They are often experts of the passive-aggressive social interaction techniques to fend off pressure and criticism.  They are often the resident politicians and sycophants in the organisation, always working on finding the weakness in the system, to exploit them for their own benefit in order to survive, when in fact they should be removed.  They are the masters of rumours and whispers as well, but they are clever enough to disguise what they are doing, so they can be hard to ferret out. Hopefully we haven’t allowed any of these horrible people to become leaders in our organisations. The stars of this four box quadrant show of course are those in the top right quadrant, high in courage and high in humanness, labelled Partners in this construct. They can offer feedback in a way which is balanced with warmth and care.  They build relationships built on trust and these are the types of people who can unite teams and lead the organisation forward.  I was reflecting on this four quadrant model, when I read an article in the Financial Times by Tarek Chehidi on Human Skills and what we will need in business.  He wrote, “The trend towards digitalisation and AI is well under way in many industries, allowing some technical skills to be automated, and leading employers to place a greater emphasis on human-centric skills such as problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking, cognitive agility and empathy”.  He added most education systems “prioritise knowledge transfer, memorisation and standardised tests, and fail to cultivate human-centric skills”.  If the higher education system isn’t producing the empathy and human-centric skills, then it is up to organisations to take a good hard look at who they are promoting, what they are modelling and what type of people they want running the b