Everything You Care About Depends on This…

“We are shit at what makes us human.” —Brené Brown

Be present. Be curious. Be human.

These became the core standards for a corporate sales team I recently worked with heading into last quarter. It was a powerful off-site session. The group left feeling inspired, aligned, and clear about how they wanted to operate as a team—not just with each other, but with their clients and other teams across the organization.

And then, adversity hit.

The last quarter has been a brutal struggle to hit their numbers. And in corporate sales, numbers are everything. Corporations don't evaluate or measure presence, curiosity, or your capacity to just be human.

And yet—if this team only focuses on the numbers, they will eventually find themselves out of a job. Not because a competitor will out-hustle them, but because an algorithm will replace them. AI can optimize data and automate outreach, but it cannot replace humanity.

But prioritizing humanity isn't just a strategy to save our jobs—it’s how we find genuine enjoyment and fulfillment in them.

The legendary football manager Jürgen Klopp understood this deeply. It’s exactly what made him such an inspiring leader. He recognized that you cannot support performance without supporting the person first.

The most important role of a leader, he believes, is the conversations. The raw, human ones—the moments where we choose to show up fully present and deeply curious.

Because when we have those conversations, we realize that it isn't just the professional pressure of hitting quarterly targets, chasing good performance reviews, or earning nice bonuses that breaks us down. As Klopp beautifully articulates, it’s the heavy, everyday human stuff—marriage struggles, sick kids, sleepless nights, and personal loss. All of these things directly impact our lived experience, which dictates our ultimate performance.

Brené Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek all champion the same fundamental truth: the highest-yielding performance strategy on the planet is simply caring.

Being human and actively caring is hard. We will struggle at it and the system won't always reward us for it.

But we cannot give up on it.

—J.P. Nerbun

P.S. Want to build a team culture that thrives on connection and high performance? My new book, The Culture Captain, is available now on Amazon. This is your step-by-step blueprint to operationalize human-centered standards and transform your leadership framework.