A new year presents an opportunity to adopt habits that enhance your personal brand and increase your success in 2026 and beyond. While goals often get most of the attention at the start of the year, habits are what shape outcomes.

The habits outlined here focus on the human side of leadership. They’re based in neuroscience and have a positive impact on individuals, teams, and organizations. They are core to those who understand the importance of being human in an age when technology is embedded in virtually every element of business.

Integrate These Essential Authentic Leadership Behaviors

"Authentic leaders create human connections with their people by exhibiting skills, behaviors, and mindsets that increase engagement, inspire creativity, and create connection."

With all the tasks you could prioritize and the limited hours available each day, how do you choose what to work on?

Among most CEOs, there’s broad consensus: Senior leaders should focus on the “what”—purpose, vision, strategy—and delegate the “how.” Peter Drucker wrote, “The executive is not supposed to be a handyman. He is supposed to be a builder.”

Yet when we study some of the world’s top-performing firms, we see a contradictory set of behaviors. Leaders at Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota care deeply about the “how.” They act as teachers and system builders. They don’t meddle—they coach. They don’t override—they elevate.

The 5 Principles

1. They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value

Erik Engstrom transformed RELX by coaching every employee to obsess over “customer value.” He asked: How does using this product improve the customer’s economics? Unlike companies that focus on metrics benefiting the firm (like retention or transaction size), hands-on CEOs focus on metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer.

At Amazon, Bezos didn't just ask for low prices; he built a bot to track 1,000 items against competitors. This detail orientation creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they care, attending to details becomes a shared norm.

2. They Architect the Way Work Gets Done

It’s not about changing org charts. It’s about shifting decision rights closer to the front lines. Bezos redesigned work to create independent teams guided by the "two-pizza rule" and the famous "six-page memo" requirement. PowerPoint was forbidden to encourage deeper thinking.

Leaders in these firms recognize that frontline teams are key to creating value. They make it their personal mission to design processes so employees are empowered with the tools they need.

3. They Use Experiments to Make Decisions

Toyota may be best understood as a system of nested experiments. Decisions are not made by rank or hunch—they are tested. This commits leaders to humble learning.

When CEOs join in testing an idea—demanding that data, not hierarchy, decides—they elevate teams rather than override them. Authority comes not from opinion but from evidence.

4. They Lead by Teaching the Tool Kit

At Danaher, 100 executives are flown in annually not for a secret project, but to solve a real business problem using the kaizen method. They are there to learn and teach the system.

Larry Culp (Danaher/GE) puts it this way: “We force division presidents to develop a command of the how so that they can teach the how. They shouldn’t say, ‘Go do that’ but instead, ‘Come do it with me.’”

5. They Strive to Be Better, Faster, Cheaper—Every Year, Forever

These leaders reject the logic of transformation—the idea that performance improves through heroic, one-shot interventions. Instead, they build systems where improvement is the standard business.

If you don’t commit to continuous improvement, you eventually set yourself up to need transformation. You get out of shape. These companies work the improvement muscle every day.

---

Why is this approach so hard to copy?

Moving from the conventional model to one where the CEO is the chief architect requires a redefinition of leadership itself. It requires the ability to move fluidly between altitude and detail. It is not a leadership style defined by isolated behaviors; it is a system of mutually reinforcing habits.

The superior performance that has resulted from this way of leading is lasting proof of its power.