Not Every Leader Builds a Thriving Culture.
Here Is What the Best Ones Do.

Leadership is hard. That part is not negotiable.

What is negotiable is the kind of hard you choose. You can lead in ways that drain energy and burn people out. Or you can lead in ways that help people flourish, become the best version of themselves. Both paths are demanding. But only one leaves a legacy worth having.

My conversation with Dr. Katina Sawyer, organizational psychologist and author of Leading for Wellness, is a science-backed blueprint for how leaders can foster healthier, more productive work environments. Katina and her co-authors spent years interviewing employees and leaders to understand what separates the leaders who uplift from the ones who extinguish. What they found has stayed with me and in the article, I’ve outlined some of their findings.

The Accumulation Effect

Think about a workplace where you dread Monday morning. Where the meetings feel like minefields. Where you tiptoe around your manager, not knowing how to raise issues at hand or give your opinion openly.

Those little accumulated negativities drag on you. Over time, they erode your confidence, narrow your thinking, and chip away at your ability to perform to your potential.

Now think about the opposite.

A workplace where you wake up and feel genuinely excited to tackle a problem. Where you look forward to seeing a colleague. Where the work itself feels meaningful. That also accumulates over time. That energy compounds. And it shows up in your performance in ways that dread simply cannot.

Katina’s research puts a number on the cost of getting this wrong. Companies lose trillions of dollars in aggregate annually just from turnover driven by toxic workplaces. Engagement gaps cost billions more. And yet many organizations still treat wellness as a perk, a gym membership, a mental health app layered on top of a broken culture.

As Oxford research covering ~1,560 workplace interventions in the UK found, almost none of those surface-level programs produced a positive return.

Real wellness, Katina argues, is not a benefit. It is a culture. It is emotional health, manageable stress, support for people when life gets hard, and a felt sense of balance that is tailored to the individual, not handed down as policy. That definition came directly from the people Katina and her team interviewed. It emerged from the ground up.

Action Points: -> Audit your current wellness spend. Are you funding surface-level perks or the actual conditions that make work feel good? -> Ask your team: “What would make it easier to bring your best to work?” Then listen without defending. -> Look at Oxford’s research on ~1,560 workplace wellbeing interventions. Let the data guide where you redirect resources.

Great Leaders Are Remembered

Here is what I found most remarkable in Katina’s research.

The leaders who built cultures of genuine emotional health, manageable stress, and real psychological safety, where people felt seen, supported, and able to do their best work, were remembered by their teams for decades. Not because they were especially charismatic. But because they actively and intentionally invested in their people’s health, happiness, and results. That investment rippled forward into people’s families, communities, and careers long after the org chart had changed.

Great leaders are remembered because they helped people become more than they thought they could be. That is a very different thing from simply not being bad.

When Katina talks to leaders about the impact their leadership has on people beyond the office walls, she is pointing at something real. Stress is contagious. Research shows that stress levels in households rise to meet the most stressed person in the home. When your people leave work depleted, they bring that depletion back to their partners, their children, their neighbors. The consequences of poor leadership do not stay inside the building.

Neither do the consequences of great leadership.

What Is A Generator Leader

Katina calls the leaders who create these thriving cultures “generators.” And the definition matters.

A generator is not simply the absence of toxic behavior. A lot of leaders believe they are doing well because they are not doing the worst thing they have witnessed. But neutral is not generative. A generator is a leader who actively infuses their team with energy, vibrancy, and health so that people can unlock their full potential.

The framework Katina and her co-authors developed identifies four pillars of generator leadership. Let me walk through each one.

Pillar One: Fire Your Work Self

Most leaders, somewhere along the way, put on a mask. A version of themselves they believe leadership requires. Decisive. Certain. Stoic. Always on.

That mask is not leadership. That mask is a performance. And it costs everyone.

Generator leaders do the inner work to identify when they are showing up as someone other than themselves, and they choose to close the gap. They bring their actual lives into work, their hobbies, their interests, their passions, because they understand that generator leaders are positively deviant in their ability to create workplaces that support health, happiness, and results. That kind of culture cannot be built from behind a mask.

When leaders share their struggles, something shifts. Teams feel safer bringing their own. Mistakes get surfaced early instead of festering. If you want to create psychological safety, start with vulnerability. Not as a tactic. As a genuine practice.

The other thing that happens when leaders fire their work selves is that people start to want to become leaders themselves. Because they see that leadership does not require abandoning who you are.

Action Points: -> Identify one “work self” behavior you have been performing that does not reflect who you actually are. Commit to dropping it for one month. -> Share a genuine struggle or failure with your team this week. Notice what opens up. -> Ask yourself: “Would someone on my team want to become a leader based on what they see in me?”

Pillar Two: Set the Tone Through Distributed Strengths

One of the most persistent myths in leadership is that working the most signals the most commitment.

Generator leaders are not the ones who work the most. They are the ones who are most intentional about creating conditions where the work distributes itself well.

They do this primarily through gratitude and public recognition of individual strengths. When a leader regularly and specifically names what each person does well, two things happen. People feel genuinely seen. And the team builds a mental map of who to go to for what, so they stop funneling every problem back to the leader.

That shift, from a hub-and-spoke model to a networked team, is where leaders get their time back. The leaders who complain they have no bandwidth for strategy or relationship building are often the same ones who never invested in distributing recognition and responsibility. Those fires keep coming because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Action Points: -> In your next team meeting, publicly and specifically name one strength each person brings. Be precise, not generic. -> Map your team’s strengths visually. Who is good at what? Make sure the team knows, not just you. -> Track how often people come to you versus to each other. If the answer is almost always you, start building different pathways.

Pillar Three: Become a Boundary Bouncer

Generator leaders set their own work-life boundaries intentionally. And then they actively protect the same for the people on their team.

Katina uses the image of a bouncer at a club, standing at the velvet rope. Yes, occasionally something truly VIP needs to come through. An urgent client situation. A rare deadline. But the bouncer does not let just anything pass. And if someone else tries to schedule over an employee’s protected time, the generator leader steps in and advocates for that person.

That act of advocacy matters more than most leaders realize. Because your team members may not feel they have the standing to say no to a senior colleague. But you do. Using that standing on their behalf is one of the most concrete expressions of care a leader can offer.

This also means knowing your people well enough to know what their non-negotiables are. Not ten priorities. Not a vague preference. What are the two or three things that, if protected, allow this person to show up fully? Ask that question. Then actually honor the answer.

Action Points: -> Have a one-on-one with each team member this month. Ask: “What are the one or two non-negotiables that help you show up at your best?” -> The next time a meeting conflicts with a boundary you know a team member holds, step in and advocate for them. -> Role model your own boundaries openly. If you are leaving for a commitment, give your team permission to do the same.

Pillar Four: Segmenter versus Integrator

Some people are segmenters. They prefer to do a sustained block of work, close the laptop at five, and be fully off until morning. They are not less committed. They are not less productive. Research shows they perform at an equivalent level to integrators, just in their own way.

The danger is when leaders assume their own working style is the template. An integrator leader who sends emails at ten at night is not just modeling flexibility. To a segmenter on their team, they may be sending a signal that this is expected, that boundaries are porous, that the evenings are not really off.

Generator leaders ask. They have actual conversations about how people work best. And then they try to honor those differences rather than flatten them into a single norm that serves nobody particularly well.

Action Points: -> Ask each person on your team if they are a segmenter or an integrator? -> Audit your own habits as a leader. Do you send late-night messages? Do you schedule calls at the edge of the working day? Consider what signal that sends. -> Create explicit team norms around response times and availability that honor different working styles rather than defaulting to your own.

The Work Worth Doing

None of this is easy. Culture can push back against generator behaviors. Teams sometimes have extinguishers who dampen the tone. And leaders are human, which means they also need to recover.

That last point matters more than most business cultures acknowledge. No athlete says recovery is less important than time on the field. And yet in business, recovery gets treated as optional, something for weekends or vacation. Micro-recoveries throughout the day, meso-recoveries through weekends, and macro-recoveries through real time away are not luxuries. They are how you sustain the capacity to lead generatively rather than reactively.

You cannot pour from an empty cup. You cannot fill your team if you are running on fumes.

The generator leader is not the one who sacrifices everything for the job. The generator leader is the one people remember twenty years later, with warmth and gratitude, saying: that leader helped me become who I am.

That is the legacy available to every leader, in every organization, regardless of what the culture above them looks like.

Learn more about Katina Sawyer on LinkedIn.

Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Katina Sawyer below, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.

Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.

Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.