If your team weren’t paid to be led by you, would they stay? And if so, for how long?

Most leaders will never have to answer this question. I did.

Between 2019 and 2024, I dedicated myself to building a digital startup. I wasn’t able to turn it into a sustainable business, but the experience gave me what I now consider my greatest lesson in leadership.

For 5 years, I led a team of 10 people with no salary, no contract, no benefits, and none of the status that typically helps keep people on a team. Everyone knew this from the outset. The team ranged from highly senior professionals to very junior ones, spread across Portugal, from Faro to Braga. While everyone else had a full-time job from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., I was fully dedicated to the project. The challenge was to keep these people engaged remotely, constantly navigating the line between tiredness and exhaustion, as they worked on the project after 6:00 p.m. on weekdays and on weekends.

Why did they stay?

The most common answer would be that they stayed because they believed in the project’s purpose. The most inspiring would be that they stayed because of my particular vision. And the most emotional would be that they stayed because of the sense of camaraderie we built over time. But none of these explains 5 years of such demanding work, during which we developed 3 versions of the digital platform we had designed, along with its dashboard. During that time, I took part in 4 accelerator programs, but we won no competitions, were accepted into no incubators, and failed to secure any investment. Still, the team stayed. It is important to note that I had no personal or professional relationship with any of these people before inviting them to join the project.

All we had was one another and the validation of more than 1,200 people who said they liked our digital product when they tested it — but that wasn’t enough to gain traction within Portugal’s digital entrepreneurship ecosystem.

This leadership experience led me to question what we typically mean by leadership.

We have become accustomed to measuring retention, satisfaction, motivation and productivity through increasingly sophisticated metrics. But behind many of them, the underlying question seems to be less, “What keeps a person truly committed?” and more, “How do I get the most out of this person while they are with the company?”

I’m not saying that the metrics we have been using are entirely wrong. I’m saying that they stem from a reductive view of human beings and their potential to collaborate and achieve. That we continue to set goals and design performance evaluations as if everyone were at the same stage of individual development. That we continue to reduce people to roles and tasks. And that staying is not the same as being committed.

But what was happening in this case that traditional metrics remain unable to capture?

The answer is so simple that it may well be overlooked.

In this story, these people already had jobs, salaries, contracts, benefits and the professional status that came with their roles. What they seemed to be looking for was a genuine opportunity to belong and find fulfillment. We know how demanding the day-to-day work in technology can be in any company, let alone taking on additional work that, from the outside, seemed to offer only one thing: more work.

But from the inside, what these people had been missing — and found — was a space where they felt seen, heard and valued and where they had the autonomy to think and create. A space that allowed them to become more than they were when they arrived.

How do I know?

One of the people on this team once wrote to me: “I want to thank you for helping me become a better professional. During the time we worked together, I feel I improved significantly in one area: confidence in my own work. And that is now showing in the work I do for [employer’s name].”

This message, like so many other expressions I received over time, made me realize something important: what happened within that team was no accident. It was the result of human conditions that came together — and that can be understood, cultivated and recreated.

When a person feels seen, supported, challenged, valued, trusted with responsibility and encouraged, something changes. Commitment and dedication no longer depend solely on external rewards; they also begin to emerge from the relationship people build with themselves, with others and with what they are creating.

None of this showed up in our bank accounts, but all of it was present in the human experience that kept everyone showing up and doing their part, day after day.

Perhaps the most important question for a leader is not how to keep people, but who those people become while working with them. I’m talking about a shift from performance management to human development. Only then can we truly speak of human leadership.

Because human commitment does not come only from what we receive. More importantly, it comes from who we become in the process.

If we understand that much of people’s energy and talent can only be unlocked when deeper human needs are met — to belong, contribute, achieve and grow — perhaps we will stop focusing solely on extracting performance and finally start creating the conditions for human potential to multiply.

When we see people only through the roles they perform, it becomes natural to ask whether those roles can be automated. But when we create environments where people build confidence, develop autonomy and expand their capacity to contribute, the conversation shifts from replacement to development.

That is what I saw happen over those five years.

Ordinary people becoming more capable versions of themselves because they found an environment that allowed them to grow.

A few weeks ago, another person from that team sent me a digital product he had built using artificial intelligence, from one day to the next — far more sophisticated than the platform it had taken us 5 years to develop 3 years ago. When I saw his work, I realized that he had evolved from executing what I asked of him to creating something far better than anything I had been able to build myself. The first person showed me what was happening within her. The second showed me what he became capable of doing as a result of what had happened within him.

This is precisely the relationship between human development and human achievement that I am talking about.

The best leadership doesn’t retain people. It develops them. A real case of human leadership. A U T H O R Ana Partidário holds a Ph.D. in Management, specializing in Human Resources, and is internationally certified in Emotional Intelligence. She is the founder of The Human Becomings and creator of the Humanum Method™, through which she develops projects with both human and strategic impact, integrating human skills and emotional intelligence into the management and development of people and organizations. She is a guest lecturer at IE University, in executive education, where she teaches in the Emotional Management for Conscious Leadership program, and mentors SME leaders in Nova SBE’s Voice Leadership program. She has worked with organizations operating in demanding environments, including Cisco, MC Sonae, Obramat and Holon and has trained more than 1,500 professionals, from executives to employees. She speaks at national and international events and hosts the Ser Mais podcast, where she interviews prominent leaders.