WHAT MAKES YOUR TEAM WANT TO STAY — BODY AND SOUL?

“A team can meet goals without soul — but it will never create something truly transformative.” – Marcello de Souza
A few years ago, I was called in to consult for a technology company where turnover reached 38% annually. The CEO, distressed, said: “We have good salaries, modern benefits, decompressing spaces, but people keep leaving.” Listening to the leaders and especially the employees, I realized what was missing wasn’t structure — it was meaning. They had everything but soul.
On the surface, everything seemed to work: integration events, structured career plans, internal marketing campaigns. But behind the scenes, the prevailing feeling was emotional disconnection. As Viktor Frankl teaches us, humans can endure almost any “how” — as long as they have a “why” that speaks to their soul. That company had built a modern building but forgot to light the inner lights of its inhabitants.
Leading with soul is not a rhetorical luxury. It is an ethical and strategic imperative.
It’s not the salary. It’s not gourmet coffee. It’s not the ping-pong table. It’s the culture that makes the heart beat. It’s the symbolic space where the individual feels their presence matters. Leading in the 21st century is not stacking results or flaunting authority — it’s architecting an ecosystem where people feel alive, seen, and free to grow as whole human beings. Inspiring is not generating fleeting euphoria; it’s igniting a purpose that moves with truth, consistency, and depth.
We live in an era of organizational exhaustion. According to Gallup (2025), 44% of professionals report chronic stress at work. Microsoft (2021) revealed that value misalignment is today one of the main causes of talent turnover. This is not just a statistic. It’s an urgent call. Conscious leadership has ceased to be an aspirational choice: it has become a vital necessity.
Inspiring is more than motivating. It’s sustaining the dignity of the other.
Based on more than 27 years in cognitive behavioral development, combining neuroscience, social psychology, philosophy, and strategic management foundations, I propose here five essential pillars to lead with soul. But beware: this requires courage. Courage to listen to what is unspoken. To feel what has been silenced. And to change what no longer fits.
Are you ready to transform your leadership?
Next, we will dive into the four pillars, with depth, grounding, and humanity.

1. Awaken dreams, not just goals
In an executive mentoring process with a CEO from the logistics sector, I heard the following phrase: “I offer generous bonuses, career plans, structure. But people keep operating on autopilot — as if something inside them is asleep.”
This phrase has stayed with me for years because it reveals an invisible dilemma in modern organizations: the exhaustion of management models based only on goals, metrics, and pressure. Professionals are not necessarily unhappy. They are asleep — operating efficiently, but without soul.
In Cognitive Behavioral Development (DCC), we understand that no supported goal replaces the power of an activated dream. When an individual feels called by something existentially meaningful, engagement ceases to be an external effort and becomes an internal movement — spontaneous, creative, sustainable.
Neuroscience confirms: a sense of purpose activates the medial prefrontal cortex — the brain region involved in conscious decision-making, long-term planning, and emotional regulation. Recent studies indicate that organizational environments with a strong sense of collective meaning increase cognitive performance by up to 31% and reduce mental exhaustion by 46% (Journal of Neuroscience & Behavior, 2023).
But purpose is not implanted through slogans. It is cultivated in real conversations.
I recall a mental health startup where I acted as facilitator. During a dialogue circle, a leader asked an off-script question: “What project would you do here if you could follow your heart?”
Silence lasted a few seconds until an analyst answered: “I would create a free program to support caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients.”
The leader not only listened. He gave structure and freedom for the dream to become a pilot. The result? The retention rate in the team increased, productivity soared, and — most importantly — the company culture gained another texture: more human, more alive, more inspired.
In DCCO, this is known as “organic convergence between individual purpose and systemic direction” — when one person’s dream becomes everyone’s lever.
Dreams are not romantic distractions. They are strategic resources for human activation. Denying them in the name of productivity is a structural mistake. A team can meet goals without soul — but it will never create something truly transformative.
Strategic reflection for leaders:
• Do you know the dreams that move each person on your team — or just the deliverables they need to complete?
• What spaces have you cultivated so that dreams stop being invisible?
• In your current culture, is dreaming allowed or seen as a waste of time?
• Start with a simple but powerful question: “What would you like to build here if you had permission?”
The leadership of the future will belong to those who know how to awaken not only goals — but humanity.

2. Respect is the minimum; inspiration demands radical presence
In many organizations, respect is confused with formality and cordiality with connection. But there is a vast difference between a functionally polite environment and an emotionally alive ecosystem.
Paying salaries on time, offering quality coffee, and maintaining a “cordial climate” is basic. It is not a differential — it is a legal and operational obligation. Yet, many leaders believe this is enough to retain talent or generate engagement.
Inspiring demands more. It is an act of emotional courage that passes through presence — radical presence. In DCC, we call radical presence the relational openness state in which the leader is wholly listening: with the body, the senses, the soul. It is not just hearing words but embracing silences, discomforts, hesitations, emotions that escape the script. Radical presence is when the other perceives they don’t need to hide to be accepted.
Social and relational psychology confirms: psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson defines it, is the main basis for teams to innovate, collaborate, and develop. When people feel they can err, propose, disagree, and be authentic without fear of punishment, the group’s energy reorganizes at a new maturity level.
Recently, in a project with a retail multinational manager, she told me:
“Marcello, I used to conduct standardized feedback meetings, believing everything was fine. Until, in an informal conversation, a team member said: ‘I need space to fail without fear of looking incompetent.’ That destabilized me. And that’s when I started to change.”
This leader did not look for ready-made formulas. She created authentic open-dialogue rituals, revisited her listening methods, and began to validate more than correct. The result? The team began to present solutions they previously dared not voice. Innovation did not come from a creative brainstorm — it came from trust.
In DCCO, we call this symbolic validation environments — spaces where the subject feels legitimized to exist as they are, not just as they must appear. And here lies the most neglected leadership point: You may have listened to someone — but did that person really feel heard?
Presence is not just being in the room. It is being whole.
• When was the last time you looked your team in the eye, without distraction?
• When did you last stop seeking the right answer and simply held another’s doubt?
• Are you a leader who solves quickly or one who listens deeply?
Radical presence is not about technique. It is about internal posture. It is about giving up control for a few moments to hold a field where the other can emerge.

Reflection for those who want to truly inspire:
• Does your leadership offer listening or judgment disguised as advice?
• Do you lead to correct or to understand?
• In your culture, is silence a safe pause or a hole of tension?
Start with a question rarely asked — and be whole to listen to the answer:
“What makes you feel alive in here?”
Living Leadership Is Born in the Space Where the Other Can Be — Without Fear, Masks, or Effort. And This Is Not Created With Words — It Is Built With Presence.

3. Freedom to Disagree Is Freedom to Create
Leading is not about maintaining order. It is about sustaining vitality. And vitality demands movement, friction, dissonance — it demands truth.
Inspiring is not about creating a unanimous euphoria. It is about building a space where disagreement is not only allowed but welcomed as living intelligence. Where differences of opinion do not represent threats but latent collective power.
Harvard Business Review (2024) points out that 85% of professionals avoid expressing criticism for fear of retaliation, marginalization, or exposure. This is not just a communication problem — it is a symptom of a defensive culture, trapped in the aesthetics of harmony and the egoic fragility of leadership.
In Cognitive Behavioral Development (DCC), this condition is treated as “adaptive silencing”: a psychic protection mechanism generated by contexts where social bonds are unstable and mistakes are punished with symbolic exclusion.
And the side effect? Silence. Conformism. Mediocrity.
As Hannah Arendt warned: “Where everyone thinks alike, no one is really thinking.”
Disagreement is the engine of freedom — and, therefore, of creation. In a project with a product development team at a technology company, I challenged the group with a simple question:
“What do you not feel comfortable saying in here?”
The initial silence was uncomfortable. But after a few minutes, an intern shared discomfort with the testing model adopted — which, to the leadership’s surprise, really contained flaws that were costing money. This comment resulted in a process overhaul that generated a 20% reduction in operational costs.
None of this would have emerged if the culture had been oriented to the “institutional yes.”
Google’s Project Aristotle, a study that investigated the company’s most successful teams, revealed that the most decisive factor for high performance was not collective intelligence nor technical profile — but psychological safety: the certainty that one can make mistakes, disagree, propose, and be who they are, without punishment.
In DCCO, this is structured as integrated critical listening devices: real-time feedback rituals, anonymous expression channels, open forums, and validation of divergence as creative input.
But attention: allowing disagreement is not the absence of direction.
It is creating space for collective construction, without weakening authority — but legitimizing it. Because true authority does not rest on fear, but on relational trust.
Foucault already said: “Power is not something you have, but something you exercise in relationships.”
That is, conscious leaders do not protect themselves from dissent — they develop through it.
Reflection for those who lead with courage:
• Do you cultivate listening or wait for reaffirmation?
• What kind of truth is your leadership able to welcome without closing off?
• Does your team feel they can disagree with you without being punished — even subtly?
The culture of innovation begins when criticism stops being a threat and becomes an offering. Ask your team: “What is blocking your shine — and how might I, as a leader, be unknowingly contributing to this?”
And most importantly: be willing not to interrupt, not to justify, not to defend yourself.
True listening is, by nature, transformative — and uncomfortable.
And it is in this discomfort that the new can be born.

4. Justice Is Honoring Differences
The word “justice” has been hijacked by corporate discourse and transformed into a synonym for meritocracy. But real justice — the one that transforms, uplifts, heals — cannot be measured with a single ruler. It is recognized in detail. It manifests in caring for differences.
As Aristotle already taught, true justice is not treating everyone equally, but treating unequals unequally, according to their singularities.
But companies — out of convenience or ignorance — keep insisting on treating everyone as if they were replicable versions of the same mold. Meritocracy, in practice, is the triumph of the appearance of justice over real justice. It ignores contexts, disregards social intersections, and turns structural inequalities into “lack of effort.” It is a discourse that rewards those born close to the finish line, blames those who carry invisible burdens, and reinforces a culture of competition, silencing, and toxic self-sufficiency.
• As organizational psychologist Joan Williams demonstrated, meritocracy tends to amplify unconscious biases in performance evaluations, harming women, Black people, neurodivergent individuals, and professionals from peripheral backgrounds.
• Carol Gilligan, in care psychology, already warned: systems that ignore human interdependence and the value of connection promote emotional injustice and affective exclusion disguised as impartiality.
In DCCO, we understand justice not as equity of treatment, but as relational balance adjusted to human complexity. Each person carries their story, limits, and resources. One needs direction to feel safe. Another needs autonomy to expand. One moves by challenge. Another withdraws without support.
Failing to recognize these singularities is leading by convenience — not by wisdom.
In a mentoring session with an HR leader from an energy company, she shared:
“For a long time, I treated everyone with the same ruler, thinking that was fair. Until I realized some felt invisible. When I started adapting my style — giving more support to some, more freedom to others — engagement rose and absenteeism dropped by half.”
She didn’t change the policy. She changed the listening. And that changed everything.
Paul Ricoeur said that justice is born in the face of the other. That is, in the ethics of recognizing the other as they are, not as I wish they were.
Emotionally healthy organizations do not seek to standardize behavior. They cultivate environments where difference does not have to deform to belong.

5. Toxic Environments: Where Equality Is Poison
A toxic environment is one that demands constant effort to fit in, where there is only room for one way of being, producing, thinking, or speaking. It is one where “excellence” is based on cold performance, disregarding context, emotional state, or vital energy. It is where being sensitive is weakness, and asking for help means incompetence.
In DCC, we call this an environment of “organized symbolic violence” — where everything seems normal, but the subject slowly dies inside. Justice here is creating space for legitimate vulnerability, active belonging, and subjective evolution.

Practical cases: when justice (or its absence) changes everything
I. The Silence That Destroys — When Invisibility Leads to Departure
In a recent consultancy, a brilliant professional from a peripheral background shared her painful experience:
“I felt like a shadow on the team, as if my voice didn’t matter, as if I had to become a version of myself that I’m not to be accepted. Meritocracy here felt like a mask because no matter how much I tried, there was never real space for my ideas. I ended up leaving. It wasn’t about salary, it was about lack of justice.”
This case reveals a brutal face of relational injustice: chronic invisibility. When the organization treats everyone with the same ruler, it invisibilizes not only differences but the very humanity of people. This invisibility is one of the biggest factors of wear and silent, lethal abandonment for organizational culture.
II. The Impact of Perceived Injustice on Mental Health: Burnout, Self-Abandonment, and Dissociation
Recent research (APA, 2023; Leiter & Maslach, 2022) shows that environments lacking distributive and relational justice significantly increase burnout, anxiety disorders, and depression rates. The feeling of not being recognized, of having one’s subjective value invalidated, can lead to so-called self-abandonment — when a person internalizes the message that they do not deserve care and even distances themselves to survive.
From a neuroscientific point of view, this process can trigger emotional dissociation — a defense mechanism that fragments emotional experience to reduce pain but harms creativity, productivity, and integral health. Thus, cruel meritocracy not only undermines justice but sabotages the very human capital the organization seeks to maximize.
III. Standardized Evaluation as an Instrument of Subjective Oppression
Organizational performance evaluation policies tend to be standardized, rigid, and based on quantitative metrics that ignore the complexity of the subject. These evaluations, when poorly applied, function as instruments of organized symbolic violence (Bourdieu), imposing a single standard of “excellence” that excludes singularities and enforces a homogeneous mold.
Moreover, by replicating unconscious biases, they reinforce the marginalization of minority groups and the culture of silence and conformity, turning evaluation into a mechanism of control — not development.
Transforming this paradigm requires a new systemic and integrative outlook, as proposed by DCCO: evaluation that is a dialogue, that recognizes trajectories, contexts, and unique potentials — and that is, above all, a tool for relational justice and collective evolution.

Reflections for just leadership:
• Do you offer a one-size-fits-all mold, or do you adjust your leadership to the real plurality of your team?
• In your culture, do those who find things easier receive more praise — or do you also value the silent effort of those starting from further behind?
• Do you know who in your team is tired of trying to appear as someone they are not?
Leading with justice is more than correcting inequalities: it is honoring singularities. It is understanding that human potential is not revealed by comparison, but through deep comprehension.
Start by asking: “What do you need from me to flourish here — in your own way?”
And be ready to hear not just answers — but stories. Because it is there, in the other’s journey, that true justice is revealed.

Leading With Soul Is Sustaining The Human At The Center
Inspiring goes far beyond motivating. Inspiring is leading with soul — it is replacing cold, authoritarian command with genuine connection; substituting demands with deep trust; transforming mechanical tasks into lives touched by purpose. Nietzsche challenges us to be poets of our own lives — artisans of the stories we write with courage, authenticity, and meaning.
Inspirational leaders are not mere managers. They are weavers of meaning, storytellers who reveal potential, belonging, and significance. Neuroscience confirms: environments that offer meaning and psychological safety activate brain circuits linked to well-being, creativity, and innovation. It is in these environments that beating hearts and flourishing minds find their fertile soil.
Conscious leadership is a dynamic journey, manifested in the daily courage to look into the eyes, listen with the whole body, and welcome with an open heart.

And how to start this silent revolution? Start small, start now:
• Ask a collaborator, with genuine curiosity, what inspires them in their work.
• Dedicate five minutes to listen — without interrupting, judging, or anticipating solutions.
• Create safe channels for honest feedback, where vulnerability is strength, not weakness.
• Adapt your leadership to support one person at a time, recognizing that each being is a unique universe.
These seemingly simple gestures are powerful seeds that build a living culture — an ecosystem where people don’t just work, but flourish, recognize themselves, and transform. Leading with soul is igniting the internal fire that moves the collective. It is making the team’s heart beat — and beat together.
The future of organizations is a symphony of diverse voices, emerging potentials that recognize and inspire each other. Are you ready to be the conductor of this orchestra of lives?

Leading with soul is not rhetorical luxury. It is a moral imperative. It is knowing that a culture can produce numbers — and still drain people. Meet goals — and leave bodies sick and souls asleep. Be “efficient” — and disconnected from the real life that pulses in every person in that organization.
It is remembering, every day, that before positions, strategies, and spreadsheets, there are stories — complex subjectivities, silenced desires, buried talents, pains that “don’t fit the agenda.” The soul — like truth — always finds its way. When it finds no legitimate space, it gets sick. Or gives up.
In DCC/DCCO, we learn that conscious leadership is not just managing people — it is honoring their complexity, history, emotions, and potential. It is not giving in to whims, nor losing direction. It is leading with wholeness. Sustaining listening when it would be easier to cut off. Embracing doubt when it would be more convenient to dictate the answer.
The true leader is a poet of the culture they choose to build — one who transforms routine into meaning, pressure into presence, hierarchy into bond. But this demands rupture:
With dehumanizing meritocracy.
With the logic of molds.
With the mistaken belief that treating everyone equally is being just.
With the habit of leading as if people were resources.
Toxic environments do not arise from great tragedies — they are born from the normalization of absence:
From listening that doesn’t listen.
From praise conditioned on results.
From “you can speak” that turns into veiled retaliation.
From “strategic management” that abandons the ethics of presence.
Leading with soul is the opposite of that. It is truly asking the other:
“What makes you want to be here?”
“What in me, as a leader, blocks your shine?”
“What do you need to be who you are — and still belong?”
And not interrupting. Not defending. Not rationalizing.
But listening. And transforming.
Emmanuel Levinas said that “the face of the other calls us to responsibility.”
The true leader accepts this call — and sustains it with humility and courage.
Because, in the end, the question that matters is not:
“Did you produce results?”
But rather:
“Did people flourish around you?”
This answer is not in dashboards. It is in the silence after your absence. In what remains when you leave. In what echoes in the culture, even without your physical presence.

And now?
Which of these truths confronts you? Which discomfort became a seed?
Share in the comments which turning point touched your journey.
Let’s build together a community of leaders who are not afraid to feel — nor to change.
Because leading with soul is not a technique.
It is commitment.
It is choice.
It is legacy.

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