“Caring” still gets treated like a soft skill.
Nice to have. Good for morale. Secondary to execution.
That framing misses the point.
In Approachable Leadership, the model developed by Phillip B. Wilson, caring is not about empathy or tone. It is about whether leaders have access to accurate information early enough to act on it. If employees don’t see them as approachable and caring, they probably don’t.
Leaders don’t fail because they don’t care. They fail because they don’t get the truth soon enough, because their employees are reluctant to talk with them.
Leaders who are not perceived as approachable often do not get the truth early enough to lead effectively.
Power distance is automatic
Approachable Leadership starts with a basic reality of organizational life: power changes behavior.
The moment someone becomes “the boss,” power distance appears. Authority over pay, schedules, discipline, and career changes what people say, when they say it, and what they decide to keep to themselves. This happens before leaders announce open-door policies or describe themselves as approachable.
On The Leadership Project Podcast, Wilson captured it succinctly:
“Power changes the room before the leader ever opens their mouth.”
This is not a failure of intent. It is predictable human behavior.
Caring matters because it is how leaders actively counterbalance that distance so information can move upward without fear. Not to be liked. To stay informed.
Silence is calculation, not disengagement
When issues surface late, leaders often assume employees were disengaged or indifferent.
That explanation is usually wrong.
Before speaking up, employees quietly assess risk:
Is this safe?
Will this matter?
Will anything change?
When the answers trend no, people adapt. They soften messages. They work around leadership instead of through it.
From the leadership seat, this often looks like stability because you aren’t hearing about problems. It is not. It is filtered information. Leaders still receive information. It just arrives late and is incomplete.
As Wilson warned on the Human Capital Leadership Podcast,
“By the time leaders hear about a problem, it’s often already expensive.”
Approachability functions as a signal system
Approachable Leadership does not define approachability by personality. It defines it by behavior that determines whether people believe honesty is worth the risk.
Three conditions consistently determine whether employees speak up early:
Right Space: Leaders are genuinely available when issues arise, not just theoretically accessible.
Right Feeling: People leave conversations feeling heard, not evaluated mid-sentence.
Right Action: Leadership follows through, particularly when the message is inconvenient.
Miss any one of these and silence becomes the rational choice. Don’t let this happen.
The practical ER takeaway
Approachable leadership is often discussed in cultural terms, but its ER implications are hard to miss.
When leaders are approachable, issues surface internally instead of externally. Conflict gets addressed in a timely manner. Employees are more likely to believe concerns will be heard, addressed, and acted on without needing third-party intervention.
When that belief disappears, employees do not disengage. They redirect to agencies and labor unions.
Practicing approachable leadership does not guarantee a union-free workplace. But it materially improves the odds by strengthening internal trust, surfacing issues early, and reinforcing management's credibility as a problem-solver rather than a barrier.
At the same time, the upside goes well beyond union avoidance. Organizations that get this right tend to build workplaces where accountability is clearer, feedback is earlier, and performance conversations are less defensive. In other words, environments where people can do their best work without fear, and where workarounds can create conditions under which extraordinary workplaces can be successful.
