The leadership advice that gets the most attention right now is about putting yourself at the center. “Founder mode.” Main-character energy. The idea that conviction means being the loudest, most visible person in the room.
It’s a compelling story. It’s also wrong.
A growing body of research says the leaders who build the deepest trust and the strongest performance aren’t the ones performing their own heroism. They’re the ones making other people’s stories the subject. And this isn’t only a leadership insight. It’s a branding one.
What You’ll Learn
- Why the “founder mode” trend in leadership backfires, and what the research says about humble alternatives
- How a 2025 meta-analysis connects leader humility to measurable performance gains
- What a global study of 11,500 consumers reveals about empathy as a business advantage
- How supporting-character energy translates directly into brand strategy
- The specific difference between brands that center themselves and brands that center their audience
Why Does Founder Mode Keep Failing?
Founder mode fails because it confuses visibility with value. The concept encourages leaders to impose their vision directly, bypassing management layers and trusting only their own instincts. It rewards self-centering at a structural level.
Paul Graham’s September 2024 essay popularizing the term drew 20 million social media views and a wave of think pieces (Jamil Zaki, Harvard Business Review, May 2026). The concept was built on Brian Chesky’s observation that delegating at Airbnb had been disastrous, and that Steve Jobs’ hands-on approach was the better model. The implication was clear: the founder’s direct involvement is the magic ingredient.
The criticism landed fast. Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, wrote in Fortune that the essay creates a false binary. His point was specific: senior executives bring skills, experience, and knowledge that most founders don’t have, and characterizing those contributions as bureaucratic gatekeeping misreads how organizations scale (Fortune, September 2024).
Handy’s observation lands harder than it sounds. The research on humble leadership tells the same story from the opposite direction. A 2025 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies by Wu, Chen, and Zhang found that humble leaders improve follower task performance and organizational citizenship behavior through two mechanisms: relational trust (the follower trusts the leader) and cognitive belief (the follower trusts themselves). Both channels require the leader to make room for someone else’s story.
The most common mistake in founder mode is treating your own visibility as proof of leadership. The research says it’s the opposite: leaders who center others’ capabilities produce the measurable results founder mode only promises.
What Does the Research Say About Humble and Intellectually Humble Leadership?
Humble leadership predicts employee performance, trust, and engagement more reliably than the charismatic models most leadership advice is built on. The effect isn’t marginal. It shows up across industries, cultures, and organizational sizes.
A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology examined 518 manager-subordinate pairs in Chinese small and mid-sized enterprises. The finding was specific: intellectual humility in leaders enhances employee thriving at work and job performance by fostering positive job attitudes. The mechanism runs through psychological safety. When a leader demonstrates awareness of their own limitations, employees feel safer contributing, experimenting, and growing.
A separate 2025 meta-analysis found that leader humility makes unique contributions to follower outcomes beyond those explained by transformational leadership (ScienceDirect, 2025). That distinction matters. Transformational leadership gets most of the academic and popular attention. But humility adds something transformational charisma doesn’t: it shifts the locus of agency from the leader to the team.
A 2025 study in the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources confirmed the trust pathway. Humble leadership increases employee feedback-seeking behavior through affective trust in the leader. When people trust their leader’s intentions, they ask harder questions, surface problems earlier, and seek growth instead of protection.
A useful rule of thumb: if a leadership approach depends on the leader being the most impressive person in the room, it’s producing dependence, not performance.
What Happens When Organizations Train for Empathy Instead of Authority?
Organizations that invest in empathy see measurable returns in customer loyalty, retention, and advocacy. The data is clear enough to put a number on it.
Zurich Insurance partnered with Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki on a 2025 global study surveying 11,500 consumers across 11 countries. The results were specific: 60% of consumers said they only use companies that genuinely care about them. Seventy-three percent said they’d avoid companies that showed a lack of empathy. And 43% reported they’d already left a brand because it failed on this dimension (Zurich Insurance/YouGov, September 2025).
Zurich didn’t stop at the survey. The company built a Global Empathy Training Program, training 26% of its global workforce across the UK, Switzerland, North America, Malaysia, and Australia. The measurable outcome: their Transactional Net Promoter Score rose 7 percentage points from January 2024 to June 2025.
This pattern repeats across industries. The Edelman Trust Barometer has consistently found that 81% of customers need to trust a brand before buying from it, and 67% will stop buying from brands they perceive as untrustworthy. Trust isn’t a soft metric. It’s the gate that every transaction passes through.
The decision line is straightforward: if your organization invests in understanding people’s actual experience, the loyalty follows. If it invests in projecting its own authority, the loyalty doesn’t.
How Does Supporting-Character Energy Apply to Branding?
Supporting-character energy in branding means the audience’s situation is the subject of every signal the brand sends. Their confusion, their ambition, their context. A brand that makes the audience the protagonist doesn’t disappear. It becomes the thing they can’t replace.
Zaki’s framing in HBR maps directly onto how this works in brand strategy. He describes supporting-character energy as a leadership style focused on understanding and advancing other people’s stories rather than one’s own (HBR, May 2026). Swap “leadership” for “brand communication” and the principle holds without modification.
Consider the difference between two versions of the same brand. Version one centers its own story: the founder’s journey, the company’s awards, its vision for the industry. The audience watches. Version two treats the audience’s situation as the subject: their language is the register, their problem is the opening line, their desired outcome is the destination.
Version one is performing. Version two is being useful. The research on which one earns trust is not ambiguous.
5W Public Relations found that 71% of consumers purchase more frequently from businesses whose values align with their own, and 83% of millennials consider that alignment a deciding factor. Value alignment isn’t a marketing trick. It’s a structural property of a brand that has done the work of understanding who it’s for and what those people are trying to figure out.
Stanford research on information retention quantifies why story structure matters: retention rates jump from 5-10% for isolated facts to 65-70% when the same information is embedded in a narrative (Dan and Chip Heath). The Headstream consumer survey found that 92% of consumers want brand communications that feel like stories. But the key word is “feel.” The audience doesn’t want to watch a brand’s story. They want to be in one.
The brand that advances the audience’s story earns deeper trust than the brand performing its own.
What’s the Difference Between a Brand That Centers Itself and One That Centers Its Audience?
The difference is structural, not tonal. A self-centering brand organizes its signals around its own credentials, achievements, and perspective. An audience-centering brand organizes its signals around the reader’s situation, questions, and desired outcome.
Here’s a diagnostic: look at the subject of every sentence on your homepage, your about page, your most recent three social posts. Count how many begin with “we,” “our,” “I,” or the company name. Count how many begin with “you,” “your,” or a description of the audience’s situation.
Most brands discover the ratio is lopsided. The brand is speaking about itself to an audience that came looking for help with something else.
This isn’t a style preference. Deloitte’s research found that companies prioritizing customer-centricity are 60% more profitable than those that don’t. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. A brand oriented toward the audience’s experience makes better decisions about what to say, when to say it, and what to leave out. The audience’s context becomes the editing filter.
The practical shift requires three moves. First, rewrite your opening lines so the reader’s situation is the subject. Not “We help companies build brands” but “You know who you are. The question is whether anyone else does.” Second, treat every piece of content as a response to a specific question the audience is carrying. Not “here’s what we think about X” but “here’s what X means for someone in your position.” Third, measure success by what the audience does with the content, not by how well the content represents the brand.
A useful test: if you removed your company name from a piece of content and the content still served the reader, you’ve built something audience-centered. If it collapsed without the brand context, you built a brochure.
Conclusion
The most useful insight in Zaki’s HBR piece isn’t that humble leaders outperform self-centering ones, though the evidence for that is clear. It’s that the capacity to understand and advance someone else’s story is a skill, not a personality trait. It can be practiced, measured, and improved.
That matters for branding because the same principle operates at every scale. The brand that organizes its signals around the audience’s experience builds structural trust. The brand that organizes its signals around its own story builds a portfolio of credentials nobody asked to see.
The decision isn’t complicated. Make someone else the main character.
