The Power of Tenderness - The Power of Balance

Podcast Summary: The Power of Balance with Stephen Barden
Episode: The Power of Tenderness
Date: December 28, 2025

Episode Overview

In this solo episode, Stephen Barden explores the counterintuitive notion that true leadership power emerges not from aggression or control, but from tenderness. Drawing on his book, “How successful leaders do business with their world,” and decades of coaching experience, Barden delves into the origins of our power dynamics, examines the roots of competitive leadership styles, and makes the case for tenderness—an active, nurturing, and systemic approach to leadership—as the most effective way to lead organizations, cultivate innovation, and create balance.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Redefining Power and Leadership

Power as Capacity:
Power is rooted in “the capacity to act,” not necessarily in domination or control.

“Power comes from the Latin word potis, and eventually evolved into the French pouvoir, meaning to be able to do. In simple terms, power is simply the capacity to act.” (01:03)
Stances on Power:
- Oppositional Stance: Stemming from childhood experiences with power imbalance, this stance sees the world (or organization) as adversarial, leading to suspicion, competition, and constant vigilance.
- Partnering Stance: Emerging from a sense of balance with the world, this outlook encourages collaboration and treats the world (or team) as an ally.
“Those we call powerful have much more capacity to act than those we call powerless. But they’re both on the same continuum.” (01:14)

2. Origins of Competitive Leadership

Many “aggressive, combative” leaders are driven by deep-seated anxieties and a sense of vulnerability, not strength.
The urge to amass power over others often reflects an attempt to reduce personal angst and vulnerability.

“Is the drive to gain power over others...actually a drive to remove the angst of vulnerability? And does the drive for monopoly power reflect a feeling of extreme vulnerability?” (09:05)
Even with amassed power, oppositional leaders rarely feel safe; their suspicion extends even to “familiars”—their closest colleagues.

3. The Pitfalls of Competition

Limited Innovation:
Excessive focus on competition traps leaders in cycles of sustaining innovation (incremental improvement) instead of breakthrough thinking.

“Competition is no friend of innovation. Clayton Christensen’s works on innovation...are very clear about that.” (18:12)
Historical Innovations Were Collaborative:
Pioneering achievements like the Internet and AI emerged from cooperation, not rivalry.

“The pioneers of the Internet and the World Wide Web worked cooperatively to create those technologies for the common good.” (21:10)

4. Defining Tenderness in Leadership

Tenderness is not simply empathy or compassion, but the active desire to nurture, develop, and remove barriers to others’ capacities.

“Tenderness is, for me, the recognition of the vulnerability of others from one’s own place of vulnerability and the desire to help, to intervene...It’s nurturing, developmental and active.” (25:41)
Etymology:
The word “tender” originally means both “to stretch” and “to reach out”—implying vulnerability and the act of offering support.
Difference from Softness or Coddling:
Tenderness is not about being soft or overindulgent; it’s about systemic, active engagement with people’s and organizations’ needs and vulnerabilities.

“Tenderness doesn’t exploit the vulnerabilities of the other. It partners to nurture and develop the other for the common good.” (28:19)

5. Systemic Application of Tenderness

At every level—individual, team, organization, society—tenderness operates by diagnosing and addressing barriers to capacity.
When integrated into management, tenderness enhances not only individual well-being but organizational output, innovation, and adaptability.

“Tenderness may look like an interpersonal emotion, but it’s actually a philosophy of values… the operational expression of the partnering stance, but it’s also a healing for the oppositional leader.” (37:21)

6. Real-world Examples

WD-40 (with Gary Ridge):
Shifted from management to coaching; managers became “tenderers,” focused on team growth and development, yielding high trust, employee satisfaction, and strong financial results.
Buurtzorg (Dutch home care):
Uses self-managing teams with decentralized, client-centered decision-making, exemplifying “tender” leadership.
Mindera (tech consultancy):
Applies a “Teal” model (as described by Frederic Laloux), emphasizing self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose—each aligning with the ethos of tenderness.

“Employees…are encouraged to own and make their own decisions at their operational level. Wholeness entails bringing your social persona to work…compassion and tenderness, if you like.” (47:10)
- High employee ratings (Mindera: 4.4 on Glassdoor, 87% recommend; Buurtzorg: 4.1, 78%).

7. Tenderness as a New Management Model

Contrast with Taylorism:
Previous models focused on control, efficiency, and cost. Tenderness instead treats employees as complex beings to be enabled, not driven.

“A tenderness based model… is probably the first management model since industrialization that really addresses the employee as a socially and psychologically complex being.” (52:26)
Tenderness requires systemic consistency:
It must be integrated throughout the organization—from recruitment and coaching to operations and strategy—to be effective and trusted.
Balanced Stakeholder Focus:
Organizations cannot prioritize one group’s interests (e.g., employees) at the expense of others (e.g., clients, stakeholders). True tenderness addresses and integrates the needs of all, creating powerful alliances and sustainable success.

Memorable Quotes

“Vulnerability of this kind… is a very uncomfortable state. It's one where angst is always present, humming below the surface, and always reminding us of our vulnerability. It's a place that most sane, sentient beings would like to escape.” – Stephen Barden (10:48)
“Competing against you, measuring myself against you, may be hemming me in... Competition is no friend of innovation.” – Stephen Barden (18:29)
“Tenderness is the most accurate diagnostic tool a leader has for understanding what increases or decreases the capacity of their people, their organization, and their society... and for understanding their own capacity.” (34:50)
“What Teal, the partnering stance, and tenderness does for the first time is address the employee… as a valuable source of real knowledge and expertise and as a psychologically complex being that needs to be enabled rather than driven to perform.” (59:17)
“You cannot single out the interests of the employee or… any one of the stakeholders. You have to put the interests of the employee and the client and the organization front and center. You have to be tender with all three, and in the process, you’re creating some very powerful allies.” (01:03:18)

Notable Segments with Timestamps

Defining Power & Early Influences on Leadership: (01:00–06:55)
Vulnerability and Defensive Leadership: (07:00–15:35)
Competition vs. Innovation: (18:00–24:00)
Etymology & Essence of Tenderness: (25:41–29:40)
Applying Tenderness Systemically: (34:50–39:00)
Real-world Organizational Examples: (41:46–51:46)
Comparison to Historical Management Models: (52:26–58:09)
Balanced Stakeholder Focus – Purposeful Tenderness: (01:03:00–end)

Summary Tone

Barden’s tone throughout is thoughtful, gently provocative, and rooted in both scholarly insight and practical leadership wisdom. He challenges leadership dogmas not with antagonism, but with an empathetic philosophy, inviting listeners to question, reflect, and—crucially—try something new: tenderness.

For Listeners

If you want to move beyond the myth of the competitive, combative leader and foster environments where people and organizations both thrive, this episode supplies both the rationale and real-world inspiration for adopting tenderness as your leadership North Star.

Transcript

A (0:00)

Foreign. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Power of Balance. I'm Stephen Barden. So today I want to talk about tenderness. In fact, tenderness and power, which may send you reaching for the stop button, but bear with me, it could be a bit of nonsense. You might even find this useful and it might even make some sense. Tenderness and power. Then, just to recap what I mean by power, power comes from the Latin word potis and eventually evolved into the French word pouvoir, meaning to be able to do. In simple terms, power is simply the capacity to act. Those we call powerful have much more capacity to act than than those we call power. Less. But they're both on the same continuum. Now, I know I'm going over more old ground for some of you, but in the interests of those who haven't followed this podcast, the basis of my entire approach to power is that the way we exercise it and authority as adults depends on the assumptions we formed as children when we were exploring our world about the balance and and type of power we had with it. If in exploring and navigating our space as kids we experienced that our world, our immediate context, exercised power over us and that it had more power than we did, then as adults we would go on to treat it at least as a competitor or opponent, especially if we detected, rightly or wrongly, some malice or ill intent in that imbalance. That approach I call the oppositional stance. If, on the other hand, we experience that in our world we could find as many solutions as problems that actually it could, if we were open to it, help us find those solutions, then as adults we would assume that we have a reasonable balance with our world that is in the main, it is an ally power with. So the most effective way to get on in it would be to treat it as a partner, an asset, certainly not as an enemy. And that attitude I call the partnering stance. The early episodes of this podcast and my book on the subject Yes, I know, I never miss an opportunity. Go into more detail on that. An ingredient of any power over relationship is vulnerability. In a context where I have learned to assume that my world has the upper hand, I'm going to feel vulnerable to its whims and demands. And I could react in a number of ways from the totally passive oh God, oh God, oh God, when is the boss going to fire me? To the defiant I know that bastard wants to fire me. Let him try. I'll bloody show him to the attack. He wants to fire me, I'll get him fired first. They're all responses to an opponent, and they're all expressions of relative vulnerability. The submissives will assume that, at best, the boss or whoever is close to being invulnerable and nothing can be done. The defiance may also assume that they are more vulnerable than the boss, but respond by trying to beat the odds, perhaps by upping their game. And the aggressors recognize that the boss may well be more powerful, but she is vulnerable, that there's a chink in the armor, a soft underbelly that they can attack. All three have at least two things in common. Their world is an opponent, an adversary, and whatever they do, they assume it will always have more power. Even the aggressors presume that, never mind how successful they may be in toppling this particular representative of the world, it doesn't change their fundamental assumption that their world will always have more power and they will always have to be on the alert against it. It's a competition between power over and power under either way. Vulnerability of this kind, vulnerability to power over that triggers this constant alertness is a very uncomfortable state. It's one where angst is always present, humming below the surface, and always reminding us of our vulnerability. It's a place that most sane, sentient beings are would like to escape. So here's a question. Is the drive to gain power over others through authority, money, physical, military, or social superiority actually a drive to remove the angst of vulnerability? And does the drive for monopoly power reflect a feeling of extreme vulnerability? After all, theoretically, the more power you have over others, the less vulnerable you should feel. The more you can forget your foundational conviction that your world has far more sway than you do. I mean, even if you just lord it over your own family, you can at least have a tiny haven. Without angst, goes that logic, even if it is an illusion, and if you're lucky and smart enough to gain a great deal of power, then you have a really good chance to be able to tell yourself that you are no longer vulnerable. You're finally safe, as long, of course, as you hold on to your power base. Now, here comes the problem. Actually, there are plenty of problems. The first is you may feel vulnerable, but that doesn't remove your suspicion of your world and its inhabitants. It doesn't stop you from thinking deep down that there's always the chance that someone is coming after you. It doesn't, therefore, as a leader, tend to make you look after, nurture, and develop your people, and therefore your organization or your constituency or your country. They're your rivals. They're on the other side. And the irony is of course, that because that assumption of the child's power imbalance was formed in interactions with its family, with its familiars, it is the familiars who are seen as the biggest threat, or at least competitors. So those people with an oppositional stance feel they have to be on the alert, even against, actually especially against their own power base. That angst of vulnerability may be soothed by snorting a couple more lines of power and wealth, but the effect will always wear off and will have to be topped up. And by the way, I'm not saying, and I hope this is clear, I'm not saying that all those with this assumption of power imbalance, which is probably most of us, are in a constant state of near panic. The strength of feeling of vulnerability and anxiety will depend on how severe the initial experiences of the child were. But there's certainly a tendency for those with an oppositional stance to at least compete against their world. Those with a more balanced and cooperative assumption of power, those with a partnering stance, as I've said many times, see competition as against focusing on succeeding as a waste of time. Why should I care about how well you're doing as long as I succeed in my aims? In fact, competing against you, measuring myself against you, may be hemming me in. I may be restricting my performance, my innovativeness, my entire potential to one degree better than yours, rather than to do the best that I can, can do. And that's the second problem. Competition is no friend of innovation. Clayton Christensen's works on innovation, and particularly breakthrough innovations, is very clear about that. In his book the Innovator's Solution that he wrote with Michael Rayner, he says the most successful new growth businesses are not built by beating competitors, but by making competitors irrelevant. And it makes absolute sense to me. If you are in competitive mode, your curiosity is going to be limited to beating your rivals, to overtaking them on their path. It's what Christensen called sustaining innovations, steadily improving on what your competitors are doing. If, however, you're in solutions driven mode on finding solutions for a new market, then you can unleash your creativity, your imagination, and the entrepreneurship that is needed to find that solution. But certainly Western society, actually it's far wider than that now, of course, has established the norm that competition outperforming our neighborhood is the benchmark. In a sense, it has adopted the behavior of those who feel constantly vulnerable to their world and who are trapped into both the cycle of angst and diminishing innovation. But hang on, haven't we seen great leaps of innovation in the last 50 years when competitiveness has been at its height. The invention of the Internet and AI, to name just two. Neither of those was invented under the burden of competition. In fact, there's plenty of evidence that the pioneers of the Internet and the World Wide Web worked cooperatively to create those technologies for the common good. Tim Berners Lee made his code available to all. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn worked on open protocols for seamless communications across multiple systems. These were disruptive innovations aimed at what their inventors saw as a social need, rather than to match or beat existing competitors. The launchpad for AI as a distinct field of study and research was the Dartmouth Conference of 1956. There's little doubt that its leading participants saw the development of artificial intelligence as a collaborative effort, a partnering one, if you like, to benefit society as a whole, to, as one source put it, lead to solutions for complex societal problems, to throw open the possibilities of human intellectual exploration and capabilities, not to bypass it. Great minds like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky and earlier, of course, Alan Turing emphasized working together, not in competition, and certainly not to gain any market advantage. And they wouldn't have been able to work together to collaborate for the common good if they had seen their world and one another as competitors. And it was the collaboration of ideas, of application and of values that led to the innovation. No single person invented those transformative leaps. Since then, competition has dominated the accessories of these innovations, not the innovations themselves. Search engines, smartphones, laptops and tablets, social media, and the various chatbots. Since then, we have had what Clayton Christensen called sustaining innovations. So where does tenderness come into all this? Tenderness is, for me, the recognition of the vulnerability of others from one's own place of vulnerability and the desire to help, to intervene. Yes, it is empathy, and yes, it is compassion. But it has the essential additional ingredient of wanting to do something about it. It's nurturing, developmental and active. You can feel empathy with your colleague or compassion for your employee without the impulse to intervene. Tenderness recognizes the vulnerability, the anxiousness, the flaws and the talents of the other, and cares enough to want to do something, to help, to get those vulnerabilities, if you like, out of the way. Tenderness doesn't exploit the vulnerabilities of the other. It partners to nurture and develop the other for the common good. Where do I get this eccentric definition of tenderness? Well, etymology again. The modern word tender has two distinct meanings. To be sensitive and vulnerable on the one hand, and to reach out, to offer, to stretch on the other. But they both originally come from one source, the ancient proto indo European root 10 meaning to stretch and to stretch out. The double meaning that a tender person is stretched thin and vulnerable, and the person responding to that vulnerability is stretching, tendering to help. Have you ever felt tenderness towards your child, your partner, particularly when they're visibly stretched? Did you just feel compassion or did you want to do something? Did you instinctively want to stretch out to soothe help? On the other hand, have you witnessed or felt a complete lack of tenderness towards, I don't know, a picture of a wounded terrorist or a suffering, but very ugly, lethal spider? Why the difference? Because tenderness comes from a partnering of vulnerability, empathy. At that vulnerability level. There are no power dynamics here, no angst. There's no need for angst. It's your vulnerability recognizing theirs and wanting to help it's partnering. Lack of tenderness is where the power angst, the assumed threat, is much stronger than the empathy. You'll say to yourself, that terrorist killed God knows how many people before they were shot. As with that spider, have you seen the size of the thing? In essence, tenderness recognizes the blockages and the accelerators of another's capacity to act. It recognizes, for example, that the fierce defiance and hostility in the other may be rooted in fear. And by removing that fear and the disruptive behavior, you're increasing the value of that person to the world. But you're not just increasing the value to the world of the other, but yourself as well. So what would happen if we treated our employees, our organizations, our leaders, our citizens, the planet we live on, with tenderness? What would happen to our own feeling of angst, our own oppositional stance, if we behaved with tenderness? And is it even possible? Surely not. It's bullshit. Must be. We can't go trotting after each employee, manager, colleague or constituents, checking with a particularly compassionate tone. How are you doing, friend? You look tired. Get some rest. No, that's not tenderness. Here's what I'm saying. Tenderness is the most accurate diagnostic tool a leader has for understanding what increases or decreases the capacity of their people, their organization and their society, and for understanding their own capacity. When a CEO looks at his organization, his people, as well as the structures and processes, and realizes that they need more stability after all the change programs, despite pressure from the shareholders to plough ahead, that's tenderness. When that same CEO sees that the drive to boost the share price by slashing costs is actually damaging the products and services and pushes back, that's tenderness. And when that CEO, he's a very busy man, fiercely Resists shareholders insistence that the company be sold to a private equity company because he recognizes what it will do to the company and its people. That's tenderness. Tenderness is a virtuous circle. If you learn to feel tender towards individuals, you will learn to have a similar awareness towards teams, organizations and society. There's a systemic logic to it. When I'm tender towards a person, I see more than see. I identify and engage with what blocks or accelerates their capacity. When I'm tender towards a team, I engage with what blocks or accelerates their collective capacity, the dynamics between them. When I'm tender towards an organization, I engage with what hurts or helps structural capacity and when I'm tender towards society or the planet, I. I identify and engage with what blocks or accelerates long term capacity, the capacity of beings and their world. Tenderness may look like an interpersonal emotion, but it's actually a philosophy of values, an application of values. Actually it is the operational expression of the partnering stance, but it's also a healing for the oppositional leader. By recognizing and helping to ease the vulnerabilities, blockages and fears of others, individually, collectively or systemically, that leader becomes far more conscious of their own vulnerabilities and how to manage them. So what would that look like in reality? And is it being practiced anywhere in business or or institutions today? Some organizations, not many as far as I can see, have moved to remove the word manager from their vocabulary and even to try and get rid of centralized management. Most notable probably at the moment is the company WD40 under the 25 year leadership of Gary Ridge. Over a period of I think it was five years, he he both changed the language of management and the purpose of it. Managers became coaches whose primary job was to help their teams grow and develop. In essence what we've been talking about here, their tenderers tendering help and being sensitive to the needs of both their teams and the organization. Financial results were very strong through his period of leadership and market cap even more so. Trust and employee satisfaction levels were really very high. There are other examples of coaching management like Birdsok, a Dutch home care organization based on neighborhoods which are run by self managing teams of 12. These teams run their neighborhoods, building up networks and client caseloads and apparently shaping their operation and their recruitment around those client needs. It's clever in that they clearly recruit people, for example skilled nurses who know what kind of processes and structures are needed to both service their clients and make delivery easier. Fans claim that Bezo don't have managers, but of course they do. Their Nurses and their carers, often with the participation of their clients, are the managers. They manage themselves and they manage to get the job done rather than to control. That's tenderness too. Beerzog and another company, Mindera, a multilocational tech consultancy, uses a system closely allied to something called the Thiel model, first described by Frederic Leloux in 2014 in his book Reinventing Organizations. Teal based organizations normally have three foundational principles, self management, wholeness and evolutionary purposes. Employees, much like we saw in Beerzog, are encouraged to own and make their own decisions at their operational level. Wholeness entails bringing your social Persona to work as well as your skills, your compassion and tenderness, if you like. And evolutionary purposes is adapting to the team, to the organizational direction, rather than hanging on to this is how we've always done it. These structures and approaches, it seems to me, are very much a move to deliver what I've been calling tenderness in organizations. And it seems to be working. Glassdoor reports a 4.4 rating from Mindera employees, with 87% recommending it as a good place. Beerzop got a slightly lower approval rating of 4.1, with 78% of Glassdoor respondents recommending it as a good place to work. Not a bad rating at all. What all these companies, I think, are clearly understanding is that any form of management, whether it's Thiel or Tenderness or Taylor's scientific management, God forbid, has to be applied systemically. At its core, tenderness in business and institutions is the enrichment of the capacity of both the people and the organizational itself to learn, to think, to do and to deliver. Yes, these people are supported and mentored to overcome their blockages. And yes, the climate created is hopefully one of happiness, satisfaction and development. But the output is one to a level of standards, quality, values and volume that is needed for the organization to fulfill its purpose and its ends. So tenderness applied piecemeal or inappropriately is ridiculous. It needs to be entirely integrated within the context of an organization's strategic ends, from recruitment through to integration, coaching, developing and delivering. It needs to be consistent and trusted. It needs to be ingrained as the policy of behavior for the company. A tenderness based model. Humor me while I call it that is probably the first management model since industrialization that really addresses the employee as a socially and psychologically complex being. Taylorism prioritized efficiency, cost, process, control and profit. The workers were, in effect, human production line robots and the customer had the choice of a black model T Ford or a black one. Management was hierarchical and was essentially there to control and that's a key word to control adherence to methods and speed of delivery, not to guide More recently, modern industrial workers may have had better conditions, but control was, and mostly still is, the order of management's day in investment banks. The traders and salespeople in the front office may have had money thrown at them at a number of stages, but come the frequent downturns, they were shown the door and how and why they behaved towards their clients or anyone else was secondary to how much money they brought in. No control there, actually fierce control on how much money they delivered to the bank, and if they didn't deliver, out they went. Neither employee nor the client was the priority. Modern managements, many of them hybrid, now may have shifted their areas of control, but control they do. Airlines controlling both their customers and their employees to ensure minimal costs and minimal delays by insisting that you check in yourself, for example. Not only yourself, your luggage too. Banks, delivery companies, telecom providers that funnel you into their apps to control their costs and their limited range of services. Try calling them and you'll discover that if the waiting time doesn't kill you, nothing will. And when you get to the CSO at the end, you can hear the helplessness, the frustration, the at being the last resort of a system that simply isn't working for the customer, the employee, and eventually the organization itself. What Teal the partnering stance and Tenderness does for the first time, is address the employee, the person in the field, as a valuable source of real knowledge and expertise and as a psychologically complex being that needs to be enabled rather than driven to perform. It asks people to partner with their organizations and their clients to create a virtuous circle that benefits all. And it would be remiss of a podcast called the Power of Balance if I didn't stress this point. You cannot single out the interests of the employee or in fact, any one of the stakeholders. You have to put the interests of the employee and the client and the organization front and center. You have to be tender with all three, and in the process, you're creating some very powerful allies. I'm Stephen Barden. This has been another episode of the Power of Balance.