Great Leaders Care

Great leaders don't choose between results and wellbeing — they build both

Leadership is tough. When it comes to delivering success, you face higher demands, yet you receive less support. Meanwhile, your team members are stressed, tense and on the verge of burnout. Most leadership books focus solely on driving results, while ignoring a critical truth: you can't sustain high performance when you and your team are running on empty. That’s where Great Leaders Care is different — it delivers a practical, evidence-based framework for building teams that are both high-performing and resilient.

Graeme Cowan, Founding Director of R U OK?, draws on extensive interviews with successful CEOs plus his own personal journey with mental health, revealing what really matters in leadership. Inside, you’ll discover how caring cultures transform both people and business outcomes, including stronger engagement and performance, reduced liability and higher retention. When people feel genuinely cared for, productivity rises, turnover drops and teams become magnets for top talent.

Great Leaders Care shares the tools to:

• Master the three pillars of caring leadership: self-care, team care and support for people who are struggling.
• Spot burnout early and use the VIP (Vitality, Intimacy, Prosperity) framework to stay steady, focused and resilient.
• Build psychological safety so your team members can speak up, share ideas and take the risks that lead to innovation.
• Put care into practice with daily habits and tools that lift workplace wellbeing and performance.

Leaders who care build teams that thrive. Great Leaders Care equips you with immediately actionable strategies to become the leader people actually want to work for — while delivering the results your organization demands.

‘Great Leaders Care is a compassionate, practical guide for managers on how to care for themselves and their teams in ways that reduce burnout and build psychological safety at work. Opening with the author’s deeply personal journey through severe depression and recovery, the book provides evidence-informed tools and stories from his work, and the celebrated R U OK? movement he helped to grow. Great Leaders Care offers a clear roadmap for anyone who wants to create workplaces where struggling is okay, speaking up is welcomed, and thriving is the result.'
—Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School, author, Right Kind of Wrong and The Fearless Organization