Having served in senior leadership positions in PNUD TChad, PNUD Democratic Republic of Congo, the PNUD Central African Republic, PNUD Niger, UNDP Organisation of Human Resources and now UNDP Zambia, I would like to share my experience of people-centred leadership and why it matters.

People-centred leadership places people, partnerships, and results at the heart of development. Drawing on leadership experience in post-conflict and complex settings, it recognizes that sustainable transformation is achieved not only through technical expertise, but through trust, inclusion, and collective action.

By combining strategic vision with emotional intelligence, people-centred leaders mobilize governments, partners, civil society, and communities around shared development goals. They build strong partnerships, foster high-performing teams, anticipate risks, and unlock opportunities for greater development impact.

A Sector in Transition

Recent experience in such contexts brought home the pressures that many country offices now face. Globally, financial instability has unsettled economies and institutions alike, and the development space has not been immune. Declining official development assistance and shifting funding priorities have left the situation in many country offices tenuous, with restructuring and downsizing defining the current chapter for development organisations. This insecurity inevitably weighs on staff morale, and in crisis contexts, where demands shift constantly and certainty is scarce, that weight is heavier still.

Clarity Behind the Open Door

It is precisely in such moments that people-centred leadership is tested and, I would argue, revealed for what it actually is. The term is sometimes mistaken for softness: the open door, the patient ear, the reluctance to push. But an open door means little if it is only a door. Staff facing uncertainty do not primarily need reassurance, they need clarity about what the office will do and what is expected of each colleague. You keep the authority and you keep the discussion going at the same time. The door stays open, but what people find behind it must be a decision.

Listening to staff also means consulting them and taking their wellbeing seriously as an operational matter. In times of uncertainty, exercises such as downsizing test an office's commitments to its people, and leadership must keep genuine flexibility in how those commitments are honoured. Prioritising internal talent is one of the clearest ways to do so. Recruiting and onboarding new staff is considerably more expensive — in time, in money, and in institutional knowledge — than leveraging the skills and growth of existing team members. Holding open discussions with the staff association and making full use of internal recruitment routes, such as Tier 0, gives colleagues affected by restructuring a first genuine opportunity to return and gives the wider team the security to free their minds and focus on the work. Morale is not restored by speeches. It is restored by decisions that staff can verify.

Presence and Positioning

The second lesson concerns presence. Internally and externally, a leader must consider how to position the team for success. Regular interfacing with cooperating partners and government counterparts and, above all, field visits taken together with staff, positions the office tactically among its partners and offers the chance to lead by example. Just as important is closing the loop. When returning from every engagement, feed back to the team what was said, what was agreed, and what it means for their work. A team that is kept inside the story of its own office begins to see itself differently. Colleagues who had stopped going out to meetings start going again. That is what leading by example actually purchases, it secures action.

Facing Partners with Confidence

The third lesson is that internal renewal and external positioning are not separate workstreams, each is in fact evidence for the other. Restructuring, once complete, must be communicated strategically and deliberately to cooperating partners, traditional and non-traditional alike, and on both the donor and government side. Partners kept outside the loop are left to draw their own conclusions about an organisation's internal situation, and silence can read as decline. The message must be affirmative and clear. The office is lean and agile, with a lighter operational footprint and the excellence to implement the non-core financing on which development increasingly depends. In post-crisis environments, where the partnership space has often narrowed, this means articulating with precision, what the organization was delivering — on stabilization, on transitional governance, on social cohesion — and why it remained the partner of consequence. But no amount of articulation persuades a wary partner if the office behind it is visibly struggling.  Conversely, every promise kept — every portfolio sustained, every audit prepared for honestly, every baseline laid for an incoming Resident Representative — becomes credibility. Credibility is re-earned every day, and it is the only currency that buys an organization room to work.

One Discipline, Every Context

It would be easy to conclude that these are lessons for crisis and post-crisis settings alone. My current tenure in a stable, middle-income country suggests otherwise. Here, the work looks different. Development is anchored in functioning systems, processes and a growth agenda built on stable governance systems, institutions and economic wealth based on critical minerals, smart agriculture and access to markets and green growth strategies. In both settings, UNDP earns its place by working where it matters most, supporting key government institutions such as ministries of finance and revenue authorities to analyse fiscal space, so that governments have the resources to invest in job creation and in young people. The portfolios may differ but the discipline does not. Crisis does not demand a special kind of leadership. It simply removes the ambiguity that stable settings allow, and shows visibly and urgently,  whether the leadership was there. The strength of the organisation lies in leaders who can navigate both contexts seamlessly and that is UNDP today.

If there is a definition of people-centred leadership worth keeping, it is this: an environment in which staff is understood and capacitated, and partner confidence in the organisation is strengthened. That definition is available in every duty station, in every context.

A country office is fit for purpose not when its structure looks right on paper, but when its people can face challenges knowing exactly what they stand for. That clarity is the real legacy any of us leaves behind and it is built one well-considered decision at a time.