Care is Expensive
Last week, I had the privilege of facilitating a two-day strategy activation for a company rolling out a new set of core values.
It was a room full of senior leaders. Smart, accomplished, deeply committed people. We were digging into the company’s evolving values and what it means to actually embody them—not just as aspirational posters on a wall, but in the way they show up for their teams, patients, and each other.
At one point in our session, we landed on the value of care.
And without overthinking it, I said out loud:
“Care is expensive.”
I got a room full of blank stares.
That phrase—borrowed from cultural lingo that circulates more on social media than in boardrooms—didn’t immediately land. But I stood by it.
And later in the day, during a discussion about psychological safety, presence, and apathy, it started to click.
We were talking about how apathy shows up in teams—not because people are lazy, but because they’re overstretched, undervalued, or have lost trust in the system around them. And I asked again:
“Now do you understand what I mean when I say care is expensive?”
This time, I got a room full of nods.
So what does it mean to say “care is expensive?”
It means that caring isn’t cheap.
It costs you something.
It requires time, presence, vulnerability, emotional labor, clarity, and the courage to act.
It means choosing what’s human over what’s easy.
It means doing more than just the job—you’re tending to people.
And in high-stakes systems like healthcare, leadership, or business, that kind of tending is a risk.
You risk slowing things down.
You risk being misunderstood.
You risk exhausting yourself.
And yet… it’s the very thing that creates trust.
It’s the very thing that builds the culture people want to stay in.
Care requires openness. Trust requires surrender. Courage requires risk.
Care requires emotional and spiritual labor.
These are not soft skills. They are strenuous forms of leadership work.
Lastly,
It puts your identity on the line.
To embody care, trust, or courage is to make a statement about who you are—and to risk what others will assume in response.
So why do it?
Because these are the currencies of the leadership we say we want.
They are how we build trust.
They are how we shift culture.
They are how we nourish the future
What we’re really talking about: capacity.
The truth is, most leaders want to care.
But many simply don’t have the capacity to do it in a sustainable way.
And this is where burnout breeds apathy—and apathy erodes culture.
We treat apathy like a personal flaw, when it’s often a capacity signal.
It tells us something’s off. That the system can no longer hold the weight of its own values.
Why The Nourished Leader Exists
This conversation about care and capacity is at the heart of The Nourished Leader—and also at the heart of our upcoming Fall 2025 Summit.
We don’t just talk about courage, clarity, and capacity because they sound good.
We name them because they are the core nutrients of real leadership—the kind that actually sustains people in systems that were never built for their thriving.
So yes—care is expensive.
So is trust.
So is courage.
But it’s also the only currency that can build the kind of leadership our world needs right now.
