From centralizing hero to developer leader
Demographic and cultural changes in the Brazilian labor market have reached a critical point. According to ManpowerGroup's 2026 Talent Shortage Survey, 80% of Brazilian employers have difficulty filling positions, a rate above the global average of 72% and practically unchanged since 2022. At the same time, the annual unemployment rate measured by IBGE fell to 5.6% in 2025, the lowest level in the historical series that began in 2012.
In this scenario, leaders capable of retaining people, expanding competencies and developing the professionals the organization already has become increasingly important. ManpowerGroup's own survey shows that reskilling current employees has become Brazilian companies' main response to the shortage, cited by 44% of employers and ahead of the search for new professionals.
This pressure changes the work of leadership. Companies need to expand their teams' contribution without turning scarcity into overload. From the standpoint of lean management, the labor shortage exposes the so-called “eighth waste,” the underuse of people's skills, intelligence and creativity. The State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, produced by Gallup from a worldwide survey on workers' experience, estimates that only 20% of professionals are engaged at work. The organization's studies also attribute to managers about 70% of the variation observed in engagement across teams.
When only part of professionals' intellectual capacity is used, their opportunity to learn, improve and sustain results is reduced. Reversing this situation depends on managers who create room for autonomy, support problem solving and take direct responsibility for developing people.
This transition is at the heart of Gente Lean, a business novel written by Robson Gouveia, director of Lean Institute Brasil (LIB), and Ricardo Oréfice, partner and ombudsman at Itaú Unibanco. Through a fictional narrative, the book shows how leadership can create the conditions for people to solve problems, learn from their work and expand their ability to contribute. It is the first business novel by Brazilian authors to examine leadership from the perspective of lean management.
The story follows Cristina, the new director of the fictional Grupo Marquez, a traditional conglomerate marked by pressure to hit targets, low internal cooperation and the silence produced by fear of punishment. Alongside executive Eduardo, she leads a cultural change based on creating listening channels, revising metrics and bringing leadership closer to the real problems of the work.
The book shows how trust, respect and people's growth influence an organization's ability to solve problems and adapt. These elements appear in the everyday relationships between leaders and teams, in the way mistakes are handled, in the questions that are asked and in the room given for employees to grow.
This dynamic requires moving beyond the figure of the boss who concentrates answers, decisions and recognition. The leader starts listening to their team members from the context in which they work, in order to understand the obstacles they face and help them expand their ability to act. Operational problems become raw material for learning and improvement. This stance creates safety for teams to expose failures, propose solutions and expand their contribution. In the book, this process is presented as a four-step ladder, which begins with inclusion, moves through learning from mistakes and the possibility of contributing without judgment, and reaches a stage of collective maturity.
In practice, we know that the great difficulty of this change is tied to executives' own career paths. Many were promoted for their ability to master technical subjects, centralize decisions and provide quick answers. The behavior that sustained individual success can limit collective development when it remains the main reference for how to lead. Listening, delegating, admitting doubts and making room for other people to grow require different capabilities. The Gallup report also states that fewer than half of managers worldwide have received formal training for the role.
This evolution depends on self-reflection. Leaders need to recognize how their attitudes affect the environment; they must identify “blind spots” and question behaviors that produced good results in other contexts. Experience remains valuable, but it gains greater reach when it helps shape the judgment and competence of others. None of this happens without containing vanity and taming egos.
In a tighter labor market, the quality of leadership directly affects retention, engagement, productivity and adaptability. Rigid hierarchies and excessive bureaucracy slow learning and distance people from the problems they need to solve. Trust is built day to day, through consistency between words, decisions and behavior.
The advance of artificial intelligence helps reinforce this agenda. As technology takes on a larger share of operational and analytical activities, judgment, responsibility, creativity and cooperation become more important. These capabilities develop in environments where people can understand problems, test solutions and learn from experience.
Given that hiring will be increasingly difficult, a large part of the competencies companies need will have to be built internally. The raw material is closer than many executives realize and can be found in the professionals who already walk the organization's hallways. Turning this potential into collective capability will depend on leaders prepared to teach, listen and create conditions for people to grow.
