I have spent more than thirty years evaluating leaders. I am a headhunter.
People often assume that headhunters “find people jobs.” We don’t. We help organizations decide who should lead them.
Leadership is not revealed in a CV or a résumé. Leadership almost never reveals itself in the interview.
It reveals itself in everything around the interview.
How someone treats the receptionist.
Whether they thank the assistant who arranged the meeting.
Whether they include the youngest person in the room.
Whether they make difficult phone calls.
Whether they apologize.
Whether they show kindness when no one is watching.
For years I believed I had learned those lessons through executive search. Looking back, I know that was only partly true. I began studying leadership as a little girl.
One Sunday after church, my father and I stopped to see the progress on the house my parents were building. The lot was muddy, and I was wearing shiny black patent leather shoes.
“Stay in the car,” my father said. “I’ll just be a minute, honey.”
I was not an obedient child.
A few minutes later, I climbed out and followed him.
My shoes were covered in mud.
My father was angry, and he never got angry—not because of the shoes themselves, but because we were going to be in big trouble at home. I watched him kneel down, spit on his handkerchief (yes, he used cloth handkerchiefs), and desperately try to clean the mud from my shoes.
Then something happened that I have never forgotten.
He stopped.
He looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.”
I was stunned.
“Daddy,” I asked, “why are you saying you’re sorry?”
“Because it’s so stupid to get angry.”
It took me decades to fully understand the lesson hidden in that moment. Everything I would later look for in leaders was somehow present in that small exchange.
Humility. Self-awareness. Restraint. Respect. The willingness to admit you were wrong.
My father was a World War II veteran who fought in Europe at eighteen years of age and returned home to earn a doctorate in history.
History was not just something confined to books. It lived in our car, around our dinner table, and in the bedtime stories he told us about American presidents.
He drove my sister and me to school in a little Volkswagen Beetle. She sat in the front seat. I sat in the back. Together they would recite Shakespeare. How long hast thou been gravemaker? Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio…
Every morning, he made our school lunches—terrible sandwiches of white bread, cheese, and sweet pickles that had turned the bread green with pickle juice by lunchtime. I quietly threw them away every day.
From my father, I inherited curiosity about people and the conviction that authority is strongest when tempered by humility.
That curiosity became my profession.
Late in his life, Walter, one of the most important mentors I ever had, was living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Years earlier, he could recognize me from across a room.
One afternoon, after the disease had started to take his mind, we unexpectedly crossed paths at 48th and Park in Manhattan.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Finally, recognition came—not of my name, but of something deeper.
“Oh,” he said softly, “you are that lady who was so nice to me.”
His memory had forgotten almost everything.
But it had not forgotten kindness.
If there is a single lesson that ties these stories together, perhaps it is this:
Long after titles disappear, accomplishments fade, and memories fail, people remember how we made them feel.
That is the heart of leadership.
— Monica Burton
This essay is adapted from The Heart of Leadership, a memoir in progress.
© 2026 Monica Burton. All rights reserved.