MICHAEL REID | FOUNDER, HUMANS LEADING
leadership forged through experience
I grew up in a small Midwestern town where values like hard work, responsibility, humility, and keeping your word weren’t leadership concepts. They were simply how you were expected to live.
I didn’t know then that those early lessons would become part of the foundation for how I would eventually think about leadership.
My leadership journey took form in the United States Army, where responsibility was real, expectations were high, and the people around you counted on you.
I learned that leadership is rarely about having all the answers. It is about character, trust, discipline, and service. It is making decisions when the path forward is not perfectly clear, remaining composed when circumstances become difficult, and understanding the mission without losing sight of the people responsible for accomplishing it.
Those lessons became a foundation I carried long after leaving the military.
FROM THE BATTLEFIELD TO THE BOARDROOM
When I transitioned into the civilian world, I brought those principles with me.
Over the next two decades, I had the opportunity to lead teams, develop leaders, build organizations, navigate change, manage complex customer environments, and ultimately lead
multi-million-dollar services businesses within the technology industry.
The environments changed. The leadership challenges did not.
Whether leading soldiers, emerging managers, experienced executives, or large organizations,
I continued to see the same truth:
People rarely need more leadership theory. They need greater clarity about who they are when leadership becomes difficult.
Skills such as communication, delegation, motivation, and conflict management matter. But every skill is filtered through the person using it—through their values, tendencies, strengths, blind spots, reactions, and beliefs.
After more than 25 years of leadership experience, one idea has become increasingly clear:
The most powerful leadership tool you have is who you are.
Leadership is not simply something we do. It is something other people experience through us.
They experience how we respond under pressure, communicate when something goes wrong, make difficult decisions, handle disagreement, and show up when the stakes are high. They experience whether our presence creates clarity or confusion—and whether our behavior builds trust
or erodes it.
That understanding became the foundation for Humans Leading.
my leadership philosophy
My approach to leadership comes back to five core beliefs:
LEADERSHIP STARTS WITH SELF-AWARENESS
Before you can lead others intentionally, you have to understand the person doing the leading.
CHARACTER PRECEDES TECHNIQUE
Skills matter, but who you are determines how those skills are used and how people experience them.
TRUST IS BUILT THROUGH BEHAVIOR
Trust is not created by intention. It is built through consistency, decisions, conversations, and how you show up
when things are difficult.
CLARITY CREATES CONFIDENCE
Leaders do not always have certainty, but they do have a responsibility to create clarity for people to move forward.
THE INNER WORK = THE OUTER RESULTS
The quality of your leadership on the outside is shaped by the awareness, discipline, and intentionality
you develop on the inside.
why i created humans leading
Michael Reid is the founder of Humans Leading, a leadership development practice centered on vertical leadership development, executive coaching,
and experiential leadership programs.
I founded Humans Leading to help leaders turn greater self - understanding into more intentional action.
Leaders are surrounded by advice about what to do more of, what to stop doing, and what great leadership is supposed to look like. Humans Leading goes beneath those tactics to examine the patterns, assumptions, and choices shaping how a person actually leads.
Through executive coaching, leadership development experiences, personal assessments, and leadership communities, I help leaders strengthen the clarity, confidence, judgment, and intentionality behind their leadership.
That may mean helping a newly promoted manager find their footing, supporting an experienced executive navigating greater complexity and responsibility, or helping a leadership team become more deliberate about the culture it is creating.
It can also mean giving a leader the space to stop, reflect, challenge an assumption, recognize a blind spot, or see a difficult situation from a different perspective.
The goal is not to turn leaders into someone else.
It is to help them be more intentional about the leader they already have the capacity to become.
PERSPECTIVE EARNED THROUGH EXPERIENCE
My perspective has been shaped across very different environments.
Military service taught me about mission, responsibility, discipline, trust, and composure under pressure.
Business taught me about strategy, influence, organizational complexity, culture,
customer relationships, performance, and leading through constant change.
Working alongside talented leaders across industries and organizations
taught me the value of perspectives different from my own.
And my own leadership journey taught me that growth never really ends.
25+ YEARS
Leadership across military and corporate environments
UNITED STATES ARMY
Leadership shaped through service, responsibility, and mission
COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS
Organizational change, customer complexity, and consequential
decision-making
EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP
Leading teams and organizations while developing other leaders
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Translating real-world experience into practical coaching, workshops, and leadership experiences
MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESSES
Services leadership within major technology organizations
That combination is what I bring into every coaching conversation, workshop, and leadership experience.
I understand the pressure leaders face because I have lived it: the responsibility of leading people,
the expectation to deliver results, the challenge of making decisions without perfect information,
and the tension between immediate demands and long-term leadership.
Create clarity. Build trust. Make sound decisions.
Develop others. And leave the organization stronger than you found it.
THE WORK STARTS WITHIN
Today, my work is centered on helping leaders understand themselves more clearly so they can lead everything around them more intentionally.
Leadership begins long before the meeting,
the decision, or the difficult conversation.
It begins with what we bring into those moments.
Leadership starts not with a skill, but with self-discovery.
Wherever your leadership journey has taken you, there is always an opportunity to see more clearly, choose more intentionally, and lead more fully.