Jacqueline Carter
Senior leaders are being asked to be more human at exactly the moment the job has become less human. Restructures, AI rollouts, hybrid teams, and constant pressure on results have left many executives defaulting to either detached toughness or performative empathy. Neither produces the trust, candour, or performance the business needs.
Jacqueline Carter is a Senior Partner at Potential Project and co-author of four Harvard Business Review Press books on leadership, who works with senior teams on how to lead with discipline and humanity at the same time.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jacqueline Carter
- Four named books from Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave (One Second Ahead, The Mind of the Leader, Compassionate Leadership, More Human) that give a board or executive team a shared language for the human side of leadership.
- A research base built from interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders worldwide, conducted through Potential Project. Her arguments come with evidence, not anecdote.
- A framework, “wise compassion”, that gives leaders a usable answer to the empathy-versus-results tension most senior teams are stuck on.
- Twenty years of consulting at Deloitte and Potential Project with named clients including Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, and Royal Bank of Canada, so she speaks to executives in the language of operational reality, not theory.
- One of the few credible voices on AI-augmented leadership writing from a leadership-science lens rather than a technology one, anchored in her 2025 book More Human.
Biography highlights
- Senior Partner and North America Director, Potential Project.
- Co-author, More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025).
- Co-author, Compassionate Leadership (HBR Press, 2022) and The Mind of the Leader (HBR Press, 2018).
- Co-author, One Second Ahead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- MSc in Organizational Behaviour; former leader in Deloitte Consulting’s Change Leadership practice.
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider.
Biography
The most senior leaders in large organisations are being asked to do contradictory things at once: cut hard, care visibly, deploy AI fast, and keep the workforce engaged through the disruption it causes. Most leadership advice picks one side of that tension and ignores the other. Jacqueline Carter’s work, built over two decades at Potential Project and Deloitte before that, is about holding both.
Her four books with Harvard Business Review Press and Palgrave map the same argument across different terrain. The Mind of the Leader (2018) sets out the foundation: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion as practical leadership disciplines. Compassionate Leadership (2022) names the operating problem most senior leaders run into when they try to lead with empathy, namely that empathy alone makes them indecisive, and proposes “wise compassion” as the working alternative. More Human (2025) turns the same lens on AI, arguing that the technology amplifies whichever leadership instinct is already there.
The research base is unusual for a leadership speaker. Potential Project’s work draws on interviews with more than a hundred CEOs and 360-degree surveys of leaders and employees across industries. That gives Carter the evidence to make specific claims about what produces trust, candour, and performance in senior teams, rather than the generic motivational frame most leadership keynotes default to.
She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Business Insider, and has worked with executive teams at Cisco, Disney, Accenture, IKEA, Kimberly-Clark, and Royal Bank of Canada. The thread running through all of it is a single argument senior buyers will recognise immediately: the human qualities most leaders treat as soft are the ones that actually scale under pressure.
Key speaking topics
- Compassionate leadership and the empathy-versus-results tension
- AI-augmented leadership
- Leading through change, restructure, and uncertainty
- Self-leadership and resilience for senior executives
- Hybrid and virtual team leadership
- Difficult conversations and leadership candour
- Mindfulness and attention as leadership disciplines
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive committees rebuilding leadership culture after restructure or rapid growth.
- CHROs and CLOs designing senior leadership development programmes.
- Boards and senior teams working out how to deploy AI without losing the workforce.
- Partner groups and senior leaders in professional services managing client and team pressure simultaneously.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of “wise compassion” that senior leaders can use the next day in difficult conversations.
- A clearer view of where their own leadership defaults toward avoidance, false toughness, or performative care.
- A practical frame for using AI to extend leadership capacity rather than substitute for it.
- Specific language for the trade-offs between speed, candour, and care that most executive teams struggle to name.
- A research-backed counter to the assumption that human-centred leadership is incompatible with hard performance.
Talks
A keynote on why empathy alone fails senior leaders, and how “wise compassion” lets them deliver hard decisions without losing trust.
Key takeaways:
- The operational difference between empathy, sympathy, and compassion in a leadership context.
- A working frame for delivering hard messages, restructures, and underperformance conversations with candour.
- Evidence on what compassionate leadership produces in engagement, retention, and performance metrics.
A keynote on how AI changes the leadership job, drawn from her 2025 Harvard Business Review Press book.
Key takeaways:
- The three qualities of AI-augmented leadership: awareness, wisdom, and compassion.
- How leaders should decide which tasks to delegate to AI and which to keep human.
- Why AI amplifies whichever leadership instinct is already in the room, for better or worse.
A keynote on managing attention, ego, and compassion as the foundation of senior leadership.
Key takeaways:
- Mindfulness as a leadership discipline, not a wellness practice.
- The cost of leader self-absorption to team performance and retention.
- A practical view of what “leading yourself” means at the executive level.