Leading with Humanity: What 25 years of Leadership taught Yaraye Traore Tchinah

Three perspectives from Regional HR Director Yaraye Traore Tchinah on people, impact, and sustainable leadership.

What if people are not your company’s greatest asset?

For Yaraye Traore Tchinah, Regional HR Director at KPMG Côte d’Ivoire, the distinction matters.

“We often say that people are the company’s greatest asset.” “But people are not assets; they are human beings. Assets are owned. People choose each day whether they will contribute their talent, creativity and energy.”

It is a simple distinction, but it says a great deal about how Yaraye approaches leadership.

With more than 25 years of leadership experience across the United States and Africa, including senior roles at The Coca-Cola Company, LafargeHolcim, Vivo Energy, Bolloré Transport & Logistics and KPMG, she has spent her career working at the intersection of people, transformation and business performance.

Her perspective is clear: people strategy is business strategy.

Talent, leadership, culture and engagement are not simply HR topics. They directly influence an organization’s ability to execute, adapt and perform.

But her understanding of leadership was not built in a classroom. Some of her most important lessons came from experiences that did not go as planned.

1. People First: Leadership starts before the Executive Level

For senior leaders, putting people first is not simply about empathy. It is a question of how organizations build the conditions for performance, change and leadership over time.

Yaraye’s own experience illustrates the point. Early in her leadership journey, she led a transformation initiative that was technically sound, but did not generate the level of engagement she expected. The issue was not the quality of the solution. It was the way people had been brought into the journey.

“I underestimated the importance of bringing people along the journey.”

The experience changed her understanding of leadership. Having the right answer is not enough. A strategy, however strong, only creates value when people understand it, see their place in it and are willing to contribute to it.

That is why, for Yaraye, leadership is less about convincing people than about listening to them, understanding their concerns and building trust.

This perspective also challenges a familiar way of talking about talent.

Organizations often describe people as their “greatest asset”. Yaraye deliberately questions the expression: assets are owned; people are not. People make a choice every day about whether they will contribute their talent, creativity and energy.

That distinction has practical consequences for executives. If people are not assets to be managed, then leadership cannot be reduced to allocating resources or designing processes.

"The real leadership challenge is to create an environment in which people want to contribute, can perform at their best and have the opportunity to grow."

And that responsibility starts earlier than many organizations acknowledge.

One of the opportunities Yaraye sees as underused is developing leaders before they reach the executive level. Organizations often invest heavily once someone has reached senior leadership, while giving less attention to the first-line and middle managers who already have a significant influence on engagement, performance and culture.

The implication is important: leadership development should not be treated as a reward for reaching the top. It is a capability to build before people get there.

Detect potential early. Give emerging leaders the opportunity to lead. Develop their ability to listen, make decisions, build trust and bring others through change. The executive pipeline is not built at the executive level; it is built much earlier.

This is also where another of Yaraye’s observations becomes particularly relevant:

“People rarely remember your strategy, your presentation, or even your decisions as much as they remember how you made them feel.”

For executives, this is not simply a reminder to be empathetic. It is a reminder that leadership is experienced through people.

2. Leadership is about Impact, not Activity

One of the realities every executive eventually confronts is that there will always be more demands than time. More decisions to make, more issues to solve, more people to support, more priorities competing for attention.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to become more efficient at doing more. It is to become more deliberate about where leadership attention creates the greatest value.

Yaraye uses the Eisenhower Matrix as a practical reminder to distinguish between what is urgent and what is important. But the framework itself is less important than the leadership principle behind it:

“I've learned that effective leadership is not about doing more things, but about focusing on the right things.”

This is a subtle but important shift. At executive level, time management is rarely the real constraint, but attention is.

Where a leader chooses to spend attention sends a signal about what matters to the organization. If every urgent request receives the same level of attention, strategic priorities can quickly become secondary to immediate demands. Leaders become increasingly reactive, while the issues that will shape the organization six months, two years or five years from now receive less space.

That is why Yaraye describes leadership as less about managing time and more about managing priorities.

When everything appears urgent, she does not simply ask what needs to be done first. She asks:

“Which issue will have the greatest impact if left unresolved?”

The question changes the nature of the decision.

It moves the leader away from chronology and towards consequence. It encourages a distinction between what is demanding attention now and what could materially affect the organization later.

Yaraye also makes another important distinction: not everything that is important requires the leader’s direct involvement.

“Effective prioritisation often means empowering others, not trying to carry everything yourself.”

This is where prioritization becomes a leadership capability rather than a personal productivity technique.

An executive who tries to solve every problem may appear highly engaged, but can ultimately become a bottleneck. The more senior the role, the more important it becomes to create capacity through others: giving people ownership, developing their judgment and allowing them to make decisions.

Delegation, in that sense, is not simply about reducing a leader’s workload. It is about increasing the organization’s capacity to act.

And this connects to another theme running through Yaraye’s view of leadership: consistency.

As Yaraye puts it, leadership is often more about consistency than grand gestures.

The implication for executives is significant: impact should not be confused with activity.

A calendar full of meetings does not necessarily indicate leadership impact. A leader can be constantly busy and still spend too little time on the decisions, people and capabilities that will determine the organization’s future.

The more useful question is therefore not:

“How much did I get done today? but “What became possible because I focused my attention here?”

That is ultimately what makes prioritization an executive responsibility. It is not about fitting more into the day. It is about making deliberate choices about where attention, energy and decision-making capacity will have the greatest effect.

3. Sustainable leadership starts with yourself

There is another dimension to people-centred leadership that is easy to overlook: the leader is also a person.

After more than two decades of leadership across countries, cultures and time zones, Yaraye is candid about the personal cost that can come with senior responsibility. There were missed moments with family, difficult trade-offs and periods of exhaustion. At times, she was so focused on taking care of everyone else that she neglected herself.

That experience changed the way she thinks about resilience.

“Resilience is not about being endlessly strong.”

For Yaraye, resilience is not about constantly pushing through. It is about recognizing when to rest, asking for support and protecting what matters most.

“Taking care of yourself is not a luxury; it is a responsibility if you want to lead effectively over the long term.”

This challenges a familiar idea of executive leadership: that being committed means always being available, always having the answer and always carrying the pressure.

But sustainable leadership requires something different: balance, self-awareness and the ability to step back and recharge.

And this is not only a personal issue. A leader who has no space to think, listen or recover will eventually have less capacity to create those conditions for others.

For executives, the lesson is therefore not simply to “take care of yourself.” It is to recognize that your own capacity is part of your leadership capacity.

Sustainable performance cannot be built by constantly pushing harder. It requires the ability to sustain yourself while creating the conditions for others to perform and grow over time.

Looking ahead: Technology will change work. Leadership will shape what comes next.

Yaraye’s perspective becomes particularly relevant as AI and automation reshape the workplace. Technology will change jobs, workflows and the skills people need to remain relevant. For HR and business leaders, the challenge will therefore go beyond adopting new technologies. It will be about helping people and organizations adapt.

Yaraye is optimistic about AI’s potential to enhance human capability, automate routine tasks and allow people to focus more on creativity, judgment and relationships.

But she also draws a clear line:

“Technology can accelerate progress, but it cannot replace trust, leadership, or culture.”

In a world increasingly shaped by digital tools and AI, she believes human connection may become more valuable, not less.

The ability to build trust, inspire people, develop capabilities and create meaningful relationships will remain central to how organizations perform.

This brings her perspective back to a broader question for executives: as technology changes how we work, what should leadership continue to provide that technology cannot?

For Yaraye, the answer is clear. Organizations that succeed in the future will be those that combine innovation with humanity.

“Technology may transform how we work, but leadership will always determine whether people choose to give their best.”

And perhaps that is the broader challenge for the next generation of leaders: not choosing between technology and people, but learning how to make both work together.