When Someone Is Hurting, This Is What Great Leaders Do

Some moments in football are no longer just about football.

I was watching the Holland versus Morocco game when Cody Gakpo scored. And I found myself genuinely moved. Not because of the goal. Because of what he was carrying when he walked onto that pitch.

Just days before, he had lost his unborn son, Elijah. Yet there he was. Playing. And when he scored, everything he had been holding came out in a single moment. He went down to the ground. He pointed to the heavens.

It was grief.

It was love.

It was courage.

It was a tribute.

But what moved me more was what his teammates did next. They came around him immediately. They hugged him. They protected him. No speeches. No perfectly chosen words.

Just presence.

And sometimes, that is exactly what people need.

The Leadership Moment Nobody Trains For

We invest enormous time and money into leadership development. Communication. Strategy. Performance. All of it matters. But there is a moment that appears in every team at some point that no training programme prepares anyone for.

What do you do when someone on your team is hurting?

Most leaders freeze. Not because they do not care, but because they do not know what to do. They default to professionalism as a shield. They stay formal because emotional territory feels uncertain. And in doing so, they miss the most significant leadership moment available to them.

After 30 years working with leaders across 40 countries, the pattern I have seen consistently is this: people rarely remember their leaders for the strategy decks or the performance reviews. They remember the human moments. The moment someone noticed. The moment someone stayed.

Presence Is a Leadership Skill

What Gakpo's teammates demonstrated was not a soft skill. It was the foundation that trust, loyalty, and real team cohesion are built on. And it did not require a single word.

Showing up for someone who is hurting looks like this in practice:

You acknowledge it rather than working around it. You do not try to fix it, because grief is not a problem to be solved. You follow their lead on how much space or connection they need. You stay consistent rather than making one gesture and disappearing. And you protect the dignity of what they share.

That last one matters more than most leaders realise. The way a leader handles a vulnerable moment becomes the measure everyone else quietly uses to decide how much of themselves they are willing to bring to work.

The Scoreline Gets Forgotten. The Moment Does Not.

Holland went out on penalties. Morocco went through. That result is already fading.

But the image of Gakpo's teammates surrounding him, choosing him over the spectacle of the moment, that stays. Because it had nothing to do with football and everything to do with what it means to be human.

We all go through periods where our hearts are heavy and we are still expected to show up, lead, and perform. The question worth sitting with is not how to build a higher-performing team. It is how to be the kind of person that someone in pain would trust to be beside them.

That is where real leadership lives. Not in the highlight reel. In the quiet moments of presence that nobody else even notices.

Final Thoughts

The best leaders I have worked with across three decades are not always the most strategically gifted. They are the ones whose people would follow them anywhere because at some point, when it mattered, they simply showed up.