As a renowned peak performance speaker, Lubna Samara brings over 25 years of insight from science, spirituality, and business to the world of leadership.
Through her role as Founder & CEO of HigherWill and author of the international bestseller Beyond Potential, she inspires leaders to elevate their impact with purpose and foresight. Her award-winning work creates cultures where people feel valued, energized, and driven to excel.
Lubna’s unique expertise unites visionary leadership with wellbeing, advocating for spiritual intelligence, servant leadership, and purpose-led growth.
Known for signature frameworks like The Fifth Quadrant – Next-Chapter Leadership and The 4 Quadrants of Growth Method™, she guides organisations to transform culture through strategic vision and empathy. Her talks are practical, insightful and fuel high-performance environments.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Lubna Samara reveals how she weaves intention, science, and transformation into the fabric of modern leadership.
Q1. Why should leaders embrace spiritual intelligence as a foundation for purpose and resilience?
Lubna Samara: “Spiritual intelligence is actually quite a simple concept. It’s really about bringing awareness more to our day-to-day life about our values, our deepest values and what is our purpose in life. Not just, well, it’s very important to be aware of what your purpose is in the workplace, but also in the longer term.
“If you’re getting closer to the end of your life and you’re thinking what is it I wish to have done, what is it that I would have liked to accomplish? It’s, you know, what is it that if I didn’t do it, I would have regretted it, right? It’s also about living authentically, being in deeper alignment with yourself and being comfortable with who you are as a person.
“We have four main intelligences. We have the physical intelligence that athletes are very connected to, for instance. We have emotional intelligence, which we now know is very important for the workplace—that people perform better when they are with people who are emotionally intelligent. That’s been coming up in the workplace for the last 20 years.
“We have the cognitive intelligence, which has been the IQ, which has been around for a long time. And spiritual intelligence has been really coming in—people have become a lot more aware of the value of purpose in the workplace, and that’s been coming in for the last, I’d say, eight years more prominently. So that’s really key.
“Now with leadership, one of the knock-on effects of developing spiritual intelligence is that you develop your intuition and foresight, and it gives you amazingly clear vision. That is one thing about spiritual intelligence—it widens your perspective. So imagine navigating in a map that’s really zoomed in and you come across a block. If that was all your perspective, you’re going to really struggle with that blockage. Perhaps you’re not going to want to move on with it; it impacts your resilience.
“But if you could see the bigger picture, if you could see several routes to getting there, it’s not really going to phase you very much. It’s amazing for resilience. It’s very empowering in lots of different ways, but it also helps leaders be much more supportive to their workforce.
“And that’s absolutely key. There was a survey done by Boston Consultancy Group, surveying 200,000 people, and what they found was that the number one most important thing for them in the workplace that motivated them is being validated, being supported, feeling part of a community and feeling included. Believe it or not, the financial side was number eight on the list.
“That tells you a lot. Obviously, once people have a certain level of life—if you’re not in a very good place financially, that may be number one for you—but once you get to a certain point, it’s not the biggest motivator that people think it is.”
Q2. How can leaders balance vision, systems, and people to create lasting impact?
Lubna Samara: “I basically see leadership as having three main aspects to it. One is the vision. I don’t think that’s really negotiable. You really need to have a strong vision and to develop that, to keep on working on it all the time and setting strategies according to that vision.
“I don’t really see task-managing. Well, if you’re talking about senior leadership, they’re going to be looking at systems and processes and from those the tasks will develop. It’s not really negotiable. It’s not the most fun thing to do, but they have to set the systems and processes in place to get everything really ticking properly and filtering down into senior management.
“The third aspect to leadership is about what is now being called servant leadership. It’s about knowing how to bring out the best potential of their people. I call that 360-degree leadership: you’ve got the visionary aspect, you’ve got the people aspect—the human-centred part—and you’ve got the systems and processes.
“I don’t think you need to shift one from the other. It’s about balancing everything together. Without having all three main aspects to leadership, you’re always going to be struggling somewhere.
“You’re either going to be leaving your people behind and they’re going to get really upset because no one is performing properly, or you’re going to be too soft a leader who has a problem holding your people in place, or you’re not going to have a strong direction.
“So having the three together creates a very good balance for everybody.”
Q3. What warning signs reveal that a workplace culture is failing its people?
Lubna Samara: “Well, when you see a lot of your people are spending half their day looking for other jobs, that’s a surefire sign.
“There are three main signs, really. One is absenteeism, when people just don’t turn up to work. The other one is presenteeism, when people turn up to work but they’re not really being productive. And the third aspect is when you have a very low retention rate.
“With absenteeism, if you’re seeing a lot of that, that could indicate people feeling isolated at work. That can happen very easily. Managers need to be really aware of this—to give everybody equal attention. What happens is, and as a coach I’ve had people come to me saying, “My boss hates me.” The boss may not even be aware that they’re passing them over for groups or teams.
“When that person starts to feel that way, they instinctively turn to their colleagues. And their colleagues, rather than supporting them as you would think, are worried about a contagion effect, so they tend to distance themselves. What happens is that people end up waking up in the morning feeling like they’re stepping into a very hostile environment. It gets to that point.
“They don’t turn up to work. They spend a large part of the day looking for other jobs. And it’s actually a very easy problem to fix. Leaders just need to be aware that it’s their responsibility to make sure all their team is engaged and working properly, and if there is an issue with one, to take them aside and talk to them.
“Isolation in the workplace in the US costs them $54 billion a year in poor productivity. In the UK, it costs around £51 billion a year. In the US, a study by McKinsey showed losses of around $200 billion a year from people not turning up to work or not being productive. It’s a massive loss of productivity and of human capital—people are really suffering.
“Nobody wants to go to work just to slouch around. Very few people want that. Most people want to be really excited about their work, and it’s up to the managers to make sure people are being utilised. Human resources are the biggest expenditure for most industries.
“It’s not hard to do that. With a little bit of well-being investment, organisations can see massive returns. For example, a study last year by Deloitte showed that for every £1 spent investing in people’s well-being, businesses got back £4.70. For every £1 invested in changing organisational culture, they yielded £6.30.
“So the return on investment is massive, and it’s surprising that more organisations are not paying attention to this.”
This exclusive interview with Lubna Samara was conducted by Jack Hayes of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
