Why Leaders Should Embrace a Human-Centered Approach to Leadership

First jobs are memorable experiences. I began my career as a management consultant and on my first project my main responsibilities was to work directly with the program management lead for the client. As my manager at the time described to me, my job was to “make sure she had everything she needed to be successful.” 

This amounted to attending a lot of meetings, documenting a lot of statuses, updating powerpoint slides and chasing down people and asking them to do a lot of things. While this felt a bit mundane at times, the woman, Janice, was very nice, had a positive attitude and was generally liked by a lot of her colleagues

A few weeks into the role and I was running into an interesting issue – while I was doing good work for Janice and the client, I was having a hard time fitting in with my team. Even though I worked closely with Janice, my team would ask me to take on extra roles to support often at a moment’s notice (not uncommon by any means) but in particular it seemed like they enjoyed doing this to me since I was the youngest and newest person. 

As a new employee and insecure overachiever this got to me, and often made me walk on eggshells and incredibly nervous around my team. This is about the time when I was introduced to the idea of the Sunday Scaries, and to add the Sunday scaries  to an early Monday morning 330AM wake up call followed by a 3.5 hour flight to Houston and it was a difficult day to say the least.

I felt like I was flailing at work, which as a young 22-year old high-achiever was a hard pill to swallow and I remember having conversations with my parents wondering if I was cut out for this world. My parents encouraged me to stay with it and to keep fighting, as it was still something that was known and that eventually if I persisted it would come. 

The silver lining in all of this was the work I did with Janice – with her, her positive disposition, compassionate and inclusive style of working and ability to see and acknowledge me for who I was made a difference. Going into a meeting with Janice and going into a meeting with my team was like day and night.

One weekend as I was flying back to Boston and boarding the plane, I got a call from my Mom. She told me that My Grandma was sick and in the hospital and she did not have long to live. Before I could process a reaction the flight attendant told me to turn off my phone so the plane could take off. I was in shock, and just sat in my seat in the exit row crying and sobbing the entire flight back to Boston.

That weekend actually was my birthday weekend but it was hard to want to celebrate. As Sunday evening came, I remember my Dad calling me to let me know that my Grandmother had passed away peacefully, and as I started sobbing and grieving on the phone with him I could see my work phone lighting up with a call from my manager. That evening, I spent till midnight fixing a spreadsheet, only to awake 3 hours later to go to the airport.

That Monday was the longest flight, or felt like the longest flight I had ever taken down to Houston. I sat on the plane with a stone face, unable to process my feelings. I honestly couldn’t think straight or process straight and had no idea how I was going to handle the work week.

Eventually, I showed up at the client site and tried to put on a brave face but realized I couldn’t fake it anymore. In a moment of sheer humanity, I told Janice what had happened and how I was feeling. She pulled me aside, told me that she was sorry to hear about my loss and asked if there was anything that she could do. 

We started talking, and after a few minutes she revealed to me that she was raised by a single mother, who loved her dearly but worked very hard so her Grandmother played a huge role in her life and that she was so sad when she lost her Grandmother. She told me to go back to the hotel, and that she would do what she could to manage my workload until I felt better. I immediately said thank you, and broke down in tears.

It took a few more months but eventually things improved significantly for me and I started getting into a groove, showing more confidence in all situations and having the ability to take on more responsibilities, both with Janice and with my direct team. While I always had a good working relationship with the client, 

Janice actually helped me build better relationships with my team by helping me better understand how to talk to them on their own terms. Furthermore, I gained greater confidence, as well as a strong desire to make an impact and help Janice because not only did I enjoy working with her, but I truly respected her and felt that if I could help her succeed then we as a team would succeed as well. 

Work is Human

At the end of the day, businesses solve problems for customers and employees solve problems for businesses – the fundamental thread through all of that is the humanity that exists when we work with others. 

Technology plays an ever increasing role in business and that is only going to increase, but whether you’re at a 1 person company or 100,000 person company business still requires people to have to work with one another. Working in human-centered ways is central to how we as humans connect together. 

Janice epitomized how to work in a human way with others –  The empathy and compassion she showed me, as someone who was struggling to find their place in their first job and on their first project was probably the best thing that someone could do for me in such a vulnerable moment and period of time. 

Whether she realized it or not, Janice gave me the empowerment and confidence to be myself and to take ownership and initiative because I felt that she recognized my value and that she supported me. I trusted her, and eventually had the confidence to work harder, take more ownership of my work, and deliver better results. 

A Human-Centered Approach to Leadership

Janice is a perfect example of someone who has embraced this concept of human centered work. This idea that, above all, when you incorporate empathy, compassion, and inclusion into the ways of working around others it builds trust, creates an environment that empowers and encourages others to work better and more collaboratively with you. The result? Better engagement, creativity and innovation, and ultimately, business outcomes.  

It can be easy to dismiss this idea of being human first as soft, or wishy-washy, but research suggests that employees prioritize characteristics in their managers and leaders. According to a 2019 Workplace Empathy Study, 90 percent of all employees believe empathy is important in the workplace, and eight in ten are willing to leave an employer who isn’t empathetic.

In Decoding leadership: What really matters, management consultancy McKinsey & Company states that only four attributes determine 89% of leadership effectiveness, and while you should think about how each of your employees needs to be successful, the #1 trait according to the study was “Supporting their people.”

Human Centered Leadership is Future Forward

During the first few months of the COVID-19 crises, there were calls from leaders, especially to those in customer facing positions to demonstrate compassion and empathy toward our customers especially to those who were in challenging economic environments. We all smiled and waved to kids in the background or asked to see pictures of dogs and puppies, and who could forget the memes about the trite marketing commercials or taglines of “we’re here for you during this difficult time.” 

While it took a global health crisis for many of us to remember the importance of being human to our fellow co-workers and our customers, there’s no reason to stop embracing these human centered ways of working as we continue in the changing world of work. 

In the future of work where automation has an ever-increasing role, workers will have to adapt and evolve. There is strong reason to believe that workers can stay around and employed by embracing and leaning into the strengths that robots and code cannot do – creativity, innovation, collaboration, and empathy, all facets of human centered work. 

According to the World Economic Forum, of the top fifteen skills cited as being the most important in the run-up to 2025, only two were directly related to technology, sitting in seventh and eighth position respectively, and the rest were strongly linked to c creativity, resilience, and emotional intelligence. 

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to stay in touch with Janice, but more importantly, her lessons of human centered working are embedded into my everyday interactions with my colleagues and teammates. 

Along the way, I’ve embraced a few lessons and practices that may help you embrace and work in more human centered ways:

Demonstrate Curiosity  – Brooke Vuckovic, an adjunct professor of leadership at Kellogg, suggests that one of the best ways for leaders to strengthen their empathy is to use open-ended probes when communicating with their teams. For example, phrases like “Tell me more about that” or “Help me understand” to ensure that they understand an employee’s point of view completely. This not only helps you listen to others to better understand their intentions beyond their first  which demonstrates empathy, but it also allows your employees to feel seen and heard. 

Create space for others to connect – Last year, the Insurance company Cigna published it’s Just this month Cigna published its annual study on Loneliness in the America where 52% of Americans say they feel alone most or all of the time, a jump of 6% in the last year. And 38% say they “do not have close relationships with other people.” As humans, part of why we work is because we are social creatures and want to connect with others. 

We can fight loneliness, burnout, and disengagement making it a priority of finding ways to help your employees connect with one another, through formal or informal mechanisms. Based on your work environment and modes of communication, your choices for how you do this may vary, but the most important thing you can do is to consistently. 

Highlight great behaviors when you see it – Leaders and managers can make human centered work more common by drawing attention to the right behaviors when they are exhibited. For example, when teammates or employees demonstrate qualities like compassion, empathy, or kindness, highlight these in team meetings or virtual communications to let others know that these are the types of behaviors you hope to see.  Bringing attention to it and rewarding it — for instance through incentives and recognition — can allow employees to see its prevalence, turning up the volume on a positive norm.

Take time to celebrate wins and successes – In our always on and continuous moving world, it’s easy to work really hard on a big project, achieve the desired outcome, and move onto the next goal. Furthermore, we often miss what our teammates or other parts of the company are doing because we are laser focused on our own individual work. 

Make sure that you take the time to openly celebrate and communicate the wins and success of your team. Susan David, Harvard Professor and author of Emotional Agility  talks about a phrase from the Swahili language called “sawubona,” which literally translates into “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.” Acknowledging, and “Seeing” others allows them to be human and connected, which in turn makes them feel acknowledged, seen, and appreciated.

As I look at my own career and some of the biggest successes I have had, most of them have come through using human centered ways of working and leading my teammates and colleagues. I can attribute this to the lessons I learned from Janice, as well as my own internal desire to seek the goodness in others. 

As a techno-optimist and believer in the rise of automation and digital transformation, I believe by leaning into our strengths as humans and embracing human centered ways of working we can bring a more human approach to work – we just need to embrace being human centered in how we show up to work.

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