Why Humanity Is the Most Essential Quality for Leaders Today — Within People
Today’s leaders are finding themselves challenged by major happenings in the world of work and the world at large. From the pandemic to the invasion of Ukraine, rogue supreme courts to economic recession, leaders are being called to stand for their values, protect their people, tighten their belts and juggle uncertainty. Often at the same time. But through all that, we’ve watched one quality of leadership go from nice-to-have to essential: humanity.
In the last two years alone, we’ve seen leaders operate at both ends of the humanity spectrum.
On the positive end, a surge of empathy in the workplace accompanied the pandemic. Suddenly leaders were seeing into people’s homes, and sharing a collective time of fear, uncertainty and grief that had little regard for hierarchy. New levels of trust were built from the rubble of office hours, as leaders watched people get work done remotely, on their own terms. It was as if employees were able to shed their office exoskeletons and return to being humans.
And at the other end, we’ve also watched leaders systematically dehumanising people. A dictator invading a democracy with no care for the human cost. Legislators stripping the LGBTQIA+ community of its rights and dignity. A rogue U.S. Supreme Court jamming the biggest of sticks into the gears of women’s rights. Right down to leaders in the workplace insisting people return to the office because it’s easier to control them there – often stripping away the life-changing flexibility and empowerment that flexibility brought.
Leadership has always had a relationship with power. Old leadership was mostly concerned with taking it (often directly from others), and then hanging on to it. Amassing power and control gets a whole lot easier if you dehumanise the folks you want to take it from. (I have strong feelings about old leadership and why we’re done with it – here’s a rant if you’re interested.)
But human-centred leadership seeks to use a leader’s power as an enabling tool to help others step into their own power. And when more people have access to power, we make progress on creating freer, more equitable workplaces. So it follows that if your goal is to create a freer, more equitable world – even at work – first you need to re-humanise the workplace.
And, you guessed it, that starts with humanising leadership.
8 qualities of human leadership
Four years ago, we asked dozens of leaders who were growing progressive organisations around the world a simple question: what are the qualities needed to lead a purposeful, values-driven organisation where people can love who they are and what they do?
What we heard back surprised us, because the answers weren’t consistent with how leadership is generally understood or enacted. And it reassured us (for the same reason).
Here they are:
