Could most of life’s troubles begin to melt away if we agreed to honour each other’s dignity (and our own)?

“When you honour somebody’s dignity, you strengthen your own.” - Donna Hicks

Have you come across the wonderful work of Donna Hicks on #dignity? I spent some time with her a group of leaders from across the world today - WOW!

My article ends with a question "is it time to become agents of dignity?". But first... let me share some context.

My network knows I love to support behaviour and culture change. If you’re reading this note, I suspect you're interested in this subject, too.

One of the approaches I take in my practice is to help leaders co-create and activate frameworks of shared values and behavioural expectations (or shared standards and codes of conduct), with their entire organisations, communities or professional groups. I’ve completed 98 such exercises over the years and recently completed an analysis of the frameworks co-created by the most customer-focused and public service driven organisations I’ve worked with.

What did I see?

#Dignity sits at the core of them all!

Indeed, a call to honour people’s dignity seems to be a foundation, a prerequisite if you like, to honour all the other frequently recurring calls for behaviours, standards and values.

So, after a wonderful morning supporting the personal and professional development of leaders from the National Health Service in London, you won’t be surprised to hear that I was thrilled to spend the afternoon in a session with the wisdom of Dr. Donna Hicks and the subject of dignity.

Donna, if didn’t know, is a former Deputy Director at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she remains an associate with a focus on international conflict analysis and resolution.? The ever-modest Paul Barnett had convened leaders from across the globe to reflect on his interview with Donna, and I was invited to help kick-off the event with my reflections.? His Enlightened Enterprise Academy is one to watch.

Donna’s years of work and exploration in dignity offers a profound insight into leadership.?The interview between Paul and Donna is here, it’s worth a hour of your time.?And the more I engage with her work, the more I see a call for leaders to think and act at four levels, possibly five:

1. personal leadership: knowing and honouring one's own dignity,

2. interpersonal leadership: building trust and psychological safety,

3. organisational leadership: embedding dignity into systems and governance, and

4. inter-organisational leadership: leading ecosystems of shared purpose.

The fifth might be a nod for all of us to play a more purposeful and skillful role in the collective leadership of humanity.

Anyway, below is a version of the notes I used to help kick-start our session today - I hope you enjoy them.? More importantly, I hope you watch Paul’s and Donna’s interview, read Donna’s books, and check-out Paul’s movement calling for enlightened leaders.

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1. Personal Leadership: knowing and honouring one's own dignity

Donna’s work, to me, emphasises that at the heart of personal leadership lies self-awareness and self-respect – our dignity is inherent, a core aspect of being human:

“Nobody can take away our dignity... it is in our hands only.”

This realisation has to be foundational for leaders.

Recognising our own intrinsic worth enables us to act authentically, with self-assurance, and to avoid overreactions when facing challenges.

Donna shared an anecdote about Archbishop Desmond Tutu that underscores the resilience required to maintain personal dignity. Even under systemic oppression, as world witnessed in the apartheid regime, no-one could take his dignity from him.

Insight: Leaders must engage in deep self-reflection, recognise their inherent dignity and examine their triggers to avoid perpetuating harm. Practices like mindfulness (Donna talks of “10 deep breaths”) can empower leaders to pause, to create space between stimulus and response. Doing so means we can choose behaviours aligned with dignity, rather than letting undignified behaviours choose us.

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2. Interpersonal Leadership: building trust and psychological safety

Donna’s work, to me, argues that dignity must be the foundation for trust and productive relationships, both personal and professional. Therefore, interpersonal leadership rests and thrives on treating others as inherently valuable, regardless of status or circumstance:

“When you honour somebody’s dignity, you strengthen your own.”

Donna has worked extensively in crisis and conflict situations. ?She recounts asking parties in conflict to pause and reflect on their emotional responses, using dignity as a lens.? This transformed once rigid dialogues into empathetic conversations – it illustrates how acknowledging emotions and humanity can unlock breakthroughs.

She shares stories of workplace psychological safety, too, where the very act of not being seen or heard is an infringement of dignity and when this constantly happens it has a traumatic effect.?

As leaders, Donna calls for us to recognise and address dignity violations:

“80% of people said they didn’t feel safe to speak up when their dignity was violated.”

My takeaway from this is that to truly honour dignity, we need to recognise where people are at in their lives, too. ?A person who has experience dignity violations over and over, in a past organisation, may find the very things that honour dignity in their new employer, like fast and frank feedback, actually create harm. ?We need to meet people where they are.

Insight: Leaders must foster environments where individuals feel seen, heard, and valued. This includes providing feedback with compassion, engaging in “crucial conversations,” and ensuring safety for authentic expression.

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3. Organisational Leadership: embedding dignity into systems and governance

Donna’s work, to me, reminds us that organisations too often perpetuate indignities, not just through interpersonal dynamics but also systemic structures. She emphasises the dual responsibility of leadership: role modelling dignity personally and embedding it institutionally:

“If leaders haven’t integrated dignity into their repertoire, you’ll see toxic work cultures.”

She highlights systemic indignities such as unfair policies and inequitable opportunities, which erode trust and engagement. A leader’s role must, therefore, extend beyond setting examples to actively name and dismantle structural barriers that perpetuate dignity violations, such as punitive policies or inconsistent leadership accountability.? As Donna notes, when dignity becomes central to an organisation’s culture, outcomes improve:

“Employee engagement increases, loyalty grows, and profits rise when people feel they matter.”

This insight in Donn’a work hits me hard.? It calls on leaders to do the work in the first two levels to feed the third.? We all know suffering when we see it, it’s where people are talking about being in pain and feel hurt at work. Donna reminds us that our brains don’t know how to distinguish the difference between a physical assault and a dignity violation, in terms of how they activate systems such as the vagus nerve in the regulation of fight, flight or freeze response.?

So, as leaders we have to say “not on my watch”; we cannot turn a blind eye.? We need to think less about wielding power and more about using our precious power – to both give power away and to stop the so called “professionalisation” of governance and performance management from stripping out the dignity of being human.

Insight: Leaders have an opportunity to embed dignity in governance and policies, and in doing so support the transformation of organisational cultures. This is another call for leaders to align systems with values, ensuring inclusion, fairness, and opportunities for all.

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4. Inter-Organizational leadership: leading ecosystems of shared purpose

Donna’s work in national and international conflicts, to me, illustrates the power of dignity to transcend organisational boundaries. ?She describes how shared humanity, rather than cultural differences, defines conflicts:

“This is about what it means to be a human being.”

Her collaboration with global initiatives like the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Inner Development Goals (IDGs) exemplifies inter-organisational leadership. ?And she’s quick to offer a critique on the lack of progress on SDGs - a lack of true systems thinking and insufficient personal human development:

“If our inner worlds don’t match the needs of our outer world, conflict will persist.”

Working a lot in health and care and local government across the UK, I see a huge need for systems thinking and deep collaboration. So, I’m left wondering if the unifying word we’ve all been looking for is dignity, mixed with systems thinking.

Insight: Inter-organisational leadership requires systems thinking and collaboration that prioritise dignity across ecosystems. Leaders must influence human-centred change by garnering collective wisdom to shape and agree shared purpose, then align their organisations toward shared goals for human flourishing.

A fifth level?

In our group conversation, some people started to challenge us all to think even more widely than this. A fifth level of leadership seemed to emerge - purposeful and skillful participation in the collective leadership of humanity.?

There seemed to be a call for people who consider themselves to be leaders to rise beyond personal, interpersonal, organisational, and inter-organisational spheres to address humanity's shared challenges. ?This is grounded in the universal truth that, as Donna states:

“We all have dignity. It’s our highest common denominator.” ?

Working with this level in mind calls upon us all embrace a planetary mindset whilst working at the other levels, too. Where we embrace collaboration across divides to heal and regenerate the very systems that sustain us. ?Where we prioritise humility and mutual recognition. Where we understand that “when you honour somebody’s dignity, you strengthen your own”, at scale.? This level of leadership, at least in our group call today, seemed to be about creating a legacy of global flourishing, inspired by Donna’a call to:

“treat people the way they want to be treated, and they can become what they’re capable of being.”

I experienced this as a call to unite humanity in the shared purpose of ensuring our collective survival and evolution. Yeah - one of those calls! Haha!

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A summary: Is it time to become agents of dignity?

I believe Donna Hicks’ work implores leaders to embrace dignity as a personal, relational, organisational, and systemic imperative. ?No-one reading my posts will think about leadership as power or control, I’m sure, but this message will put more wind in our sails to build environments where people can flourish at all levels.

To act on this vision, my reflections call for action at four levels, at least, which depend upon each other and interrelate:

1. Personal. Reflect on your triggers and practice self-awareness. Ask yourself, “How do I honour my dignity and the dignity of others daily?”
2. Interpersonal. Commit to creating psychological safety. Start by acknowledging and validating others’ experiences.
3. Organisational. Audit your policies and systems. Identify and then dismantle structural indignities that hinder equity and inclusion.
4. Inter-Organisational. Advocate for dignity in your ecosystem. Don’t turn a blind eye to poor behaviour in your supply chain for example. Join global movements that champion shared humanity.

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Donna reminded me today:

“We must decide if we want to be agents of dignity or perpetrators of indignity.” The choice is ours to make, and our the futures might just depends on it.

Thanks Donna and thanks Paul for your invite to support.

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