Leaders Need To Treat People As Humans To Build Human-Centered Organization

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” John Quincy Adams

No organization can ever be more human than the humanity the leaders bring to it. The make of an organization is dependent on the kind of leader they have. That is because an organization is the lengthened shadow of the leader. A leader’s level of consciousness impacts and saturates the whole organization.

Every human-centered leader has two major responsibilities:

1. To design a business model that creates, delivers and captures value for the customer. This creates economic value.

2. To design a culture that treats employees as human in order to drive the business model. This creates human value.

Human-Centered Leaders use their culture to drive their business model. There is no way they can effectively optimize their business model when their culture is not great.

Human-Centered leaders design a culture that serves their employees and treat them as humans thereby capturing engagement, performance, and innovation from their employees.

They also design their business model to serve their customers right in order to capture profit and growth as value. It’s the case of whatever you sow, you will also reap.

We most times wonder why leaders don’t follow the values of their organizations. It's quite simple. Organizations are not supposed to have values; leaders should have values. When leaders live by their values and model the right behaviors, they will attract people who have similar values and behaviors.

The way a leader treats people, what he says and does that affects them emotionally, is more important in bringing out the best in them than all the training, intelligence, or experience the leader might have at doing the job. How people feel triggers either the right behavior that results in performance and innovation or behavior that sabotage the entire business.

Leadership is not about telling people what to do and how to behave but modeling certain behaviors. That’s because people do what they see leaders do not what leaders say. When you understand this, you will understand that leadership is stewardship of the lives put in your trust. The way a leader behaves impacts the way their people live.

Human-Centered leaders design culture with humanity stamped in it. Through culture, they take their people to a better place and help them develop and evolve as humans. The greatest legacy of a leader is to develop a culture that brings out the best of the humans entrusted to her.

Culture design must start from the employee experience, while business model design starts with the customer experience. Both culture and business models must focus on the transformation of employees and customers respectively. Culture can be likened to the operating system of your organization which shapes your purpose, while the business model is the hardware. Without the right culture, your business model may not work optimally.

Power To Purpose

Years back business leadership was more like the military; it was all about the power people exercise. Leaders are the ones who do the thinking and give orders, every other person must obey and do exactly what they are told to do. You don’t question leaders at all. Their product was the king.

From Leadership based on power, organizations transitioned to leadership based on profit. Leaders started acting like pirates and mercenaries. People became tools to achieve the numbers. The best leaders are those who help companies produce profits. No one cares how they make a profit as long as they make it happen. They may destroy lives, families, communities, the environment, and the earth in the process; no one cares as long as they make a profit. To compensate for the destruction, they give money to causes as corporate social responsibility. Customers are king.

As people became dissatisfied with this kind of leadership, leaders transitioned into purpose-driven or rather human-centered. Leadership became missionaries and their organization became a vehicle to achieve their purpose. People became the end rather than the means. Every stakeholder from the employee, to the customer, to shareholders, investors, suppliers to the communities gets their humanity elevated.

To achieve the purpose, leaders need an economic engine. The engine needs the right fuel to power it and make it function optimally. Here is how a human-centered organization functions:

Leaders drive culture

Culture drives employee engagement and performance

Employee engagement drives business model

Business Model drives customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction drives company value and business growth

The true measure of a human-centered culture is performance. It should produce people who are willing and ready to serve each other and the customer. Human-centered culture helps enhance employees’ human ingenuity. When they are engaged, they will consistently innovate to help the customer flourish as a human.

The true measure of a business model is a happy customer. It should enhance the ability of the customer to do better and more. The business model provides customers with capabilities that help them unleash their human potential.

Human-Centered leaders think beyond work because the way they behave and treat their people impacts the way their employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and communities live.