Truly Human Leadership (what's behind it?)

When I give lectures at universities or at master courses, or when I speak at leadership conferences, I always present the model that I feel I have helped to create and that I have been following and applying day after day for sixteen years now: Truly Human Leadership.

We know how it was born, we know how it works and the results it gives, its goal of touching people's lives and making it so that, after a day of work, everyone can go home feeling healthy, motivated and above all satisfied. The model we built also tells us what to do in order to be ethical leaders. In fact, I strongly feel that another way of defining Truly Human Leadership is to call it Ethical Leadership. Applying this model for almost 20 years has allowed us to study and improve our approach, and we can now say we know it thoroughly. After a conference I presented at, a person asked me: "The approach you have is really beautiful and certainly successful, but what’s behind it, what is the principle that drives all this?" I replied using a sentence that Bob has often said to me: "Remember, everyone is someone’s precious child." And this answer was enough. The person thanked me, satisfied.?

Yet, I couldn’t get that question, “what's behind it”, out of my head. There had to be more, because the leadership model that Bob came up with was and is way too powerful. Actually, the answer I gave that person at the conference was just the tip of the iceberg.??In a salvaged fragment of his writings, Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BC - 475 BC) tells us:?"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious"?(fr. 54).?And this is our case-in-point. What is not seen in Truly Human Leadership is what gives it strength and determines its success. But what was this hidden harmony that supported everything? This became food for thought.?

As I said before, it certainly has to do with ethics. In this case, ethics represents a behavior governed by norms that guide people's actions. The term ethics refers to the Greek ?θο?/?θο?, "èthos", behavior, custom, character, habit. From ?θο? comes the adjective ?θικ??, which also acquires the meaning of principles, characteristics of human behavior that affect the community. The term, therefore, rises to the value of what is relevant to ethical doctrine, or it means what is relevant to behavior, and therefore susceptible to evaluation and hence to judgment.

"Characteristics of human behavior that affect the community." If we are speaking about a company, the community becomes the people who belong to it. Ultimately, we are speaking about the conduct or behavior of each of us, which, in the workplace as at home, at school as in all other social environments, influences the lives of other people. So here is the first focal point: the behavior of each of us affecting people's lives. This is ethics. Hence “We measure our success by the way we touch the lives of people” is an ethical principle. In the realm of philosophy, we would say that it is an ethical judgment. Philosophers speak in strange fashion: they consider judgment – that for us is a thing – to be a sentence. Therefore, it is an ethical sentence. If this is the field we are involved in, then we can start digging deeper.

When can we show ethical behavior? All the major philosophers agree on this: we can show ethical behavior if we are at least with another person, not alone, so it is something that exists only?in relation to others. There are, of course, many ways to relate to another person; but which is the best, the humanly best relationship? The one that makes sure that what two people can do together is not just the sum of one plus one, but that there is no limit to what they can achieve together. The answer here is easy, as it is already part of THL:?caring. Because caring is the winning way to relate to others. Because it is inherent in human beings. I often ask if anyone has ever seen a foal coming into the world. Within a short time of its birth, the young horse is already standing on its own legs; it is immediately independent. How long does it take a?human cub?to become independent? Here anthropology helps us out. Ever since the human species began to walk upright, the pelvis, in order to keep a balance, has become narrower and nature has had to find a compromise with the new dimensions to allow birthing cubs, a time estimated in 40 weeks: more time would mean that the little one would grow too much and the head would not pass through. So, our little cub is born but, as we know, they are not independent and will need care for months, even years.?

As children, we live in a world made of care. And this care is so strong that in the first months of life, our?ego?is not yet formed, and we can say that it is replaced by?tu?(you). We are our caregiver, as we live in symbiosis with them. Care becomes an imprinting for us. We grow up, go to school and from then on, we are taught to be individuals; our "I" increasingly takes on form and substance, and we forget that feeling of care. However, it is not erased: it is only dormant. In fact, when someone freely takes care of us, we immediately recognize that sensation, that primordial feeling, we open up and are led to approach and follow the person who is caring of us. We like to find and live with people who care for us and we respond to that care with equal care. Therefore, we act ethically when we behave in a way that touches people's lives and we relate to others by taking care of them.?

Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century philosopher, tells us that the necessary condition to act ethically is freedom. To act ethically, and therefore to take care of people and influence their lives in a positive way through our actions, we need to be free. But which freedom are we talking about? Because there is more than one, or at least more than one type. Let's look into them.?

There is physical freedom: I am not tied to a chain or locked in a cell; I can move. There is psychological freedom: I am in a restaurant, I can choose rice or pasta or meat. There is freedom of opinion, of speech: I can say what I think, express my opinions. These are the three freedoms Kant referred to, and really, if we do not have them, we cannot act ethically, because ethical action requires us to be able to choose. There is, however, another type of freedom, that I would call metaphysic, which is what interests us here. Augustine of Hippo, better known as Saint Augustine (354 AD - 430 AD), describes this and to do so, he introduces the concepts of will and reason. He explains the relationship between our will and our reason or intellect, and how the first has the upper hand over the second. In short, when our will desires something, it asks the intellect: can you find me a good reason why I can do this thing that I want to do? If I wanted to eat an ice cream, my will would??ask my intellect to find a good reason why I should eat that ice cream, for example because it is fresh, delicious, and sweet. And then the action is performed. It also works in the negative sense: when I don't want something, I'll find good reasons not to do it.?

But what is the will that moves everything for Saint Augustine? It is “pondus ad bonum”,?like a weight on an inclined plane which quickly descends towards what is good. Our will always seeks what is good for us. And if this is so, then if I found something or someone that is wholly and always good, I would cling to it without ever breaking from it. For St. Augustine, this complete good is God. But if we move from theology to anthropology, from the divine to the human, what happens? This kind of good does not exist: no person I meet represents it, so no person I meet will capture me. I will always be free to leave, change my direction, disregard them. Hence my lot that I cannot impose myself but only?propose?myself to the other person I meet. And if the person in front of me sees some good for themselves in the way I propose myself, in what I am giving or offering, then their will decides that there is a good reason to follow me and to listen to me and spend time with me, because this is good for them. From this reasoning derives the beautiful corollary of?human dignity. When faced with another person, who is a person like me, I can only propose myself and the other person will have the freedom to choose me, or not, based on my proposal.

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Once again, here we understand how the?caring?relationship is the key through which we can make others choose us; it is the right proposal. The choice is made by the person who listens to us speaking words, but above all it is in the eyes of those who see us doing things, giving examples. We can say that?leadership is in the eye of the beholder. It is not ours, but it is given to us after we have proposed ourselves, and therefore after we have given. Leadership always comes from an act of courage: giving, caring for others, putting oneself at the service of others. But there is more to our Truly Human Leadership, something that is ultimately the engine of this model's success. We move from a one-to-one relationship to several people relating to each other, a group of people who make up the company and who are in relation with the world. And that is the masterstroke.?

Listening to one of Bob's stories several times enlightened my mind; I discovered the engine that drives everything. Bob was participating in a TV interview and the journalist could not resist saying: "It’s the first time in my career that I have ever interview a CEO who for more than two hours has only talked about the people who work in his company and never of the products it manufactures." And Bob replied: "You're wrong. For two hours I've been actually talking about my products."

If people are the products of a company, then what are the products that the company makes – machines, services, spare parts? This is key. What in classical organizations was the?end, the purpose – producing machines, products, services, making profit, generating cash flow using people as a?means?to obtain one's end – here, thanks to Bob's intuition, is overturned.?The end is our people. What the company produces – the machines, the services, the spare parts, the profit, the cash flow – has become the means to allow people to live in a caring, protected environment and to ensure that this also extends beyond the walls of the company, into the world.??We simply reversed the addends, but the outcome has changed enormously.?

How do you think people who up until yesterday were always treated as a means to achieve results will feel if they were considered the measure of success instead? Moreover, if people understand that what the company produces and the results it obtains are the means that allow them to be the end, to live in a caring environment for them and for the people they love, how and how much they will they devote themselves to obtaining those results? As we often say, they will devote their hands, their minds and their hearts, because everything they make is for them. It is as if in our companies we had many small artisan shops dedicated to creating well-made things by putting love into them because love has, in turn, been given to them. The results did and will come. Here we understand the meaning of the phrase: "people and results in harmony".?

However, we can dig a little deeper, because there is something more behind it. Indeed, a company made up of people, a group of people, that unite around a principle that everyone accepts, becomes a?community. A community is a group of people who have embraced a principle valid for everyone, and who for this principle are ready to sacrifice themselves in different ways, without the envy or conflict. There is someone who, for the sake of that principle, is happy to sacrifice themselves more than the next person, but this does not pain them. They do not feel discriminated against or unjustly affected, but are happy because they are donating their contribution to the fulfillment of that end and are carrying on the principle they believe in. This is why during the crisis of 2010, when PCMC was faced with a significant drop in orders and everyone was asked to take a period of three weeks of unpaid vacation in order to ensure that no one should lose their job, not only did everyone accept, but there were those who, being able to do so, took more weeks off, thus allowing people who were in greater difficulty to take fewer weeks off. In communities, we take care of people and are ready to sacrifice ourselves for those around us. The mechanism that moves the whole system seems therefore to be the exchange between the end and the means and the subsequent passage from a group of people to a community of people.?

I was quite satisfied with what I had discovered behind Truly Human Leadership, but one more question still haunted me. What did we implement in order to make it all work out? After all, if there had only been 10-15 of us, more or less what we were when we talked about these concepts in Aspen back in 2005, it would have been easy, but there are 12,000 of us today. Technical knowledge does not help, while competences, soft skills, especially relational ones, emotional ones and leadership above all, yes, those are useful because they are transmitted more quickly and more in depth and in all cultures. I don't want to dwell on that too much here; talking about skills could be the subject of another article, but I do want to say one thing. Stories are told in every culture: teaching passes through storytelling. I will not explain why, it would be too time consuming, but I have found that storytelling is the most powerful method for developing relational and emotional skills. That's why Bob has always told wonderful stories.?