Humanising Leadership

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review
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Giving your people a sense of meaning is the key to success

The re-humanization of leadership has become one of the most
pressing issues of our times. Two of our biggest clients, a leading
pharmaceutical company and a successful global bank, have both been
on a journey of over two years in doing precisely this, with very tangible
rewards. Re-humanizing leadership is crucial for the 21st-century
enterprise. What are the steps that will take us there?
What went wrong?
http://dialoguereview.com/re-humanizing-leadership/?utm_source=Institute%20of%2... 27/09/2016
Page 2 of 8
Human beings are meaning makers. The higher emotions of purpose,

empathy, and shared meaning are critical as they build the foundations
208
for sustainability. But with strategy becoming the proverbial one-eyed
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into smart decks, spreadsheets, graphs, and statistics. These are useful
complex system of meaning. But, sadly, that is precisely what
Purpose or intention had no place in the models. But greed and selfinterest did.
To re-humanize leadership, we will have to overcome an Industrial Age
worldview that taught us to define ourselves and our organizations as
closed and fragmented black boxes.
This approach did seem to work as long as the world was assumed to
be linear and a closed system. So strategy became the Holy Grail, and
the harbinger of success. And yes, every once in a while we would pay
lip service to our values, except those were not values at all but, at best,
a list of aspirational statements that were unmoored from reality. At
worst they were simply feel-good lines. Purpose had little or no value in
a worldviewthat was defined by input and output. Our contention is
that purpose will have to be the core leadership resource in the 21st
century.
And as the business environment becomes increasingly complex and
ambiguous, there is an even greater need to humanize leadership,
imbuing it with deeper meaning and purpose. Yet so many
organizations continue to position leadership as an instrument for
maximizing efficiency or output, so much so that we have come to
accept that as the norm. Yet volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and
ambiguity (Vuca) makes this approach even more untenable.
The Vuca challenge
Page 3 of 8
As the defining acronym for the 21st century, Vuca conjures up an

unmanageable world in which disruption is the new normal and leaders
208
had better adapt or perish. The fact is, globalization, convergent
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survey by Duke Corporate Education, chief executives declared

one challenge.
The 21st century is challenging our belief in linearity. From global
understandable boxes, are crumbling in front of our eyes. Social media

allows customers to talk to each other, access the same information,
and influence public opinion with a point of view. The customer is no
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longer the passive recipient. We have to come up with an entirely new

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What gets in our way?

The organization trap
The biggest problem we have is that most of our organizations are
simply not equipped to deal with this new reality. We built them on the
The case for curiosity

16 December 2013 - 5
Comments
demand agility, adaptability, and innovation from our employees, but
Dialogue Classic The

Gandhi principle: Five
myths about soft
leadership
we still reward them for status, obedience, and conformity.
1 January 2016 - 4
assumption of a linear world; so we built neat-looking boxes of

departments, functions, hierarchies and reporting lines. Now we
Comments
The cognitive trap
Page 4 of 8
A softer hand for a

hard-wired world
Our brains are simply not adapted for complexity. Nature has prepared
us for immediate danger and reacting instantly, but not for deciphering
208
the weak signals of complex problems. Our brains lack the neural
Shares
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Comments
193
Striking the gender

balance
14 April 2014 - 2
12
Comments
How can leaders

survive and thrive in a
leadership supernova?
2 September 2013 - 2
Comments
YOUR DIALOGUE
Wrong mindset
Which of the following do you thin

poses the greatest risk to global
to act from worn emotional states and learned scripts without thinking.
This mindset is redundant when addressing complex problems, and yet
we see managers repeatedly falling into this trap.
business:
Which of the following do you think
the greatest risk to global business:
Financial instability
Even the brains logic system is fallible. Much slower than the reactive
mindset, the logical mindset is prone to cognitive overload and
depletion, and when that happens, it simply hands back control to the
reactive. The rapid and exponential growth of information is a serious
Political fragility
Environmental threats
International complexity
threat to our capacity for attention, creating attention-deficit: we notice

it in so many senior managers who are emotionally exhausted. Only a
Risk aversion and reluctance to grow
mindful mindset that resonates with purpose can overcome the
Other
limitations of these two mindsets.

Doing the right thing
Vote
In September 1982, several people died in Chicago from taking extra-
View
strength Tylenol, which had been deliberately contaminated with

cyanide by a still-unknown perpetrator. The manufacturers, Johnson &
Johnson (J&J), withdrew every product from every shelf in the US and
stopped production. The contamination did not happen in a company
plant but J&J took complete responsibility for it. The companys chief
executive, James Burke, was asked later how he coped with the difficult
situation of withdrawing products knowing that the share price would
plummet right away. His reply was simple: It was the right thing to do.
The right action, the defining characteristic of good leadership emerges
out of purpose, which asks the question, Why do we exist uniquely in
Page 5 of 8
this world? Leaders who operate effectively in a Vuca world are

merchants of meaning, fluent in navigating complexity.
208
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doing the organization a huge service. Then, one day at a team meeting,
principles of integration. These principles are usually obscure because

it requires a higher cognitive level to see them. Rather than waste
energy and resources in trying to control the differentiation, they focus
their attention on stepping back and discovering the integrating
principle.
Excavating and inquiring into purpose
As the very reason for an organizations existence, purpose defines the
ability to sustain its relationship with the world, allowing the
organization to flourish over time. But most of our organizations either
lack an innate sense of purpose or have forgotten it, and so it needs
excavating.
Leaders need to gather narratives, artifacts, perspectives, and ideas that
reveal latent purpose. This is an oblique approach of listening in to
what people are thinking and feeling rather than asking them to
define the purpose, which is a mistake that many leaders make. Only
then can leaders start building the narrative that will eventually morph
into organizational purpose. It begins by paying attention to what
people say when they are asked the question, Why are we here? and
about examining what they connect to, thereby discovering the artifacts
that come out of those conversations. There are two conversations at
this stage, the first one being the affect conversation (see Figure 1).
This one inquires into the feeling that the organization evokes in its
people. We refer to this conversation as service: the notion here is that
the call to serve is the highest affect that people can feel. The second
Page 6 of 8
one is the meaning conversation, which elicits the story of the

organization and its relevance. This conversation is about the story.
208
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line of sight with purpose, and understanding what they need to do.
deep inquiry (see Figure 2), they have socialized it in multiple settings,
of balancing the frenetic pull of short-term business demands with the

larger and longer-term perspective of the ecosystem. The rehumanizing of leadership dampens the reactive mindset of bias and
biology, and limits the overwhelming of the logical mindset.
The 21st century presents a crucial juncture where leaders must
actively shape the evolution of their organizations through the rehumanization of leadership.
Sudhanshu Palsule is a leading thinker in the fields of leading in

complexity and transformative leadership, and an award-winning
educator and author
Michael Chavez is chief executive of Duke Corporate Education
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Dialogue Review | on 5 September 2016 | 0 Comment

KEEP UP TO DATE WITH

READ THE FULL GRAPHIC VERSION

Giving your people a sense of meaning is the key to success

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

Human beings are meaning makers. The higher emotions of purpose,

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

As the defining acronym for the 21st century, Vuca conjures up an

survey by Duke Corporate Education, chief executives declared

The 21st century is challenging our belief in linearity. From global

understandable boxes, are crumbling in front of our eyes. Social media

longer the passive recipient. We have to come up with an entirely new

way of leading in the 21st century.

What gets in our way?

The case for curiosity

demand agility, adaptability, and innovation from our employees, but

Dialogue Classic The

we still reward them for status, obedience, and conformity.

assumption of a linear world; so we built neat-looking boxes of

The cognitive trap

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

A softer hand for a

Striking the gender

How can leaders

Which of the following do you thin

threat to our capacity for attention, creating attention-deficit: we notice

Risk aversion and reluctance to grow

mindful mindset that resonates with purpose can overcome the

limitations of these two mindsets.

In September 1982, several people died in Chicago from taking extra-

strength Tylenol, which had been deliberately contaminated with

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

this world? Leaders who operate effectively in a Vuca world are

principles of integration. These principles are usually obscure because

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

one is the meaning conversation, which elicits the story of the

of balancing the frenetic pull of short-term business demands with the

Sudhanshu Palsule is a leading thinker in the fields of leading in

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

Nikes next design

Comments are closed.

practical and world-

class journal, which

focuses on key issues

TOP POSTS & PAGES

business leaders and

managers around the

Re-humanizing leadershipDialogue Review

the opinions and

worlds most prolific

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