Where has the humanity gone?

Hey there, it’s Karen. So glad you’ve joined the now-weekly newsletter where I share thoughts around how to be more effective leaders and managers. I draw from prior experience as a b-school professor, HR executive, executive coach, CEO, and start-up founder. In all these capacities, I’ve seen how poor leadership can undermine individual and collective success.

In this week’s newsletter, we are talking about the apparent lack of humanity in current-day leadership and why its destroying results and people. And it’s a touchy topic for me. Maybe for you too. Let’s get into it.

How did we come to believe this was ok?

Open TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn or pretty much any social media site these days and you have a front row seat to the dehumanization of leadership.

Recently a video recorded by a woman being fired from Cloudflare went viral for the shocking way in which she was notified of her termination. Without knowing the parties on the call, without a specific reason, and without much compassion, she was terminated in an online meeting that left her without any answers. The company’s CEO went on to call the incident “painful.” Uhmmm, you think?

At least the above story involved a meeting (I guess), this ex-Googler ended eight years at the famed company with a cookie-cutter email.

And we aren’t just botching terminations, WebMD’s CEO recorded a bizarre mandatory return-to-office video. In which, he said things like “we’re getting serious” and showed a stock image of a person with boxer shorts taking a video meeting in their kitchen. While perhaps a little less egregious than the termination examples, it came off as pretty tone-deaf and de-humanizing nonetheless.

Can leaders and companies make these types of decisions? Of course! Companies and their leaders can fire, layoff, mandate return-to-office etc. I take no exception (don’t have enough information) with any of the above decisions themselves and believe that tough calls need to be made inside companies. Goodness knows I’ve made enough myself. The problem is in how these decisions were implemented. When did we become ok with treating people this way?

How to add the human back to leadership

Practicing a human-focused approach to leadership isn’t about ping-pong tables or beer fridges. It’s about:

• Leading with transparency - whenever possible, leaders should share the “why” of major decisions. Better yet, involve people in those decisions as much as you can. Yes, even the ones that are the hardest.

• Leaning into Accountability - leaders need to show up, even when they don’t want to, probably especially when they don’t! They need to take accountability for their decisions and the implications. They don’t have to apologize necessarily, but they do have to be present in the moments that define their teams.

• Taking Action with Good Intent - Even when difficult decisions have to be made, act with good intention. How would you want to receive difficult news, learn of something that isn’t favorable, or experience something challenging? Act the way you’d want someone to act if you were on the receiving end.

It’s not complicated stuff. Most of us learned it in pre-school. It is hard though. It requires courage to bring humanity back into leadership but if we aren’t brave enough, what hope do we have to truly change the world? To ambitious? Ok, then what hope do we have not to go viral for all the wrong reasons?

That’s it for today but one more thing: if someone forwarded you this email and you’d like to sign up for Up and to the Right, we’d love to have you:

Lead on,

Karen