This is an excerpt from The Simple Leader: Personal and Professional Leadership at the Nexus of Lean and Zen
When we treat people merely as they are, they will remain as they are. When we treat them as if they were what they should be, they will become what they should be.
– Thomas S. Monson
We’re supposedly all human, but sometimes we don’t act that way. Traditional leadership thinking has taught us that it is acceptable, sometimes even expected, for leaders to be harsh, uncaring, and distant. We may even believe that improving the bottom line means making choices such as putting the organization ahead of individuals.
Traditional business accounting skews our perspective to think of people only as costs. Nowhere on a profit and loss statement is the value of employee creativity, knowledge, and experience explicitly stated. This leads managers to make crazy decisions, like shedding thousands of years of experience in order to achieve a couple bucks an hour of labor cost savings.
Being a leader (instead of just a manager) means you should think differently. Human-centric leadership recognizes that your people are human and they should be valued accordingly. By understanding this, you can promote and get the most out the human side of your organization, your team, or even your family.