About Human Centricity
Originally published on 18 March 2014. Republished with minor corrections and added source links; the argument is unchanged.
The rediscovery of humanity
It may be a strange thing to say, but business seems to have rediscovered the importance of people. Ever since Douglas McGregor published The Human Side of Enterprise in 1960, a great many words have been written about people and business. We can point to plenty of organisations where people sit at the core of strategic discussions. But many of them hold an espoused human-centric vision that does not come true in practice.
Human centricity defined
Being human-centric has to do with integrating human characteristics — empathy, fairness, reciprocity, kindness, compassion — into business strategy.
Business people who adopt a human-centric approach always ask three questions:
- What can the people in this organisation accomplish?
- How does this business decision affect them?
- How can the business create value for the people working in it?
So it is about leverage and impact. A true human-centric strategy takes people as its point of departure and looks for a balance between people and results.
A difficult position?
Saying you are human-centric is easy. Making sure people experience it is not. Why?
First, people have different expectations. What feels right to one person may feel wrong to another. Or, as one manager put it to me: you cannot do right by everyone. Second, the subjective nature of personal experience produces a variety of responses. People are less predictable than we would like. So you cannot do right by everyone, and not all of the time.
It is easier for leaders to declare that the business is exclusively results-oriented. You do whatever it takes to get the result. Whatever it takes. That is very clear, and it leaves little room for subjectivity: everything that supports the strategy is right, everything that does not is wrong. We all know where that approach leads. The trouble with it is that the end justifies the means — and in that logic, people are the means.
A trembling balance
A human-centric approach does not treat people as resources. It treats their development and well-being as objectives in their own right. No results without people. No people without results. It is a balance, and a trembling one.
I worked in a company that strove for that balance. And even so, people sometimes told me they did not feel the human-centric approach. That kind of feedback tends to arrive when someone experiences friction: negative feedback, a missed promotion, a dismissal.
Human centricity does not mean everything is rosy and soft. Human characteristics also include unproductive or counterproductive behaviour: low performance, territorialism, disengagement, negative politics, overestimation of one's own potential, feuds. So whenever something jeopardises the success of the collective, something will be done about it. In a human-centric approach the result still matters. The biggest difference is in how you get there.
Confusion
When people tell me human centricity is a farce because they do not personally feel it, that is the result of a confusion.
Human centricity does not mean people will always have an easy life. It does not mean they can always have what they want. It is not an excuse for failing to aim at results, or failing to achieve them. And it does not exclude the fact that difficult decisions sometimes have to be taken. It means you take those decisions with the human side of them in mind. It means you do not take them indifferently, but with full involvement. And it means you execute them in the best possible way: with dignity and respect.
This is comparable to customer orientation. A company that puts the client at the core of its business does not thereby commit to doing anything at any price for that client. Human centricity means creating a partnership with the people who work for the organisation. It is a relationship of giving and taking, a balance of listening and demanding. It is also a matter of making choices while looking for the balance between people and results. And underneath all of it lies the intention of the company's leaders.
What is the value of human centricity?
There are two plausible answers. The first is financial; the second is more philosophical in nature.
Take the return on investment first. Research suggests that companies which treat their people well do better in the long run. Alex Edmans found that a portfolio of the "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" outperformed its benchmarks by roughly 2 to 3.5% a year over a twenty-five-year period. In the shorter term there is higher engagement and productivity. People stay longer. Absenteeism is lower. All of this feeds the overall performance of the company.
But even with the financial arguments in hand, the philosophical answer may matter more. One could say that being human-centric is the only way to do business, because the alternative is worse. It allows a business to add value to someone's life. And to paraphrase the Mishnah: whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved an entire world.
