Losing Our Humanity and How to Win It Back
It’s official, our ability to act like human beings is slowly slipping away.
This revelation hit me this week when I received an email from the Harvard Business Review, promoting their new series on Emotional Intelligence in the workplace. Here is their offer from Amazon:
“How to be human at work. HBR’s Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master. The specially priced six-volume set includes, Mindfulness, Resilience, Influence and Persuasion, Authentic Leadership, Happiness, and Empathy.”
In reality, this series is very well done and highly valuable for anyone who works in the areas of leadership, talent and workforce development — but it still scares me.
I keep asking myself, “Did we need to teach this stuff twenty years ago? Didn’t we learn these things through the trial and error of growing up, going to school and entering the workforce?”
It begs the question, are we losing our innate ability to interact with each other as human beings? And if so, what’s causing it?
There are a lot of factors at play here, especially in our modern workforce. We are in an age of great change and flux, with a multi-generational global workforce that relies on technology more and more each day. Sometimes, it feels like as the world gets smaller and smaller, human beings are getting further and further apart.
So, how do we address this unsettling feeling that we’re losing our ability to really connect with each other on a human level? It’s critical that we all come up with some meaningful solutions to this growing chasm in human interaction, as it has a global impact both personally and professionally.
In a keynote speech, How to Redefine the Role of Humanity in the Workplace, Gustavo Razzetti offers up some interesting thoughts to consider:
“As things change and evolve, our ability to learn new things is much more important than what we know today. The same happens with our skillset. Organizations might continually train their employees to adapt to ever-changing demands of new jobs.
Our abilities and mindset will be more critical to achieve success. Adaptability will become the new competitive advantage to thrive in an ever-changing environment.
Careers will be less and less linear. Fluid mobility will take over. Career change will become the new normal. Work must be redesigned around people. We need to move from a “job-centered” workplace to a “People-Centered” one.”
As far a business owners and executives are concerned, the re-engaging on a human level must come from the top down. The Society of Humancentric Leaders has even published a manifesto that outlines leadership behaviors conducive to re-connecting with people while moving business forward:
1. HUMAN CENTRIC LEADERS WANT TO ACHIEVE INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IMPACT BY STRETCHING INTO THEIR BEST SELVES AND BEING OF SERVICE.
2. COLLABORATION IS THE FOUNDATION, FUEL AND GATEWAY TO TOP ORGANISATIONAL RESULTS.
3. EVERYONE IS A LEADER REGARDLESS OF JOB TITLE, RANK OR STATUS.
4. THE POWER IS IN THE SYSTEM, NOT IN ANY ONE INDIVIDUAL.
5. EVERY TEAM HAS A UNIQUE SPIRIT THAT DESERVES TO BE NURTURED, FIRED UP AND HONOURED.
6. WE CAN ALWAYS INFLUENCE OUR ENVIRONMENT. WE REFUSE THE LIE THAT WE HAVE NO AGENCY.
7. WE CAN CREATE THE CONDITIONS TO ALLOW POTENTIAL TO EMERGE IN EVERY MOMENT AND SITUATION.
8. TO BE A LEADER IS TO BE A CHANGE AGENT.
9. TO BE HUMAN CENTRIC IS TO RECOGNISE OUR FUNDAMENTAL NEED FOR TOGETHERNESS AND EVOLUTION.
10. TO BE A HUMAN CENTRIC LEADER IS TO CHOOSE TO COME TOGETHER, AS EMPOWERED CHANGE AGENTS, IN SERVICE OF A HIGHER PURPOSE.
Ultimately, business drivers haven’t changed. It’s still all about value, growth, innovation, etc… Yet it’s still up to us human beings to make it all happen.
If that’s true, then the ongoing challenge will be how we motivate ourselves and each other, optimizing performance in the workplace through mutual understanding and collaboration, while finding real meaning within our own personal lives.
Humanity starts with being humane.
