Beyond Human-Centred Organisations – Four Principles of Leadership

Eduardo Nofuentes

 I believe organisations should be the “force for good” and “force for change” that we are struggling to see in the political and economic systems which govern us; and a place where humans can thrive.

When thinking about all this, the term that comes to mind is Human Centred Organisations: Organisations that exist to create solutions to challenges by placing the perspective of the affected humans at the centre of solution creation.

 What are the principles leaders of such organisations should follow? Here are four that I think are important: 

 1.     Purpose over Profit

This is the first principle that comes to my mind. To lead a Human Centred Organisation, purpose must definitely come before profit. Being clear about the purpose of the organisation and putting it at the centre of everything you do is key. 

Purpose is the reason for which something is created or for which something exists; and when it comes to organisations it should not be to make money. Money or profit should be the result of what we do; not the why.  Simon Sinek told us all about this 10 years ago in his book “Start with Why”; and in my opinion, organisations still have not made this shift; they still take decisions based on profits or short-term results rather than based on the reason they were created in the first place.

 Luckily, there are successful organisations that are true to this principle. One of my favourite examples is Shopify, the e-commerce Canadian company. Shopify’s purpose is: “Make commerce better for everyone” and you can really tell it is important for them when the first thing you see when you come out of their lift in their offices in Ottawa is a big neon sign with those words. But when I truly realised they were driven by their purpose and not their profit, was when attending their internal annual conference in 2017 I saw their CEO Tobi Lutke putting a slide in front of the entire staff that said:

The 3 Priorities that exist for Shopify:

1.     Build the best product in the world to make commerce better for everyone

2.     Make profit so we can do more of 1

3.     Never reverse 1 and 2

This sent a clear message to the entire company about what they were there to do. If you are curious about if this approach is successful – from a financial point of view – you can check and compare the share price of Shopify between January 2017 and now. 

2.     Planet over customer and shareholder

There is a beautiful cartoon by Tom Toro where you can see an executive and three kids sitting around a bonfire wearing ragged clothes with an apocalyptical background, where the executive tells the kids: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders”. 

This cartoon encapsulates the problem with unconscious capitalism and its fragility, where short term revenue and profits have driven most of business decisions for decades. 

Thankfully, there are nowadays more companies that realise that focusing on the customer rather than the shareholder will yield better long-term results. We have seen a shift to consumer-led organisations where the decisions are made thinking and taking into consideration what customers and consumers want rather than the quarterly results or the share price daily fluctuations. 

But it is time to do more, it is time to put the planet and humanity over customers too. Businesses need to become a “force for good”, engines that drive positive impact and change in the world. The trend has started, but there is much more we can do. Things like the BCorp movement and certification have helped, but we need more leaders believing in a global economy that looks to a shared and sustainable prosperity for all.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

An organisation and their leaders can’t certainly label themselves as Human Centred unless they are putting the Planet over their Customers and over their Profit. Have you said NO to a customer, a project, a provider because you know they don’t have a positive long-term impact for society? Or have you looked elsewhere?

This was an important topic for the people in our business – Neu21 - and the way we resolved it was by creating an internal team that designed some guidelines to help us decide which organisations we did and did not want to work with. We also created a Total Client Impact framework that shows us if a particular project is going to compromise our stand around this topic. You can download the framework HERE. Any company can create their own guidelines; but if you don’t know where to start, the Bcorp website is a good place. 

3.     People Growth over Business Strategy 

Organisations are formed by humans and before those organisations can have any impact on their customers or society, they need to think about their own people. 

At Neu21 we have been practising, talking and helping other organisations get onboard with the concept of becoming Deliberately Developmental Organisations. A concept that has many sources and “parents” but was perhaps better described by the Robert Keagan book: “An Everyone Culture”.

Deliberately Developmental Organisations or DDO’s believe that the growth and development of their people is even more important than the strategy they develop; reason being is that if people in the organisation grow and develop – they can tackle more complexity and at a faster rate than the market they are in, then they will be able to adapt to any strategy or market changes and conditions.

DDO’s are organised around the deceptively simple but radical conviction: Organisations best prosper when they are deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow and realise their deepest potential. 

In order to achieve this, leaders need to design and implement an organisational culture where support for people’s ongoing growth and development is woven into the daily fabric of working life, and is visible in the company’s regular operations, day-to-day routines, and conversations. 

4.     The Collective over the Individual

In my opinion, some of the societal problems we face right now are born from the culture of individualism that grew very strongly in the 80’s and 90’s – sadly the time I was a boy and a teenager – when messages of glorified self-aggrandisement were bombarded constantly through TV, music and films. 

The same issues, in my mind, are being faced by organisations; where the way we manage, assess performance and reward people is entrenched in that same pattern of thinking of “isolating and highlighting the individual”. 

The leaders and organisations of the future need to understand that it is the collective that achieves success (or failure) and therefore they need to build systems of work that promote and enable this approach. The easiest way to start is by removing individual KPI’s – yes, that’s right; removing individual KPI’s. Make them as broad as you can. If you can have company-wide KPI’s rather than team ones, even better. Executives often complain their teams don’t collaborate, but what can you expect when everyone is battling to achieve personal KPI’s.

The leadership in organisations need to create systems that encourage collaboration and enable the collective thinking. At Neu21 we have been trying to cultivate this mindset since the beginning. Our consultants don’t have individual targets around business development– instead we assess the success collectively; we all know how much money we need to keep growing and we all try to do our best to bring more clients. We don’t have individual targets about how much work we do with clients, we don’t measure how many days each consultant work or how many clients they have – instead we decide collectively who are the best consultants to work with each client based on skills, experience, etc…and because we don’t charge our clients per person, hour or day we can have more than one consultant working together, helping and learning from each other and adding extra value for the client. This approach results in a much more engaged workforce, less individual anxiety and higher collective organisational success. 

 This concept of the collective does not mean we don’t value having individuals with strong self-belief. In fact, one of the keys to achieve this collective mindset is having a group of individuals with low egos and high self-esteem. I believe this year has taught us all that the biggest problems and challenges of society need to be solved together and through the power of the collective. 

Those are my thoughts about the leaders and organisations of the future; do you agree? What are yours? Please let us know your thoughts, and together let’s keep building a better tomorrow for organisations and the world of work.