Human-Centred Leadership
I’ve posted on Linkedin about Josh Bersin’s recent interview with Fortune and his description of human-centred HR as a reset. Well it was. 20 years ago.
Today we need something much more powerful and ambition in order to navigate through the end the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and beyond. This is human-centric, or what I call people-centric HR. And more people centricity from leaders in the rest of the business outside HR too.
Human-centered focuses on people, but it still does this from a business perspective. It’s a bit like a sun worshipper paying homage to the sun. Their focus is the sun, but that focus comes from themselves and their own perspective standing on the Earth.
Human-centric actually places people at the centre and sees the business from their perspective. So it’s more like imagining yourself on the sun, feeling the heat of the nuclear reaction, seeing the solar flares shooting out around you, and a small image of the Earth in the vast distance. This is more of what we need today. Because that is more what it’s like as an employee. You’re not tethered to the business, and from your perspective, the business is a bit smaller and a bit further way than we often consider it to be.
So here’s my build on Josh’s chart illustrating the differences between human- and business-centred, with some of my suggestions for how human-centric will be different too.
As I noted in Linkedin, this is about AND, not FROM – To. We still need business and human-centred perspectives too. It’s just that today we need more. We need a reset. And the reset needs to be about human-centricity, ie taking our people’s perspective, not just centering, or focusing on them.
Jon Ingham
HR Strategist, Trainer, Learning Facilitator at the Jon Ingham Strategic HR Academy
