Put Humans at the Center of Your Business
it’s the shift we’re all calling for
With the Great Resignation afoot, I’ve been talking a lot about the people part of what I do.
No matter which way you slice it, we humans are calling on businesses to become more, well, human. The word I use is human-centered.
But what does that mean? First, you need to look at your business as made up of humans. Your humans (otherwise known as stakeholders) generally include your customers, your team, your funders, your partners, and your community, but you may have others specific to your work.
Then you need to recognize that as a leader, you’re responsible for caring for your company, which means tending to all the relationships it relies on.
Tending to these relationships isn’t all that different from tending to the other human relationships in our lives. We need to listen more than we talk, do what we say we’re going to do, and actually give a crap. There’s more, of course, but these three things are key.
Taking it a step further, for purpose-driven businesses, all of these humans are working together to advance your company’s purpose. This distinction opens up another aspect of human-centeredness: your work isn’t about you, or your company, or your product. It’s about helping someone (a human) do or achieve something.
You start with your customer, the humans you serve. This particular relationship sits at the heart of what you do because without them, you’d have no business.
Then you have your team because without them, nothing happens. This relationship is perhaps less obvious than your customer (for whom we have not only human-centered but customer-centered). Your team members have their own purpose. Do they know how it connects to the company's purpose and how their efforts contribute to your impact? Do you know what they want to achieve?
If you said to yourself, “Geez, I have a lot of questions to ask and a lot of listening to do so I can answer these questions,” you’re probably right. But it’s totally worth it.
Here’s a do list
Define your stakeholders.
Prioritize your stakeholders. You cannot make everyone happy all of the time, which means there will inevitably be trade-offs. Prioritizing your stakeholders helps your team know what to do in those situations.
Listen to your stakeholders. Feedback loops provide a path to understanding their experience and perspective.
Create profiles for your team that recognize the whole human.
Adopt impact storytelling. There’s many ways to do it, but impact stories ground what you’re doing and the impact you’re making—in the words of real humans.
Foster learning. Your ability to not only adapt but thrive over the long term is dependent on how well your people are able to add skills, gain perspective, and absorb knowledge. Moreover, as an organization focused on providing value to others, the more you can adopt a learner’s mindset when approaching your work, the more success you will have in designing solutions that actually make an impact.
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