Human-Centric Business
I’ve been wanting a phrase to describe our business philosophy. Actually it’s not just our business philosophy, it’s one that I see traces of in many of the great business books including ones written by Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, and Seth Godin. The concept is to build a business around being a better human as much as you build it around generating profit. The phrase that comes to my head to define this is Human-Centric Business.
To me, Human-Centric Business means that as an employer you take on the role of teaching, empowering, and growing your employees. Running a human-centric business means that you don’t just hire employees to do a job, to delegate tasks to, or to run part of your assembly line. You are creating a community with your business and your role as an employer is to be a mentor in business and life. If it’s not one of your strong suits currently, get some “life coaching” (bad term, good profession) to learn how to be more self-aware. Self-awareness generates more awareness of others and this is the single key to becoming an amazing boss.
Human-Centric also means that your business is generating something positive for the world – something with the benefit of the larger population in mind. I recognize this is a gray area but I feel confident that if you find self-awareness the rest will take care of itself.
This is pretty interesting. But practicality and ideal sometimes come in conflict especially in extraordinary times like this economic crisis. I also feel that there is a disproportionate amount of time spent on the agreed need for leadership verses management and for leaders to inspire and nurture. I don’t think the average manager/leader/employer does not want to be nurturing I think although they (the bad boss) do exist, there is also something to be said for the people on the line. If the role as an employer is to be a mentor in business and life then who mentors the employer and how does he /she employ and run a business when there are elements that don’t want to be Mentored. Building a business around being a better human is like building a business around being a better Christian. No one says the one with all the responsibility (boss/leader/manager/employer) is not in business or not human or not Christian.
This thesis seems to say that by having a business and creating a livelihood comes with an overarching responsibility to nurture and take care of the emotional needs of all employees including the financial needs as well as the welfare of the community. How does this work for the start up that intends to do all these things when they can? I don’t see business a as fiefdom where the land owner has responsibility to take care of all those who work the land because there is no loyalty in business among employees in this society. You are creating a community with your business and.
Human-Centric Business requires Human-Centric workers and Human-Centric workers deserve to be in a Human-Centric Business. Until that changes then the expectations being placed on management to be so heavily (not that there isn’t some requirement or expectation) focused on the human side of business and the needs (emotional/financial/spiritual/egos/illnesses/hunger) of each individual is somewhat unrealistic. To me running a business means that you do hire employees to do a job, to delegate tasks to, or to run part of your assembly line. You also create a community with your business and my role as an employer is to be a mentor in business and life. That is human-centric and therefore does not lose the business in the Human-Centric Business equation.