Humans, not resources
Human-first working and how to build a team that will support you through life, in and outside of corporate.
I launched my business this week. It would make sense to talk about what I’m selling, the motivation behind it or the new (and many) challenges I’m facing. Rather, I wanted to write about my people.
Because we are nothing without our community. I think we need to shift our perspective about our human connections at work and the role they play in our lives. Because they bring so much meaning to my days, and I would not be the person I am - professionally and personally - without them.
My business fits into the ‘Portfolio Career’ / solopreneurship category. Meaning, it’s just me and I do a lot of different things under one common theme: designing work for the AI era. Yes, I’m ‘going it alone’ on paper, but in reality, I have a whole ‘team’ of people that I depend on for work.
I’ve met a lot of my community through work. What often began as a joint work assignment together evolved into some deep friendships and close acquaintances that have stood the test of time. I now have a group of people, both locally and internationally, that have sustained me through my career and personal life. They give me advice, emotional support, feedback, coaching and mentorship, even though there are no ‘formal’ working relationships in place.
While everyone will likely have people they get along with at work, make no mistake: these important relationships weren’t built by accident. They have brought so much meaning and joy to my life. And I want others to share in this too.
Putting the human first
Every connection starts with how I approach people at work. I always focus on the human first. Not the project or the client or the company we work for, but I always put the unique, complex person I get to spend hours of my day with first.
Because everyone has lives. They have people that love them, things they are passionate about, and baggage they are carrying. Everyone, over the course of their life experiences grief and heartbreaks to recover from, and major life milestones to celebrate. And since a lot of our adult lives are spent at work, keeping the life stuff separate from the work stuff is impossible.
We all know that work impacts life every day. For most of us, work dictates where we have to be and when, and how we spend the majority of our waking hours… for +40 years (!!!). We all have our ups and downs, and thinking that a ‘colleague’ can just leave that all at the door every workday is crazy. So why don’t we think that life - in all its brutal and beautiful glory - will impact work?
I embrace the whole human that shows up to work with and for me. It’s a delicate balance in the beginning, and hard to navigate when things go off track, but for me, it’s been worth it every time.
So how does one actually show up as ‘human-first’ at work? Let me explain in two ways: a framework and practical examples.
A framework for human-first
Putting the needs and wants of individuals may seem crazy to those who deal with stressful environments and are managing to hard targets. People are paid to be doing a job, so their output should be the thing you care most about, right? What about work-life balance and keeping your personal life personal?
Here’s the thing about human-first working: caring about the people you work with / for and achieving results are not mutually exclusive. If anything, human-first management is your fastest way to get the outcomes you need delivered.
When working with someone new or on a new team, I often draw / talk about this diagram to set the standard about how I work with, for and manage people. I openly and intentionally set expectations about being human-first. No one is forced to share, and are entirely in control about what they feel comfortable with. But the non-negotiable is to be honest about how life is impacting work. You don’t have to share what you’re going through, but I do need to know if it means we will miss a deadline or they can’t show up in the way I expect.
As a manager, this helps you manage both the team and the project. Always knowing where people are at - both personally and professionally - helps you manage workload and redistribute work due to changing capacity and need. It also helps you manage timelines and tough stakeholders, as you get early sight if something might slip due to the shifting needs of the team. It also helps you give air cover to your team, and create the best environment for them.
Because if people feel cared about and supported holistically, they will do better work. They feel safe to ask questions and will ask for help when they need it. They will let you know if they feel like something is sliding, so it’s much easier to manage deadlines and outcomes. Your people will put their hand up to take on more work when they have capacity, especially if another team member isn’t at their best. And they will work really f*cking hard when you need them to - as long as it’s not all the time and every day, but very much when it matters.
But working in a human-first way goes well beyond philosophy. It’s the little things that happen in your day-to-day that really show that you are serious about putting people first.
Practical ways to be human-first at work
I’ve been lucky to have worked for and with a lot of human-first managers and colleagues. I’ve learned a lot along the way, and created my own ways of showing up for people at work. Here are some examples:
Learning everyone’s coffee order and bringing it to them every week.
Scheduling social time (i.e. - coffee chats, lunches) during working hours.
Sitting with a colleague in a super stressful time / under a tight deadline into the evening so they don’t have to face it alone (even if you’re not working on the thing with them).
Flexing HR policies to give the people the time and space they need when facing a life challenge (sickness, grief, caregiving, etc), which includes giving more time or extending the policy to include non-traditional relationships.
Writing handwritten thank you cards often.
Holding space for people’s emotions when they are going through a rough time, even if that’s just the odd bad day or potentially something harder.
Sending flowers for hard times: loss of a loved one, miscarriages, or heartbreaks.
Checking in on someone who is going through those things.
Flexible working, in terms of both location and hours of work, for hobbies, childcare, and other personal commitments.
Celebrating and supporting someone who is changing roles or moving to a new job, even if that makes your immediate life harder.
Making time to get to know someone - their living situation, loves, kids, hobbies, etc. Not in a forced way, but in the small moments between meetings, on coffee breaks and in planned social time.
Understanding what someone needs to give their best work, and how you can support them to grow and develop.
If someone is under-performing, asking about what’s going on outside their life first.
Bringing easy-to-eat food to new parents (if local), or sending baby gifts for new parents afar.
Remembering the things you’ve learned about them and asking about them.
Offering up career advice, coaching and mentoring, regardless of whether you are no longer working on the same team or at the same company.
Coordinating resources and support for team members with accessibility issues, be it physical requirements or neurodivergence.
Celebrating birthdays, marriages, promotions, educational milestones with cards, gifts or event just a meaningful note.
Checking in on life stuff in 1:1s - this varies by individual, but I often ask ‘how is everything for you outside of work’ if someone has kept their personal life details quiet.
Buying a topic-relevant book for someone spontaneously.
Giving people time back after busy periods of lots of overtime.
Know that all of these things have been done for or by me at some point in my career, and it’s made my working relationships so much more meaningful. I will be forever grateful for those managers / mentors / colleagues who gave me a space space and air cover at work during my divorce, who supported my career transitions, who offered endless advice and mentoring in both the good and challenging times.
For some, this may seem like a lot, or potentially feels like you cross the line for working relationships. Sometimes you have to bend and break the rules to make things happen. You have to spend your own time and money occasionally to cover the costs of these things too, which is a privilege not available to many. You have to do what makes you feel comfortable, and don’t have to do everything all at once. It’s taken me years to hone in on my leadership / working style, but it’s only through intentionality and reflection that I’ve been really clear on what works for me and how I want to show up at work.
Work is so much better when played as part of a team. But it’s important to remember boundaries. Especially when dealing with the corporate version of this.
Work family > ‘We’re a family’ corporate BS.
You can’t talk about being human-first work without being clear about what it isn’t.
Companies saying ‘we are a family’ is absolutely not it. I have never seen a big company successfully simultaneously live their ‘values’ and hold their leaders to full account. We’ve all seen a badly behaving leader be tolerated if they are delivering against the bottom line.
And make no mistake, as someone who spent years working in restructuring and M&A, the company doesn’t care about you. They will sell you off or make you redundant if their stock price is suffering. Shareholder value is king, at all costs. Loyalty won’t matter when you’re just a number on a spreadsheet.
This approach is also not about managers and leaders that use ‘but you’re part of the team’ to drive long hours and excess workloads. It’s not the people who share their personal stories as some PowerPoint exercise because corporate comms told them to. I don’t have to define what this looks like outright, because we all can smell inauthenticity a mile away.
But some individuals do deserve our loyalty. And you can be loyal to people without being loyal the company. The people that supported me through tough times, who managed me to do my best work, who showed me they cared about me first before ‘deliverables’… they have my loyalty, then and now, even after the working relationship has formally ended.
And this is how I’ve ended up with a work family. I often call former colleagues my work daughters, work husbands / wives, work big sisters and brothers, etc. I use this language specifically, because they sit in a place that goes well beyond ‘someone I used to work with’ or ‘friend from work’. They hold a specific and meaningful place in my life, but we lack a way to describe it sufficiently, so I had to create my own.
Why this matters now
You didn’t think I would end a Substack without mentioning AI right?
Knowledge work is about to go through a massive transformation. As AI becomes ubiquitous, work will be redesigned. And this change is going to be hard, for some more than others.
But leading in a human-first way is an antidote to the potential chaos that AI brings. If we are to thrive in AI-enabled work, we must remember that our humanity is what sets us apart. Nothing can replace true and genuine human connection.
We often don’t choose the people we work with, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn these relationships into something supportive and connected. And when you spend hours of your day with them, shouldn’t you make the most of that?
Work connections matter. I find so much meaning in work through these human connections. We are all just trying to figure out this life together, and now more than ever, we need community, kindness and care for one another, regardless of our interactions.
And if these recent months taught me anything, it’s that when you treat work colleagues in a human-first way, they will show up for you… even if they don’t have to, and especially when you’re taking a risk and trying something new.
🎉 Now that I’ve launched Human Fluency, here are a few ways I can support you:
60 minute strategy sessions: Do you need advice on AI in your business? Have a sticky AI project challenge that you want a thought partner to work through? Need access to an expert quickly on AI adoption / Augmentation? You can now book an hour with me directly. I’ll send you a detailed form to get some background info on the topic so we can make the most of our time together. Email or feel free to BOOK DIRECTLY.
Fractional Advisory / Consulting: I help clients from tech startups to large scale enterprises design work for the AI era, and bridge AI capabilities and human needs. This may mean setting up your AI Strategy for your small business, working with tech start-ups to help scale and land their product in big companies, or help large enterprises transform their organisation to be AI-enabled.
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