Humanity — See the Human in the Role
The first point on the compass, and the one I trusted least when I started.
LEADERSHIPAIHUMAN LEADERSHIPLEARNING TO LEAD
Roland Lewis
11/11/20267 min read
Humanity — See the Human in the Role
What are my people experiencing right now?
That’s the question underneath this point on the Compass. Not “what are my people producing?” Not “what are they delivering?” What are they experiencing?
Humanity was the point I believed in least when I started building this model. It felt too soft to stand next to Accountability and Moral Judgement, and I thought it had to earn its place. That says something about the leader I used to be. Earlier in my career I had carefully turned myself into a bit of a robot, with no feelings and a clinical approach to leadership. I had mistaken emotional control for emotional intelligence. Of course Humanity looked soft to me. It has since become the foundation the other five stand on.
Here’s what changed my mind.
An earthling, standing on the ground
I’m a lover of words, and etymology in particular. Tracing a word back to where it came from helps me understand what I’m actually talking about, rather than what I assume I’m talking about. So when I asked why “humanity” deserved a place in a leadership model built for the age of AI, I went looking for the root of the word.
You can trace “human” back to a Proto-Indo-European root, dhghem, meaning earth. An earthling: one who stands on the earth. The word set humans apart from the gods, and grounded who we are in the physical, sensory, embodied world.
That was the moment this point flipped from the weakest part of the model to the strongest.
Think about what that means next to artificial intelligence. AI has an ethereal quality. It isn’t embodied. It has no earth under it and no earth in it. We are connected to this planet and, because of how our brains have evolved, connected to each other in a way AI is not. Follow the word forward through history and care becomes entwined with it: kindness, gentleness, politeness, refinement. To be human isn’t only to belong to the earth. It’s to care for the other earthlings standing on it with you.
That’s not a scientific proof. It’s a leadership idea built on a defensible etymology, and I want to be upfront about the difference. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Humanity is where the whole Compass makes contact with people. It’s where we decide whether we’ll meet the person, or only the role they fill. My mission is to help leaders see the human in the role, and this is the point on the Compass where that work starts.
What the research says: This idea sits on a strong seam of leadership and organisational research. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that whether people voice a concern, admit an error or ask for help is shaped far more by the team’s shared beliefs about how they’ll be treated than by any individual’s comfort or courage (Edmondson, 1999). William Kahn’s research on “psychological presence” describes people bringing their physical, cognitive and emotional selves into a role, or holding parts of themselves back, depending on what the environment makes safe (Kahn, 1990, 1992). Jane Dutton and colleagues describe compassion at work as a process: you have to notice someone’s experience before you can make sense of it and act on it (Dutton, Workman and Hardin, 2014). Noticing comes first, and most of us skip straight past it into problem-solving.
Why your state is contagious
There’s a piece of science I keep coming back to. We are wired to pick up each other’s emotional state. Researchers call it emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson, 1993). It’s why you tend to smile back when someone smiles at you, and why aggression tends to breed aggression. Mirror neurons are often given as the explanation, but that neuroscience is still debated, so I hold it lightly. The effect itself is well established. It doesn’t control you, but it shapes your responsiveness far more than most of us give it credit for.
So as a leader, your state is contagious whether you intend it to be or not.
I worked in an organisation that experienced a sudden, traumatic death. There’s no playbook for that. What people needed wasn’t someone to tell them what to do, how to think or how to fix it. They needed other people to be there with them: sharing the space, physically present, together.
Most of the time it’s nowhere near that dramatic. It looks like taking a breath before you walk into a hard conversation. It looks like naming what’s true instead of pretending you feel nothing: “I feel really uncomfortable. This is a challenging time for us, and I know we need to stay calm, so I’m going to try to bring that calm into the room.” That’s co-regulation. A leader can help regulate the people they lead, but only by being in the room and present, not managing from a distance.
A scenario you might recognise
Picture a team member who’s gone quiet in meetings over the past fortnight. Their output hasn’t dropped. Deadlines are still being met. The role is still being performed, so it would be easy not to notice that anything has changed.
A leader who only sees the role checks the deliverables, sees they’re fine and moves on. A leader practising Humanity notices the pattern (the change in participation, the changed pace, the quieter presence in the room) and separates the observation from the story. Not “they’re not coping” or “they’re not committed”. Just: I’ve noticed you’ve been a bit quieter in our last few catch-ups. I wanted to check in. Is there anything going on I should know about, or anything I can do?
Notice, then ask, without diagnosing on their behalf. Underneath that is a belief I hold firmly: almost everyone acts with positive intentions. We are all just people, trying to do a good job with what we have. Assuming that changes the question you ask.
One of my favourite pieces of feedback came from a team member I once led. Her highlight conversation of the year was when I asked how she felt about working with a particular colleague. It was the first time in her working career anyone had asked her that, and it made her feel valued as a member of the team. One question. That’s how small this can be.
Both sides of the sword
I work with leaders on both sides of a dynamic I think of as two sides of a sword. Some see the role and forget the person. They’re the leader in that scenario who checks the deliverables and moves on, frustrated with people who just don’t get it. Others see the person and lose sight of the role. They notice the quiet team member, then rescue: take the work back, lower the bar, and tell themselves they’re being kind. Both mean well. Both take something from the person in front of them: the chance to be capable. Humanity, done well, holds both. You see the whole person, and you still trust them with the role.
(Adapted from my research review for the Humanity point of the Compass; see Edmondson, 2019; Dutton, Workman and Hardin, 2014.)
None of these are personality types. They’re behaviours, which means they’re learnable at every stage. It also means seniority is no guarantee. I’ve met established leaders still operating at the “isn’t working” end of this, and aspiring leaders already doing it beautifully.
Try this: The Human In The Role Scan
Before your next one-on-one, take ten minutes. Think of one recent interaction where someone’s behaviour surprised, frustrated or concerned you. Write three columns: what you observed (only what a camera could record, no interpretation); what you interpreted from it; and what you don’t know yet.
Then draft one sentence that starts with “I noticed…” and one that starts with “Would it be useful to…?”
That’s the whole exercise. It sounds almost too simple to be useful, and the simplicity is why it works. What gets in the way of Humanity is rarely a lack of care. It’s the speed at which we leap from signal to solution, without checking whether our story about the signal was right. In coaching I call this staying low on the Ladder of Inference: what people say and do is the data, and the story can wait.
Bringing it back to the compass
Humanity doesn’t ask you to be a therapist, and it doesn’t ask you to lower the bar on performance. It asks you to see the whole person before you try to solve anything about their role, and then to hold both. Everything else on this Compass (Understanding, Moral Judgement, Awareness, Accountability and Nurturing Growth) is built on whether you did this first, small, human thing: noticed the person standing in front of you, on the same earth as you, before you noticed the problem they represented.
AI can process a sentiment score. It cannot stand outside with you in the sun before a hard conversation and feel the ground under both your feet. That’s still ours to do.
If something in how you lead is telling you it needs to change, that’s the moment I work with leaders. You can book a free 30-minute conversation at rolandlewiscoaching.com.
References
Dutton, J.E., Workman, K.M. and Hardin, A.E. (2014) ‘Compassion at work’, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, pp. 277–304. doi: 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091221
Edmondson, A.C. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383. doi: 10.2307/2666999
Edmondson, A.C. (2019) The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J.T. and Rapson, R.L. (1993) Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kahn, W.A. (1990) ‘Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work’, Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), pp. 692–724. doi: 10.2307/256287
Kahn, W.A. (1992) ‘To be fully there: Psychological presence at work’, Human Relations, 45(4), pp. 321–349. doi: 10.1177/001872679204500402
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