Humane Leadership: Tools to Engage, Empower, and Improve Performance

I offer a new relationship to your work, your team, your leadership, and maybe even to yourself.

In this book, I present a structured method for having performance improvement conversations that honor our shared values, humanity, and desire to produce excellent results. What I offer here, I learned the hard way.

As leaders we face a variety of challenges every day:

• The pressure to meet the organization's goals.

• The need to improve the performance of our all too human team.

• The moral ambiguities of power and our own integrity.


As humans we and our team members face a separate set of challenges:

• We earn our pay by working in often disempowering organizations.

• Our mental work disengages us from our bodies and deepest values.

• We feel the disappointment of our unmet need to work in a collaborative learning culture.


How can we create a culture of performance improvement and leadership that addresses all of the opportunities inherent in these problems?

Could it be that the purpose of work extends beyond mere production of valuable goods and services in exchange for a paycheck?

In his book, Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, a British economist who studied Gandhi's thinking, proposed that work has three purposes:

• Develop our capabilities so we can perform better and contribute more.

• Transcend ourselves through collaboration with others.

• Create goods and services relevant to our mission or plan.


We can learn to better engage, empower and improve the performance of all our team members. Our model also allows us to see when we can create an opening for someone to build their own leadership skills. This is the heart of success and satisfaction as a leader, seeing every moment as a chance to edify someone you care about.

This is a practical, comprehensive guide to performance improvement that provides tools for human development at work, in community and in families.

The approach is simple:

• Collaboratively review performance.

• Identify opportunities for improvement.

• Design experiments to make improvements.

• Evaluate progress and refine experiments.


Of course, the book offers much more than just a simple approach. We introduce a framework in chapter two so anyone can quickly evaluate performance issues and opportunities for improvement. In chapter three we explain how to effectively host a performance review meeting and in chapter four, we explain some of the concepts underlying these methods.

The balance of the book is a primer and reference for the many challenges and opportunities you will discover in working with the humane performance improvement practices you've learned. Chapters five and six examine the wide variety of challenges that we may bring to the performance improvement discussion. Chapters seven through eleven offer deeper understandings and tools to empower improvements in motivation, time and authority, clarity of expectations, and development of capabilities. Chapter twelve looks at the implications of the humane leadership approach for our lives and organizations.

A new framework is the easy part, how can we create real, lasting change in performance levels?

As leaders, we can offer people the experience of choosing their own mental models, habits and experiments to optimize their results. This process lets us each become part of a self-teaching organism- a self-generated, self-refining intelligence.