Sharon Olivier, Roger Delves, Leah Henderson

Change happens through people. Hardly a revolutionary premise, is it? And yet, when it comes to organizational change, there’s a tendency to deputize people behind the processes they’re running. The latter behave predictably, so we can apply a sense of order to their outcomes much more easily.   

“When I ask people to draw what comes into their mind when they hear the word ‘organization’, they often draw an organigram,” says Sharon Olivier, Professor of Practice in Leadership and Management at Hult International Business School. And she is emphatic: organizations are much more than organigrams. “Organizations are complex ecosystems of relationships. That's how work actually happens – and that's quite messy.”  

It’s part of what’s called a ‘living systems’ view, explains Roger Delves, Professor of Practice in Leadership and Management at Hult International Business School. “How your people feel, interact, and relate to one another is the difference between your organization succeeding and failing.” By contrast, a mechanistic approach frames the organization as a machine – “and people as the resources that are required to make that machine work.”  

Focusing on people and their relationships as the most effective channels for change is the core of our human-centered approach to leadership and organizational development at Hult Ashridge Executive Education. “If you can unleash the passion of your human beings, that's where you can really get movement in the organization,” says Olivier. “That’s what leadership is: a shared process of enabling movement.” 

Nothing highlights the importance of relationships quite like change. Because there’s always a human response to change – and quite often, it’s an emotional one. Many leaders are reluctant to give much airtime to emotions in the workplace (an emotional response in itself, ironically, but that’s one for the therapists). Whether it’s fear, apathy, or resentment, “leaders have got to be able to work at the intimate, relational level to recognize those attitudes and help people to accept change,” says Delves. “It’s very often the difference between change half working and completely working.”  

It goes beyond social niceties. “We could discover that we share a hobby, which we're happy to chat about,” says Delves. “What we're doing is building a relationship at the shared interests level, which is emotionally undemanding and easy to sustain – but it's not creating psychological safety.”  

There’s a lot behind psychological safety, but in its simplest form, it creates space for people to share their emotions. Without it, a leader’s relationships may not be strong enough for them to create high-performing teams.  

This is why experiential learning can be particularly powerful. “We can create an environment with actors where the leader can discover what it’s really like to have a psychologically safe conversation, and how rich and fruitful that can be,” says Delves. “You can also do the reverse – help leaders see how sterile interactions are when you don’t have ‘permission’ to go to that third level.”  

Our ability to influence and persuade is most impactful when there’s psychological safety, so it’s through these relationships that leaders can move someone from being a change rejector to embracing it. “It’s about emotional ownership,” says Olivier. “If you're in a global organization and you want different regions to own a new system or way of thinking, they need to be part of its creation. It’s not always enough to get people excited about your idea.”  

Inspiring excitement without creating ownership is more ‘performative’ leadership – such as that of politicians. “The relationship I might have with an inspirational leader, like a Mandela or a Churchill, is completely different because I experience them from afar,” says Delves.  

By definition, human-centered leadership isn’t something we observe, but something that we feel through our relationships. “It's experienced at the micro level, in the day-to-day lived experience of being in a team,” says Delves. So, whether a leader is human-centered or not can only be determined by the people they have relationships with. 

There’s one key relationship that we haven’t touched on yet – and that’s the relationship a leader has with themselves. “Leadership always starts with the self, because if you can manage your inner world, you're going to be much more powerful in your outer world,” says Olivier. “We don’t realize how powerful we are as leaders.”

She recalls approaching one leader’s closed door, covered with sticky notes which had been annotated by their gloomy team: Do not enter – they’re in a bad mood today. “Leaders are emotionally contagious,” says Olivier. “Learning about how we come across is a fundamental start to good leadership.” This is meta-awareness – the ability to observe oneself.

“It's to our detriment if we aren’t self-aware,” says Delves. He uses an exercise to help leaders gauge how connected they are with themselves. “I ask them to stand up and describe their factory floor or operating theater – whatever their work environment might be. People can do that in minute detail. Then I ask them to describe their values, ambitions, and sense of purpose – and they can't. People often give their values more thought in that 20-minute exercise than they ever have before.”

Delves thinks people should become as familiar with what he calls this inner landscape as they are the external: “The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to acknowledge that you need to commit more time to relational leadership.”

But this is one of the biggest obstacles for the human-centered leader. “For it to work, a leader has to change the way they spend their time. They've got to spend a high percentage – maybe as much as half their time – on relational leadership.” But where does that time come from?

“Relational leadership is important, but it's very rarely urgent,” says Delves. “We're asking leaders to make an attitude shift to believe they will add more value if they are more relational than task-focused.”

That’s much easier when you have the support of your organization. “Leaders have a choice about how they spend their time, but what colors that choice is how they are rewarded,” he says. “In some organizations, they're rewarded for certain behaviors to get results – and if those behaviors are not relational, then the leader has a challenge.”

This is where Delves says he often sees gaps appearing. “Management talks as if it wants a human-centered organization, with relational leaders focusing on creating positive cultures, and then the action is rewarding task-based behavior that supports the organization as a machine.”

This discrepancy can emerge in an inquiry phase, ahead of designing and delivering a leadership or organizational development solution for an organization. “We interview key stakeholders to find out about their world,” says Olivier. “What is their culture like? How hierarchical are they? What is their leadership approach?” Human-centered questions to get to a solution fit for you.

It’s about learning from your own people and leveraging their relationships, all to enable your organization to navigate change as a self-sustaining, adaptive ecosystem – in all its messy glory.