Why I'm NOT suing HBR!

For years now, I've been singing the same song. People perform at their best when and only when they know their leaders care, their work has meaning, and they have the chance to learn, grow, and develop. Now, just a couple of weeks ago, I was flying home from one of the last conferences that I spoke at in 2024, and I was reading the November-December issue of Harvard Business Review. Now, like I said, I don't know how many thousands of times that I shared those same words. But what I was drawn to this article that's titled Why Employees Quit. Imagine my surprise when in one of the first paragraphs I read this. To stick around and keep people giving their best, people need meaningful work, managers and colleagues who value, respect, and trust them, and opportunities to grow, excel, and advance in their careers. For a minute I said, did these guys read The Sensei Leader? Did they just hear me speak or what? Should I sue HBR for plagiarism? Well, obviously I'm not suing anybody. First of all, I mean, as flattering as it would be, I don't think any of these 3 researchers read The Sensei Leader, and I don't think they heard me speak at at any conference last year. And most of all, they're absolutely right. I'm actually grateful for the academic validation. The article here is a must-read. These authors, they're highly credentialed. They really know their stuff. The research is thorough, and their conclusions are absolutely solid. Okay, the next reason I'm not suing anybody, and this should be obvious, is that all this stuff is just common sense, you know? You know this stuff. You felt it. You work harder, you feel more loyalty, and you stay longer with an organization when you know that your leaders care about you, when they connect you with a greater mission that we feel we're part of something bigger than ourselves, and when we have the opportunity, you know, for real opportunities to grow and thrive and learn and advance in our careers. But too often still, leaders allow other priorities to displace these fundamental needs. It's too easy to rely on short-term motivation instead of genuine inspiration to drive results. Motivation's simple— bribe people or scare them. Inspiration requires a little bit more work. It requires rolling up your sleeves. Motivation, don't get me wrong, it works. It's a shortcut. It works up to a certain expectation or to reach certain goals and in the short term, but if you really want to bring out the best of people consistently, you've got to touch their hearts, not just their heads. That's why we emphasize the discipline of inspire. And the third reason I'm not suing anybody is because these ideas aren't mine. They've been around forever. They're not HBR's ideas either. They've been around for ages. Lao Tzu said it beautifully over 2,000 years ago: "A leader is best when the people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, 'We did it ourselves.'" Now, context matters here. Lao Tzu is not talking about absentee leadership. He's not encouraging us to be lazy. Anything but. What he's describing is a culture where leaders ensure that their people have everything they need to succeed.— and this includes support, encouragement, and autonomy. General George Patton, he reinforced this point a long time afterwards when he said, "A general officer who will invariably assume the responsibility for failure, whether he deserves it or not, and invariably give the credit for success to others, whether they deserve it or not, will achieve outstanding success." Now, I learned these principles for myself while I was leading my martial arts organization. You know, through experience I learned that to attract and keep the best people, especially instructors, and inspire their best efforts, I needed to create a caring, nurturing environment. My team had to know that I put their interests first, or at least as high as I put my own, and that they were part of a vision greater than themselves, a vision that included all of us. All of us working together, we're going to create something bigger than any one of us as individuals. And they needed to know that they were encouraged to learn, grow, and reach their full potential, both as instructors and in their own martial arts practice. So just to make it clear, no, I'm not suing HBR. I'm celebrating them. In fact, they're one of my favorite resources, especially when it comes to research-based insights. You know, every leader needs to read this journal on a regular basis. Before we go any further, let me make sure I'm clear on this point. Caring, involved leadership is not a luxury, if it ever was. The age of command and control is over. I hate to admit it, but sometimes it's hard to quantify the upside of human-centric leadership, at least in the short term. Having said that, there, there's plenty of data out there from sources like HBR, Gallup, Wharton, and others that link leadership, human-centric leadership, the kind we're talking about, to employee satisfaction and higher performance. Higher profits if you want to call it that. But direct correlations without what takes— sometimes takes a long time to surface. On the other hand, bad leadership, not paying attention to putting your people first, can be very expensive. Even then though, be careful because some of these things can go hidden for a long time. We've got to actively look for these issues and these problems if we're going to address them. In our workshops, we spend a lot of time trying to identify these problems so we can solve them, hopefully before they become too expensive. Here's a short list: disengagement—sometimes now we call it quiet quitting—revenge quitting, lost and wasted time, increased accident rates, more mistakes, hesitancy to report problems, higher job-related health issues, reputational damage, difficulty recruiting top talent, breakdowns in leadership succession, legal and compliance issues, retraining and and replacement costs. Now, some of these problems are caused by the mistakes we make, but I found that more often, these issues aren't the result of, of something we did, but rather something we didn't do. And it can be really expensive, most of all, when we just don't practice the fundamental disciplines of human-centric leadership. This means when we fail to inspire, we fail to touch people's hearts, instead of just their heads. We fail to empower, make sure that people have everything they need to succeed. And that list can be a lot longer than the list of problems we just talked about. And guide, take the time to share our knowledge, our experience, our wisdom face-to-face. In a workplace, we call it mentoring. Now, the cool thing is the answer is simple. Keep it human. Practice these fundamental disciplines of leadership, embed them in our daily leadership practice. Put people first. So I said simple, not easy. You know, if it's so simple, why is it so hard? Well, first of all, it takes time. I understand that. You have to commit time to develop and practice these disciplines. It requires intentionality and a lot of effort. And yeah, there are a lot of distractions that can get in our way, things that seem at the time more urgent, that seem to be of a higher priority. But there's nothing more important than putting your people first. And when you practice human-centric leadership concepts, consistently, those distractions become less frequent. And why? Because the people you inspire, empower, and guide will solve these problems independently, sometimes before you even know there's a problem in the first place. They'll have the tools, the autonomy, and the trust to excel, and they know you're there for them when they need you, especially to offer support, wisdom, or sometimes just encouragement. And It's like Lao Tzu said a long time ago, "When your work is done, your aim fulfilled, they will say they did it themselves." Look, I understand how these other pressures get in the way. It happens to me too. We have to deal with these problems in real time. But having said that, I think Admiral Grace Hopper said it best when she said, "Management is about things. Leadership is about people." Yes, the management side is important. You've gotta take care of business. But when you put your people first, They'll take care of your business and they'll do it better than you ever imagined. If you haven't already, make sure you go to keepithumannetwork.org and join the network today so you'll be part of this and all the other amazing resources we have for you at the Keep It Human Network.