Humanistic Leadership and Science

 At a recent presentation on humanistic leadership, I was asked about why I connect humanistic leadership and science so strongly.  Why is science central to the practice of humanistic leadership.

The answer is that in order to do good things, we can't just want to do good. We have to know how to effectively solve our problems. And to do that, we have to a) know what really causes our problem - instead of assuming what the cause is and b) we have to know what really works to solve the real causes of our problem instead of assuming we know.

To know what is real, we need science. 

Without that, we are adrift, or worse, dead.  

We are currently dealing with a labor shortage. What is causing that labor shortage? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that most people's assumptions are driven by their political biases and not by the science, and this goes for people across the spectrum. 

I also know that unless we deal with the real root cause of our problems, and there appear to be many, we not only won't fix the problem, we will probably make the problem worse. If I was tasked with fixing this problem, I would first, look at the research that has been done on what is causing our current problem. #science.

We are also dealing with a pandemic. How does this disease spread, how can we prevent it's spread. There is a tremendous amount of disinformation and misinformation being spread and again, a lot of that is based on political biases. None of us are immune to making assumptions about root causes. A scientific mindset helps us all, override our biases and look for reality that might contradict our beliefs.

The reason science is necessary is because, if you want to run a business and keep your employees safe and productive and not have them die on you or hospitalized - which does cause labor shortages, you need science.  And yes, this is a real problem. My county has told us our trash pickups will be delayed because employees are sick. My county government, literally, no longer has a functioning IT department because of the six staff members, 2 died, and 3 were hospitalized. Only 1 person is in our IT department is able to work. COVID literally wiped out our entire IT department in one week. 

Science is critical to operating a functioning business because functioning businesses require staff to be able to work. And for that - they need to be alive and NOT in the hospital.  We all need to understand the science and not just make assumptions about what is real or not. This doesn't just apply to the topic of covid, but - everything. 

One of the big problems I see locally is that leaders are unhappy with reality so they have declared that they are going to act as IF their preferred reality was true in the hopes that pretending it's true will make it true.  They are acting as IF the pandemic wasn't a reality. This will not work. You can't just wish away an unpleasant reality like a pandemic. You either deal with it constructively using science, or ... we all end up with more dead people, more hospitalized people and more disruption to - everything. 

I understand optimism. I'm a huge fan of optimism. You have to believe you can make things better to even try.  And a big part of that - is having a vision of what you want to see happen. My local government leaders don't lack for vision. They have a great vision. They want the pandemic to be over. So do I. But pretending it's over when it isn't - isn't going to magically make it go away. Pretending it's over when we are currently experiencing exponential growth of a deadly disease and disruptions to our work force as people end up in the hospital and some die, isn't effective leadership. It's insane leadership. It's deadly leadership. True, it's optimistic leadership, but it's not reality based leadership.  To fix our problems with a minimal amount of death and destruction, we need both optimism and SCIENCE! 

We simply can't fix our problems, whatever they are, without science.  We need to accept reality instead of wishing it away.

Good leaders do more than have vision. They plan for reality and science based plans to fix reality so that the outcome they want - actually happens. We ignore reality at our own peril. #Science is central.