Leading with Empathy and Understanding: The Power of Applied Humanistic Leadership

The world of leadership is constantly evolving, and the traditional, top-down approach is no longer effective in today's fast-paced, ever-changing business environment. In order to be successful, leaders must be able to adapt and change their style to suit the needs of their team and organization. That's where Applied Humanistic Leadership comes in.

Applied Humanistic Leadership is a leadership style that is based on the principles of humanism. It focuses on the importance of communication, reality-based decision making and the development of soft leadership skills. This style of leadership is all about creating a positive, empowering and collaborative work environment where people can thrive.

One of the key components of Applied Humanistic Leadership is humanistic communication. This means that leaders must be able to communicate effectively and empathetically with their team members. They must be able to understand their needs, concerns, and aspirations, and work to create a culture where everyone feels heard and respected.

Another important aspect of Applied Humanistic Leadership is reality-based decision making. Leaders must be able to make decisions based on the facts and information available to them, rather than relying on assumptions or stereotypes. This means taking the time to understand the situation, analyzing the data and considering the perspectives of others before making a decision.

Finally, Applied Humanistic Leadership is about developing soft leadership skills. This includes things like emotional intelligence, empathy, and self-awareness. Leaders who are able to understand and manage their own emotions and those of others, are more likely to be able to build trust and foster positive relationships with their team members.

If you're looking to improve your leadership skills, consider taking an online course in Applied Humanistic Leadership. At Humanist Learning Systems, we offer a certificate in Applied Humanistic Leadership that covers all of these topics and more. Our course is designed to help you develop the skills you need to become a more effective and compassionate leader. Sign up now and start your journey to becoming a more humanistic leader today.

Take the Course: https://humanistlearning.com/certificate-in-applied-humanistic-leadership/

note: written by Jennifer Hancock with the assistance of ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI

Does Unconscious Bias Training Work?

Will this solution work?  This is the most important question you can ever ask.

One of the benefits of taking a science based approach to harassment training is that you not only can more effectively stop harassment and bullying, you can also improve your team diversity.  Harassment and discrimination suppress diversity. It's part of the mix of why creating diverse yet cohesive work teams is so difficult. 

The Equality and Human Rights Commission published a report on the effectiveness of unconscious bias training - looking at the actual evidence on whether they work or not. https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/research-report-113-unconcious-bais-training-an-assessment-of-the-evidence-for-effectiveness-pdf.pdf

It's worth reading but here are the highlights of the findings. Training can improve awareness of unconscious bias. But, if you want behavioral change – you need to have a behavioral training and finally – there is no difference in learning between online and face to face learning outcomes on this topic.

Regarding whether it was mandatory or voluntary. Mandatory training is more likely to lead to behavioral change AND – team trainings are effective because they help the team self reinforce the learning.

One of the reasons I feel ok offering online training, is because it's as effective as face to face training in this area.  See: Box 8. Comparing methods of delivery of UBT

(This study was rated at MSSM Level 3, ‘moderately rigorous’)
Google (2013) conducted an experiment in the US to evaluate whether their UBT
workshop met the training’s aims of increased awareness and understanding of
unconscious bias and motivation to overcome it. Participants were randomly
allocated to one of three groups: participation in a live workshop, online self-study
video of the workshop, or no UBT (control group). A self-report survey was used to
measure participants’ awareness and understanding of unconscious bias and
motivation to overcome it. Participants’ awareness and understanding of
unconscious bias and motivation to overcome it were significantly higher post-test
compared with pre-test in both online and face-to-face groups, compared with the
control group. Results persisted one month after the workshop. Notably, face-toface
training did not yield stronger effects than online training.

Bias reduction strategies are scientific, evidence based methods for decreasing levels of implicit bias (for example, challenging participants’ unconscious negative thinking by presenting positive counter stereotypic images). In their rapid evidence assessment Cornish and Jones (2013)

identify a range of bias reduction strategies from the scientific research:

● Discounting commonly held stereotypes using positive and counter

stereotypic images.

● Changing how an outgroup member is evaluated and categorised through the

use of evaluative conditioning.

- Here, participants are exposed to repeated pairing of images of

outgroup members with positive images but in a way that disguises the

purpose of the activity from participants.

● Increasing contact between different groups to change the level of threat

evoked in the presence of an outgroup member.

● Encouraging people to take responsibility for their implicit biases by using

cognitive strategies such as implementation intentions (if-then action plans)

and appropriate attributions for outgroup behaviour.

● Encouraging participants to choose valuing diversity freely rather than through

fear of external sanction, or choosing a multicultural, rather than a colourblind,

approach to diversity.

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If you are looking for an online unconcious bias training - I offer one and it can  be bundled with other training programs to help staff not just become aware of their biases, but help them develop positive strategies and skills for dealing with differences so that they can overcome their biases.

https://humanistlearning.com/controlling-our-unconscious-bias/

Evidence Based Practices Reduce Uncertainty

I recently came across a group I really love that is all about evidence based practice in business.  

They are called - Center for Evidence Based Management: https://www.cebma.org/ Professor Rob Briner, who is Professor of Organizational Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, had a presentation on it and here is one of the slides. 

The reason to take an evidence based approach isn't because it will guarantee success, only that it will reduce uncertainty and make us more likely to succeed. YES!!!!!

I say this in my course - Planning for Success. https://humanistlearning.com/video-planning-for-personal-success/ You can't control every variable. All you can do is increase the odds in your favor or against you. And there are ways to increase the odds of success. The main way - is to take a science based approach!

This touches on VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity).  By taking a science based approach, you can reduce uncertainty and ambiguity and also lessen complexity through scientific understanding.  That leaves - volatility, which can be handled philosophically by accepting you can't control everything.

I don't know about you, but I would much rather deal with one problem then four.  Taking a science based approach really does increase your chances of success.

To learn more - take my course and sign up for the CEMBA newsletter. 

Problems with Change Management

There are reasons why people resist change and techniques to help them adjust. Science really can help us be more successful.

I have helped organizations – both non-profit and for profit – through change processes. I’ve helped nonprofit with toxic volunteer employee relations build a thriving volunteer program spanning several departments. I’ve helped redesign business processes for a 1/2 billion dollar company so that our acquisition team could close 8 deals a week instead of the 2 per month we had been doing. And, I’ve got a background in behavioral psychology to understand why people resist change and how to help them overcome it.

Here are 3 reasons why change processes fail and how to fix them.

1. Not understanding that change requires unlearning and unlearning follows a very predictable process.  If we are going to change something, it means that we are doing something now and we want to do it differently. That means giving up the old way and adopting the new way. For a behaviorist – this means – unlearning. All unlearning follows a pattern. Understand what that pattern is and how to trigger it  - and you can more easily control the process.

2. Not understanding that resistance to change doesn’t mean rejection of change.  Resistance to change is instinctual. We are asking people to unlearn habits and habits are hard to change, even for people who want to change. The resistance that occurs isn’t necessarily a rejection of the new processes. It’s really just an instinctual inability to let go of old habits. This manifests as all sorts of cranky behavior by the team, but it’s predicted to occur so there is no reason to get worked up about it.

3. Taking the resistance to change personally. The number of managers I’ve heard blame the employees for not understanding the brilliant ideas behind the change request  is stunning. People insert a LOT of ego into their efforts and take it personally when they experience resistance. Good managers understand how to help employees through that and the ones that succeed – get their egos out of the way and focus on helping their staff cope with the stress that is – change.

Hope this helps. I teach an online course on this. Why is Change so Hard https://humanistlearning.com/change1/ – which discusses the behavioral dynamic playing out and how behaviorists trigger and control the process.

Make Better Decisions

It’s amazing how much more effective decision making is when it is based in reality.

 One of the things I try to do with this blog is teach people how to think better so that they can make better choices.  The three skills I teach are how to combine critical thinking, compassion and personal responsibility into better decision making. Learning HOW to think better is the key to making better choices that you CAN feel confident about your choices.

The nice thing about the Humanist approach – is it is woo free – no magical thinking required. And this is important because reality based decision making is vastly superior to assumption based or fallacy based decision making. You are just going to have to trust me on this one – but I’m pretty sure if someone ever did do a scientific study on this – I’d be proven right.

(Note: I actually did try to find evidence to back up this assumption that reality based decision making is better, but it’s so obvious that if you base your decisions on evidence of what works and what doesn’t, you are going to have a better chance of success. This is so well understood that a search on “study – reality based decision making” turned up pages of studies on HOW to most effectively integrate evidence based decision making in medicine.)

Regardless, on when making a reality based or evidence based decision – you need to do your homework.  You need to find out what is factually true. What works and what doesn’t to solve your problem.

You see, we humanists are very aware that we have cognitive biases and that these biases can throw us off course. And of course, we also make a LOT of assumptions. To counteract these built in defects in our thinking, we have to work hard to challenge our assumptions and doubt whether what we think we know is actually so, so that we become motivated to find out so that we can base our decision making on evidence, to the best of our ability.

And this brings me to the next bit. You can’t ever have perfect information. It doesn't exist. At some point, you do have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge. And, you need to be OK with that. For me, I do this by accepting that I might be wrong and make a note that if I find out I was, to be humble enough to correct my mistakes. Quickly. Because the only thing worse than being wrong, is continuing to be wrong after you find out.

Finally, my rule of thumb with decision making is to do the most good and the least harm possible. Again, reality based decision making requires me to acknowledge that I don’t live in a perfect world.  All I can ever do at any time is what I think is right (Thoreau said that or something very close to that in case you were wondering).

So – to sum up – reality based decision making, coupled with a commitment to do the most good and the least harm with an acknowledgement that you may be totally screwing up but you are going to do the best you can anyway – oddly enough – leads to good confident decision making.  It really does.

Try it – you’ll see. The more humble you are about what you don’t know – the more effective you become at decision making. At least, that’s how it works for me. Someone ought to do a study to see if my personal experience translates into the rest of humanity.