Humony Leadership: You Manage Things. You LEAD People!
I recently wrote an article for American CEO Magazine titled The Need for a Leadership Mindset Change Is Obvious citing several reasons why I created Humony Leadership.
The main point of the article is that our leadership models are broken and filled with obsolete leadership practices.
In the previous post here on The Art of Great Leadership Blog, I advocate the It Is Time to Change Our Mindsets About Leadership Skills. 
These two thought trends culminated in my recent book Humony Leadership: Mindsets, Skills, and Behaviors for Being a Successful People-Centric Leader. Humony is a created word combining Human, Humanity, and Harmony to emphasize the leading of people and the need for leaders to create workplaces of wellbeing and harmony.
One of the foundational elements of Humony Leadership is that managing people is a 1980s construct. It is no longer applicable or relevant in today’s world. It is why people leave bosses, not organizations. As U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Grace Murray Hopper brilliantly stated, “You manage things. You lead people.”
Or, as I coach leaders: you manage things, processes, procedures, polices, and projects. You LEAD people!
Additionally, leaders need to forget about the idea of control. Control went out the window in 2020 with the lockdown-mandated work-from-home environment. This means that leaders have to change how they trust and lead people.
As a side note, forcing people to return to the office so that managers and leaders can feel more in control is a surefire way to ensure that the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting trends continue for a few more quarters.
Sustainable success also requires a mindset and verbiage change from seeing employees as staff, assets, or resources to seeing and understanding them as human beings. And this means increasing respect in the workplace. Leaders need to understand that they must start first by trusting and respecting their team members (and not expecting automatic trust or respect based on titles or a position on an organization chart). After all, you cannot have harmony without trust and respect.
Will this be easy? No.
But it need not be difficult or expensive either.
As John Keynes wrote, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.”
And, as I like to paraphrase my favorite leadership philosopher (Yoda), May the Force of Humony Leadership be with you.
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