The Humanity Practice Weekly — Change Your Workplace One Story, One Conversation, One Action at a Time.
If you've been reading these for a while, I appreciate you. Stay with me — the shape is changing, the work isn't. And if it lands, share it with one person who needs it.
I'm building The Humanity Practice in front of you. Every week I'll teach you a practice — and every week I'll go deeper on what I'm learning as I build this thing in real time. The wins. The drops. The things I changed my mind about. Some weeks the teaching leads. Some weeks — like this one — the build does. This is one of those weeks.
Every time you build anything for people — a piece of content, a feedback conversation, a leadership call, a meeting — you should be trying to do four things at once.
It has to be useful. It has to leave room for the other person. It has to be honest about what it costs. And it has to actually sound like you.
Drop one, and the whole thing falls apart.
That's not a content rule. It's how humanity shows up under pressure. Hold all four and you're treating the person on the other end like a human. Drop one and you're treating them like a project, a metric, a problem to manage.
On the surface I thought I was wrestling with content this week. The more I sat with it, the more I realized this isn't a content problem. It's the same thing leaders are doing wrong every day.
The Design Problem
A piece of content has to be useful, leave room for the reader, be honest about what it sells, and sound like the person who wrote it.
But so does feedback. Real feedback has to actually help. It has to leave room for the person on the other end to push back, ask, respond. It has to be honest about what's at stake. And it has to sound like you — not like a script HR sent you.
So does a leadership call. Useful means it actually solves something. Open means the people it affects can push back. Honest means you don't dress up the trade-off as a win. And it has to come from a leader who's accountable to the call, not from a press release.
Same goes for a meeting. A policy rollout. A performance conversation. A culture initiative.
I'm not pretending this is easy. Most of the time you're under pressure to drop one of these. Pick the one you want to keep. The rest will look like the right thing to sacrifice.
They're not. They're how the people on the other end know whether they're being treated like humans or like work.
When culture work fails, it's not because leaders had bad intentions. It's because they dropped one of the four and didn't catch themselves doing it.
What Goes Wrong, Every Time
Drop useful and you get content that performs but doesn't teach. Feedback that scores points but doesn't move anyone. Decisions that look strategic on a slide and solve nothing on a Tuesday.
Drop open and you get one-way communication. Engagement bait. Feedback delivered like a verdict. Town halls where the leaders talk and the room nods.
Drop honest and you get the polished version. Press release voice. Language that protects the company and abandons the person. Compassionate is what we call honesty when we've drained the truth out of it — the person hears nothing, the institution stays comfortable, and we tell ourselves we were being kind. It's also where shame lives, dressed up as accountability.
Drop you and you get the version of leadership that sounds like every other leader. The corporate cadence. The thing nobody remembers because it sounded like nothing.
Which one do you drop the most? You probably already know.
Most cultures aren't failing because leaders have bad values. They're failing because someone is dropping one of the four in nearly every moment that matters — and not noticing.
The Practice
Here's what I'm learning, in real time, watching myself make these choices in front of you:
Practicing humanity isn't picking the right one. It's refusing to drop any of them.
Useful. Open. Honest. You. All four. Every time. That's what it actually means to treat people like people instead of like work.
Here's a real one from my week. I'm building and operating at the same time, and there are days when I'm making fast calls because the work needs them and there isn't time to bring everyone in. Useful is in. Honest is in. You is in. Open — leaving room for everyone's voice — is the one I'm most willing to drop. Every time. And I have to keep catching myself, because the speed feels like leadership. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just me skipping the part that costs me the most time. Sometimes it's me treating the people around me like execution and forgetting they're people.
That's the practice. Not a perfect call. Catching the drop and starting again.
I'm going to get this wrong some weeks. The drops are part of being human. But the practice is naming it and starting again. That's what I'm asking of myself out loud. That's what humanity practice asks of leaders inside organizations every day.
This is also why we say it the way we do — we change the world of work one story, one conversation, one action at a time. That's not a tagline. That's the math.
Anyone can practice humanity in the easy moments. The real practice is what you do when nobody's watching, when the call is hard, when the pressure to drop one is highest.
What's Next
Wednesday, I posted about shame on this platform. The frame in this newsletter is why. Public shaming drops all four at once — useful, open, honest, you, every one of them traded for reach.
➡️ One of them treats people like humans.
➡️ The other treats people like targets.
Practice Note #2 lands next Friday in a new format I've been building. Five sections. Same Friday morning. A five-minute read worth opening every week.
Help me practice what I preach. Tell me how it lands. What's working. What isn't. What you'd want more or less of. DM me on LinkedIn or hit reply if it landed in your inbox.
And if you want a place to start, pick one conversation this week. A piece of feedback. A meeting you're leading. A call you're making. Hold all four. Notice which one you're most willing to sacrifice. That's the one you've been dropping for years. That's where humanity practice begins for you.
See you next Friday.
Rocki