If you are an advocate of or a professional tasked with making business a more human experience, one of the key pieces of advice you will hear is, “You must first get executive buy-in.” 

Well, you first need to understand that buy-in is only possible if the executive(s) see the need and want to change; if they don’t, either resign yourself now to being window dressing, an occasional irritant, and necessary only when some board member who cares about such stuff needs information from your CEO, or start looking for another place of employment where the leaders do have some measure of human concern. 

However, if you are not one to give up and want to forge ahead, here is some advice, and I’ll begin with advice I’ve heard given innumerable times: “You have to talk the language of business (i.e., revenue, expenses, profit, and loss).”

ABSOLUTELY NOT! This is not the answer. You see, the language of business is part of the problem. As that language—as well as the thinking behind it—is inwardly focused (i.e., based on a totally self-interested pursuit) and human experience is decidedly outwardly focused (i.e., based on an other-interested pursuit), speaking the inwardly focused “profit first, people second” language only serves to support and validate self-focused behavior. That’s like a football coach talking to their team in the language of baseball. 

I believe, instead, that if you want to bring humans into the conversation, there needs to be more emphasis on getting leaders to see what the life of living, breathing humans really looks like. They need to experience the experience (both customer and employee) and then be confronted with, “Do you like it? Would you pay for this or work here?” The truth speaks loudly, and many times it hurts enough to turn heads. 

And there’s more. Don’t think you can cop out by speaking the customer/employee-survey-data language because it’s just another way of turning people into meaningless numbers, much like money talk. You need to face the hard truth yourself and challenge your leaders to put faces on customers and employees. “This is Thelma; she’s a real customer, she’s Louise’s mom and Joe’s grandmother, and you just experienced what she has to experience. Would you want your mom or grandmom to experience that?” 

I know all of that is a bit of an “in your face” tactic, but sometimes “in your face” is the only way to wake people up. And wake up to the reality of their impact on customers and employees they must, because those are humans no business can survive without.

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