Human dignity forms the foundation of leadership

Pri Notowidigdo, The Amrop Hever Group, Global Executive Search, (e-mail: jakarta@amrophever.com)

"If you lead people or aspire to do so, treat them with respect and fairness. Remember what being a person means." For more than twenty years, my father said this to me. For my father, leadership was about giving people human dignity and social justice.

My father's words underlined how important it was to value people in all aspects of your life. His words have influenced me over the years. I believe his advice applies to our personal as well as professional lives today.

He urged me that in the process of being a person, we must learn to recognize the reality and benefit of differences - ethnic, religious and cultural. We must also learn to enhance human dignity through giving people authority, accountability and responsibility. He went on to highlight the value of learning to enjoy work and productivity. A bit of advice that was difficult was to learn to accept people as they are, build on their abilities and expect extraordinary performance. Finally, a leader must set an example of service to the community around him.

It is not just what we are doing, but what we are beginning in the process that gives us our distinct value and is uniquely human. Take, for example, how we value people at work. We pay people salaries and benefits and then make a monetary standard the only measure of their worth. However, if we truly believe in people and respect their human dignity, should we limit the measurement of human worth to what people are paid? Should we not recognize the contribution they can make or are making in the lives of customers, fellow workers and others?

What potential can people contribute to an organization? They contribute value to customers with the products they produce or services they provide. They contribute value to owners and bosses as their combined effort is worth more than the sum of the efforts of individual participants. They contribute value to each other. In the process, they learn together and experience the satisfaction of accomplishment and advancement and they develop their own self-worth.

Doesn't people's contribution correspond to the "raison d'etre" of an organization? As I see it, the purpose of an organization is to pursue excellence and quality. It is to increase profitably. And underlying all this, it is to help people develop. Through this process, people grow with the organization.

Isn't it also a reality that we all need nurturing? In an organization, it is the responsibility of the leader to see that it happens. A great sense of mission and purpose comes when we are given the opportunity to contribute to one another by serving, teaching and helping. We receive, we give and in the process we understand more of what it means to be somebody.

As leaders act on their belief in people, they listen and learn. They work at making themselves available. Their door is always open. They are out and about, talking and listening to people at all levels of the organization. They should always be willing to do whatever they ask of others. This is a simple yet profound test of the leader.

My father concluded by saying that it's the people side of the equation, not the money side, that makes a difference and keeps building meaningful relationships.

"Will all this work in my environment? Will it be sustainable?" I asked and you may likely also ask. To which he answered to me (and invariably to you), "That's up to you."