Episode 33 - Human-Centered Leadership with Dimple Dhabalia
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My love of human-centered leadership runs deep. It’s at the core of the work that I do, it’s what I present at events, and I completely nerd out over the opportunity to roll it into the culture at organizations in a meaningful and intentional way.
So, I’m sure you can imagine my delight at getting to have a conversation this week focused entirely on that topic!
At the core of human-centered leadership is the idea that every person is empowered and able to show up wholly and completely at work. That we are acknowledging people and their circumstances for what they are because no one leaves pieces of themselves at the door when they step into the office. Leading in this way focuses on vulnerability, and recognizing that everyone has a unique story and set of circumstances and we can’t assume anyone else’s experience.
Dimple Dhabalia, my guest this week, notes during our conversation that one of the struggles we are seeing in the workplace more than ever right now (hence, all the burnout) is people trying to balance wanting to succeed and do a good job while still being a human being dealing with complicated circumstances, like a global pandemic. We get stuck in the push and pull of what’s happening because we are struggling with our identity and what success means to us under different and unpredictable circumstances.
And, to complicate that even more, everyone defines success differently. We all want different things from life and want to go about getting them in different ways.
The importance of meeting people where they are at and giving them agency (the space to figure out what works for them) and autonomy (the ability to make their own decisions as adults) to sort out what success is for them and how it will look in your team or your organization cannot be overemphasized.
Dimple is doing fascinating, cutting-edge work around addressing trauma and well-being in the workplace.
Trauma and stress (and how they are linked) is something we get into quite a bit in our conversation.
There’s so much stigma and shame associated with the idea of trauma, that we tend to discount or separate from our experience of it, especially at work, because we don’t know how to process or deal with it. In fact, most of us don’t even know how to understand it or what the different types of trauma are.
I am grateful to Dimple for sharing her experience and insight into this topic with me (and with you, of course) because I hadn’t really considered the importance of recognizing trauma in the workplace - at least not to the extent that I do now, prior to our conversation.
We need to be comfortable talking about topics like trauma in order to recognize the effects these “taboo” topics have on our teams, our organizations, and the people around us every day.
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To learn more about Dimple Dhabalia you can find her online at https://www.rootsintheclouds.com/.
She is also on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimple-dhabalia-she-her-ab326813b/), Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (@RootsInTheClouds).