Day-to-day dignity-centered leadership of course works in tandem with related organization-wide efforts that affect the employe experience, such as conduct policies, mission and values statements, and codes of conduct, as well as career development initiatives, compensation practices and benefits offerings. Many of these insights are also conceptually related to initiatives around diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias, allyship, discrimination and harassment, and effective communication that many organizations have offered. Much of that is covered in the “Actions for Organizations” section of this resource platform.
Here, however, we are focused specifically on actionable, ongoing behaviors to honor dignity of our colleagues, individually and as part of a team. This detailed compendium of actions and tools – which contains links for further reading – is focused on managers and other leaders, but many of the behaviors and actions here can, of course, be utilized by individual contributors.
While honoring dignity might be an organizational value or fundamental cultural principle, it needs to be activated through specific behaviors. “Most employees would agree in principle that [honoring dignity is among] worthwhile values. They might have very different notions, however, about what these abstract terms mean in practice. Leaders can provide additional guidance by spelling out a handful of expected behaviors consistent with each value. To the extent these guidelines shape behavior across all parts of the organization, they provide a consistent framework for different functions, business units, and teams to coordinate their activities.” (MIT Sloan)
Our actions for change, tools and recommendations help to fill in that framework.