For business leaders, having a harmonious workplace where everyone can perform to their maximum potential is a long-standing ambition. One way to achieve that goal is to build a dignity-first business environment. “Our universal yearning for dignity drives our species and defines us as human beings,” Donna Hicks said in her book, “Leading With Dignity.” “It’s our highest common denominator.”

Despite its importance, “we know so little about it,” Hicks stressed. “Although we are all born with dignity, we are not born knowing how to act in accordance with this truth. Learning how to honor dignity doesn’t come naturally; it needs to be learned.”  

The consequences of overlooking dignity can be significant. “The power behind a violation of our dignity can destroy relationships, break the bonds of trust that are essential to healthy human connections,” Hicks said. 

Accordingly, individuals need to be aware of how to treat themselves and others with dignity in equal measure. “Regardless [if it’s] our personal lives or leading an organization, a key to being successful is dignity consciousness: a deep connection to our inherent value and worth and to the vulnerability that we all share to having our dignity violated.”

What you need to know 

The book highlights 10 elements that honor others’ dignity. “Acceptance of identity” starts with believing “people [are] neither inferior nor superior to you.” Second is “recognition,” where a person is “generous with praise, gives credit to others for their contributions, ideas, and experience.” 

The third element is “acknowledgment,” where a person gives full attention to others. There is also “inclusion,” physical and psychological “safety,” “fairness,” and “independence” by empowering others to act on their behalf.   

The last three “elements of dignity” are “understanding” that what others think about is as important as one’s personal thoughts, giving others the “benefit of the doubt,” and, lastly, “accountability” if one mistakenly violates another’s dignity.

The book also highlights 10 temptations that violate a person’s dignity. The first is “taking the bait,” where one lets others’ bad behavior negatively influence their own. Second is “saving face,” where people lie, blaming others for their mistakes to save their own image.

Thirdly, “depending on false dignity,” which comes from solely relying on others’ praise and approval to feel like they have dignity. There is also “depending on false security,” where people compromise their dignity to connect with others. 

The fourth temptation is “avoiding confrontation,” deliberately assuming the role of an innocent victim in conflicts, resisting feedback, blaming and shaming others, and gossiping and promoting false narratives. 

The book also notes situations where people deny violating others and refuse to apologize for their actions. That is “the most important thing to do to take responsibility for a dignity violation.”

It added, “If we are concerned about only our own value and worth, and we fail to see the dignity of others and the world around us, we run the risk of behaving like narcissists.”

To rectify dignity violations, the book notes, “saying you are sorry is [sometimes] not enough.” It instead recommends “letting the [violated] person know that you will commit to changing your behavior … and remind him or her that you are a work in progress as everyone is.”

The book says that in certain instances, particularly for service companies, employees can extend dignified actions to those they serve rather than to one another. That is evident when, for example, impactful NGOs or customer-service operations suffer persistent internal conflicts that may not be apparent to the outside world. Hicks calls it “mirroring.”

Building dignity

Business leaders can’t solely rely on having role models within an organization to build a dignity-first corporate culture, according to Hicks. “Inspiration doesn’t build a solid foundation for what is needed to produce the kind of change employees are looking for in their leaders and the organizational structure.” 

Instead, she stresses the need for “insight,” where employees “know something about how to develop healthy relationships with people and about what it takes for all of us to grow and flourish.” In other words, “having dignity dictate their interpersonal relations is critical.”

The book said people derive and understand their dignity in three stages. The first is “dependence,” which relates to “infants’ need to have their dignity nurtured as much as their physical needs.” 

The second is “Independence,” where people’s sense of worth depends on more than how others treat them. “We internalize the source of our dignity … recognizing that our sense of value comes from within us.”

The last stage is “interdependence.” According to Hicks, “In this more evolved stage of understanding our inherent value and worth, we recognize that we don’t need others to protect and maintain our dignity.” Nonetheless, the book stresses, we still need others “to help us see those blindspots, and to help us gain an awareness of how we might be violating our own or others’ dignity.”

To move seamlessly and quickly through those three stages, dignity education needs to start in schools, where kids learn what dignity means to them and others, and how to behave to preserve both. 

“Learning about dignity — our own, the dignity of others, and the dignity of the world — brings out the leadership potential in our children. When students recognize that they are good enough, no matter what, their hearts and minds are free to explore the possibility of living lives that have meaning and purpose.”

Dignity leadership

Hicks highlighted six traits a leader needs to “lead with dignity.” The first is to “demonstrate and encourage lifelong learning and development … to realize the untapped potential within [them], and that [their] starting point is one of love and dignity.” 

Accordingly, any company policy should promote lifelong learning for all its staff. The key to ensuring buy-in from employees is to “acknowledge the power of each member” and respect their ideas and efforts to improve the company and world around them. 

The other trait required to lead with dignity is to “set the tone,” Hicks said. “The foundation for this approach is a keen awareness of how vulnerable we are as human beings to having our dignity violated and how such violations create obstacles to learning and productivity.”

In such situations, leaders must lead by example as “employees scrutinize every move they make, taking cues from them to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable in the way they interact and work.” 

Yet, even the most influential role models should be careful when giving direct behavior feedback to their teams. “Emotionally, feedback is risky business,” the book says. “Feedback that feels threatening to our sense of worth can trigger a strong fear response.”

The solution to reduce such sensitivity is to “cultivate trust” by making it culturally acceptable to show vulnerability and not be criticized or ridiculed for doing so. “Trust also helps build employee commitment and increases the reputation of the organization, as well as organizational performance,” the book says. 

The next challenge leaders face in a dignity-first corporate culture is its fragility. “You can see nearly all the elements of dignity … compromised in one decision by the management team,” Hicks says. A “team’s silence and unwillingness to have a dialogue only [makes] it worse.” Meanwhile, rebuilding “trust” becomes increasingly complex every time employees feel their dignity has been violated.  

The book also stresses leaders should “employ empathy,” which comes from “our shared human experiences. Empathy inhibits cruelty toward others … and aggressive behavior.”

Another characteristic of dignity-first leaders is their ability to step back during “intense interactions with others” and ask, “What’s really going on here? What role am I playing in this drama? Are there bigger forces at work … contributing to this failed interaction?”

Hicks stresses the importance of “pushing the pause button and reflecting on our behavior [to] prevent dignity violations to others and ourselves.” However, it “isn’t easy, especially when we are emotionally hijacked during heated discussions.”    

Lastly, is the importance of “taking responsibility for our actions,” which requires leaders to have “a foundation of knowledge about the human experience. Without knowledge of [how you and others think] under circumstances of threat, we are likely to get lured into destructive behavior when we are faced with our own wrongdoing, mistake, or something else that may make us appear weak and incompetent.”

Dignity culture

To build an organization with dignity at its core, Hicks says, “people have to be knowledgeable about what it means to be human and have the courage to act on that knowledge.” Accordingly, leaders must “create a culture of dignity.” Achieving that starts by “implementing a dignity education program for everyone.” 

Leaders also need to “assess how good an organization’s members already are at communicating that they value others, and discovering areas where they need to work on these skills, both interpersonally and at the system level.” 

From those results, leaders would start “addressing the wounds to dignity” that continue impacting the company’s operations and performance. 

That fixing will come by creating a “dignity model,” which comprises two types of “acknowledgment.” The first is “systemic acknowledgment” in cases where top management violated the dignity of lower-ranked staff. The second is “interpersonal acknowledgement” among staff members, small groups, or departments. 

The next step is to “resolve current and future conflicts with dignity,” where management “defends dignity” and “addresses intergroup conflict [via] dignity dialogues.” Next, leaders should write a “dignity pledge” that highlights the organization’s commitment to integrating dignity in all interactions. 

However, Hicks says even if a company has a dignity-first leadership and culture, “there is no guarantee that embracing dignity consciousness will prevent all conflicts and disruptions to our lives and organizations.” Without a guarantee,” she concludes, “we’re likely to see more of the same human suffering that only unconditional acceptance of our inherent value and worth can alleviate.”