We’ve been taught to think of work as a thing—a place we go, a list of responsibilities, a structure bound by goals, metrics, and deadlines. Something external to us. Something that demands performance, measures output, and asks us to prove our worth.
But what if that was never the true nature of work to begin with?
At its core, I believe that work has always been about people. Even in the most rigid systems, what’s really happening is people showing up—to serve, to build, to support, to collaborate. Behind every output is a human intention. Behind every metric, a person trying to make something better. Work isn’t just a job or a set of tasks. It’s a deeply human system—rooted in energy, creativity, care, and labor exchanged in service of someone else.
In every corner of our communities, someone is doing the work of supporting someone else. Teachers, social workers, product designers, baristas, strategists, caregivers. All of them working in systems that were meant to connect us—but have too often become disconnected from the people powering them.
Over time, we’ve treated work like a machine—an impersonal engine of productivity. In the process, we’ve lost sight of what gives it life.
And that disconnection is showing up everywhere: in burnout, in misaligned strategies, in broken DEI efforts, in disengaged employees and tech tools that promise efficiency but can’t fix fractured culture.
What’s missing is the very thing work is made of: centering people.
The Great Reveal
The pandemic didn’t cause this crisis of work—it revealed it. It peeled back the curtain on the systems we’d long taken for granted and asked us to look more closely: What is this really for?
In the midst of uncertainty, we remembered. We called frontline workers heroes. We asked each other how we were really doing. We created space for grief and grace. We saw each other’s lives through Zoom squares and realized: the personal was always present—it was just hidden behind professional scripts.
But now, a few years later, many organizations are rushing to forget. To pretend we can go back to a model that asks people to compartmentalize again. To perform productivity while quietly unraveling. To erase what we learned about what makes work actually work.
We can’t go back.
Because the people who do the work are not the same. And the emotional, social, and structural conditions under which we work have changed—fundamentally.
Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Stress levels remain at all-time highs. In the U.S., nearly 60% of nonprofit workers report burnout, with similar trends across sectors. Yet leadership continues to operate from outdated assumptions—treating burnout as personal failure, culture as a vibe, and performance as the only metric that matters.
We are in a crisis of meaning. And it’s time to name it.
Why I’m Writing This Now
I’ve spent the better part of my life inside organizations—helping them lead better, serve better, and build cultures that match their missions. I’ve coached leaders through crises, facilitated retreats meant to bring people back together, and redesigned systems meant to serve. And over and over again, I’ve come to one conclusion:
We’ve made work far more complicated than it needs to be. At its core, work has always been one thing—people serving people. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that.
I’m writing this now because I believe we’re at a breaking point—and a beginning. The pandemic didn’t just expose the cracks in how we work. It widened them. Burnout has become the norm. Trust is thin. Culture work feels cosmetic. And leaders—many of whom genuinely care—are stuck between the urgency to deliver and the ache of not knowing how to hold their people. We’ve optimized ourselves into disconnection. We’ve professionalized our way out of humanity. And still, we wonder why people are leaving, why culture doesn’t stick, or why strategy stalls.
The answer isn’t more tools. It’s a total reorientation.
This matters to me not just as a consultant, but as a person. A person who’s navigated harm in organizations that claimed to do good. A person who’s worked beside leaders trying to build something different, but feeling swallowed by the very systems they inherited. A person who believes that our workplaces should reflect the kind of world we’re trying to build—not just when it’s convenient, but especially when it’s hard.
We don’t need more values statements. We need to remember what we’re here to do. Work isn’t just a task list or a ladder or a budget. It’s a container where people show up every day hoping to matter. To lead, to grow, to contribute, to belong. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s the foundation. If we get that part wrong, no strategy, no structure, no rebrand will fix it.
I want to offer a different starting point. To share what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, and what I believe we all—leaders, staff, board members, consultants—need to commit to if we want to build organizations that actually serve. Not just externally. But from the inside out.
From Productivity to Purpose
What if the problem isn’t that people aren’t working hard enough?
What if the problem is that we’re building systems that forget why the work exists in the first place?
We’ve wrapped so many layers around work—layers of policy, productivity software, performance reviews, outdated leadership models—that we’ve lost sight of the core human equation: someone is doing this work in service of someone else.
Across every sector—nonprofits, hospitals, corporations, government agencies, small businesses—there’s a human thread running through it all. In every corner of our communities, someone is pouring their energy, creativity, care, and labor into something meant to serve someone else. Teachers. Social workers. Product designers. Project managers. Baristas. Cleaners. Strategists. Customer support reps. Technologists. Caregivers. Visionaries. Helpers.
Work is a deeply human system.
But over time, we’ve treated it like a machine. Something separate. A structure.
And here’s the truth: we don’t necessarily need less structure; structure in itself is not inherently bad. But when it leads to practices that are people-centered instead of people-considered, we might be missing the mark.
We don’t need to abandon deliverables, strategy documents, or dashboards.
We need to start asking first: are these tools in service of the people doing the work, and the people the work is meant to serve?
The Consequences of Forgetting People
When people are treated as outputs rather than origins, everything suffers.
Strategy gets stuck in PowerPoint decks instead of being lived.
Culture becomes an aspirational poster on the wall instead of a practice in motion.
Accountability turns into blame instead of shared ownership.
We’ve built entire ecosystems and structures around performance, but not presence.
This has led to organizations that look functional on paper but feel fractured in practice. These aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of the same root issue: our systems have become disconnected from the people they’re meant to serve.
We’re missing a people-centered lens. If we don’t rebuild our systems to reflect that truth, they will continue to quietly fail—no matter how well they perform on the surface.
How Work Lost Its Way—and How We Can Find Our Way Back
Before economies, corporations, or formal systems, work was simply what people did to live and contribute: gather food, raise children, build homes, care for the sick, pass on knowledge. It was communal, relational, and purpose-driven by necessity. Every role had value because every life had interdependence.
In Indigenous communities and early agrarian societies, there was no distinction between “work” and “life”—they were part of the same social and spiritual fabric.
There were no “organizations” yet—but there were shared responsibilities that formed a kind of social contract: We survive and thrive by caring for each other.
As agriculture gave way to cities, trade, and specialization (think: scribes, merchants, builders), people began organizing labor. Ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome built hierarchical structures to manage increasingly complex work: food distribution, road building, military operations.
This is when we first saw centralized leadership, recordkeeping, and roles not rooted in family or survival, but assigned based on system needs.
Organizations became ways to coordinate people toward a shared goal—but the larger the system got, the more it relied on control and standardization to function.
The 18th and 19th centuries brought mechanized production: factories, time clocks, productivity metrics. Efficiency became the defining value. To scale fast, companies broke work into units—tasks, roles, departments—separating workers from decision-making and, often, from one another.
In this era, the phrase “human resources” was born—literally describing people as inputs into a system.
This shift wasn’t inherently evil—it was a response to population growth, global markets, and the promise of prosperity. But it also planted the seeds of disconnection:
- Between workers and purpose
- Between leaders and lived experience
- Between values and velocity
And as industry scaled, so did the myth that work and humanity are separate. Even as philanthropy and nonprofits emerged to serve people, they often adopted the same structures built for production: hierarchy, efficiency metrics, performance over people. The result?
- Orgs doing mission-driven work while overworking their staff
- DEI initiatives layered onto misaligned systems
- Communities being served—but staff being silenced or burned out
In trying to be “professional,” we became performative.
We told ourselves these tradeoffs were necessary to “make impact.” But the truth? We built systems that prioritized funding reports over frontline wisdom, and strategy decks over team wellbeing.
The pandemic pulled the curtain all the way back.
Suddenly, work entered our homes. Exhaustion caught up with mission. And teams who once prided themselves on performance now found themselves asking: Can we even hold onto our staff? Can we sustain our purpose without imploding?
The answer wasn’t more systems.
It was (and is) an opportunity to return to what work was always meant to be.
What Efforts Have Been Made to Shift Work Back to People?
Since the mid-20th century, efforts have surfaced to humanize work—to reintegrate purpose, participation, and personhood into how organizations function.
In the 1950s and ’60s, organizational theorists like Douglas McGregor challenged the dominant “Theory X” management view that employees were inherently lazy and needed supervision. His “Theory Y” suggested that people are naturally motivated and capable of self-direction⁴. Later, concepts like participatory management, self-managing teams, and servant leadership entered the mainstream.
By the late 20th century, workplace culture became a field of its own. Peter Drucker emphasized that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Google’s Project Aristotle (2015) found that psychological safety was the most important factor in high-performing teams⁵. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aimed to disrupt extractive dynamics and broaden who organizations were built to serve—not just externally, but internally as well.
In parallel, scholars and institutions tried to reframe business’s very purpose. In 2019, the U.S. Business Roundtable issued a now-famous statement redefining the purpose of a corporation as delivering value to all stakeholders—not just shareholders⁶. This was widely seen as a public acknowledgment that the shareholder-first model, inherited from mid-century Milton Friedman economics, was failing workers and communities alike.
Despite sincere attempts, many people-centered efforts stall, backslide, or never take hold. Why?
First, most organizations are still using systems built for control and performance. Performance reviews, hierarchical org charts, and KPI-based strategies are rarely redesigned—even as organizations claim to care about people. This leads to a dissonance where human-centered values are spoken, but machine-era structures remain.
Second, people-centered work is often reduced to a program, not a practice. DEI, for instance, is often siloed—handled by one person or team, rather than embedded into hiring, compensation, or decision-making. Culture becomes the HR team’s job. Belonging becomes a retreat, not a redesign.
Third, measurement logic keeps reasserting itself. Even leaders who want to invest in people often ask: “But how will we prove it worked?” They want belonging to show up in dashboards. They want leadership development to show ROI in quarterly terms. The result is that care gets evaluated with performance metrics—and thus reverts back to performance culture.
Finally, organizations fear what people-centered work might cost. Not just financially—but in power redistribution, time, and the discomfort of letting go. When you ask what it means to serve people well, the answers often include slowing down, changing how decisions are made, or acknowledging harm. Many organizations aren’t ready to face that truth, especially in times of resource scarcity.
What Do We Need to Do Now?
We don’t need more toolkits. We need a reorientation.
We need to remember that organizations are human inventions—built to help us do together what we could not do alone. If they’re no longer doing that, we don’t need to fix them. We need to redesign them.
That redesign starts with a shift in questions:
- From “How do we get people to perform?”
To “How do we help people feel seen, clear, and connected?” - From “What’s the metric?”
To “What does impact actually feel like—for our people and our communities?” - From “Who’s in charge?”
To “Who’s holding what, and how do we share it well?”
Leaders must do the inner work to lead differently: with integrity, presence, and courage. Teams must be equipped with new practices—not just new expectations. Systems must reflect the values we claim to hold—not undermine them.
Above all, we must stop asking human-centered work to prove itself in performance-centered language. The real proof will be in whether people stay, trust, contribute, and grow.
What It Looks Like to Build for People: The Harlem Children’s Zone
If you want to see what it looks like when an entire institution is designed around the idea that work is people serving people, look at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Founded by Geoffrey Canada, HCZ redefined what a school—and a neighborhood—could be. It wasn’t built on a single intervention. It was built on a belief: if we want children to thrive, we have to serve the entire ecosystem that surrounds them.
That meant:
- Creating high-quality early childhood education that met families where they were
- Hiring teachers and staff trained not just in academics but in trauma-informed care, cultural relevance, and community engagement
- Embedding health clinics, social work, after-school programming, parenting classes, college prep, and career support all within walking distance
- Holding everyone, from board members to bus drivers, to the same standard: we serve the whole child, the whole family, and the whole community
What made HCZ revolutionary wasn’t just its scale. It was that it never lost sight of its people. Data and outcomes mattered—but so did relationships, trust, and consistency.
They didn’t ask, “What programs can we run?”
They asked, “What would it take to truly serve the people here?”
And then they built that.
This is what happens when you start from the principle that people are the work.
You stop building programs in isolation and start building systems that reflect the reality of people’s lives.
People Are the Infrastructure
Here’s the shift I’m inviting us all to consider:
People are not a means to an end. They are the infrastructure.
If your people don’t feel clear, connected, supported, and accountable, your strategy doesn’t stand a chance.
If your leadership team isn’t aligned around culture, clarity, and communication—your initiatives will scatter.
If your staff doesn’t feel belonging, agency, and safety—your impact will be limited, no matter how noble the mission.
This is what we mean when we say work is people serving people.
It’s not just a feel-good idea. It’s a structural truth. And it’s time to rebuild our leadership models, our culture practices, and our operational systems around it.
What We Remember, What We Rebuild
If you take nothing else from this essay, take this: People are not the problem. The systems we’ve inherited—and the ones we’ve protected—are the problem. And the good news is, systems are made. That means they can be remade.
Work doesn’t have to be a source of harm, exhaustion, or disconnection. It can be a place of alignment. A place of purpose. A place where clarity, care, and contribution are not at odds. But only if we stop designing for convenience and start designing for people.
The organizations I trust most right now aren’t the ones with the most polished strategies or perfectly worded values. They’re the ones asking the hard questions. They’re building feedback loops that mean something. They’re naming misalignment before it becomes harm. They’re willing to shift—not because it’s trendy, but because it’s right. They’re not waiting for perfect—they’re committed to practice.
We don’t need more leaders with answers. We need more leaders who are willing to redesign from a different premise: that the people inside your organization deserve the same care and clarity as the people you claim to serve. That culture is built through structure, not sentiment. And that if the work isn’t working for your people, it’s not working at all.
So the invitation is this: stop performing alignment and start building it, one shift at a time, from the inside out.
References
- Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
- Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers.
- Meyer, S. (1981). The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921.
- McGregor, D. (1960). The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw-Hill.
- Duhigg, C. (2016). “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” The New York Times Magazine.
- Business Roundtable (2019). “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” https://opportunity.businessroundtable.org/ourcommitment/
- Gallup (2021). “State of the Global Workplace.” https://www.gallup.com
- Nonprofit HR (2022). “Nonprofit Talent Retention Practices Survey Results.”
- Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Oxford University Press.
- Google Re:Work. “Project Aristotle.” https://rework.withgoogle.com/