When Leadership Forgets Our Humanity: A Defining Moment
By Jane Phipps — Melbourne, Australia
I’ll never forget the moment my world fractured.
My brother had taken his life, and the weight of grief was unlike anything I had ever known. The phone calls blurred together — family, the police, friends trying to hold me upright.
However, one call stands out above all the rest.
It was from my boss.
I was a young single mum at the time, balancing work, parenting, and survival. I expected compassion. I expected a moment of human understanding. Instead, what I received was a thinly veiled threat to return to work quickly or risk losing my job.
No space to breathe. No time to grieve. Just the sharp reminder that, in their eyes, I was first and foremost an employee — not a mother, a sister, or a human being in pain.
That moment crystallized something in me: leadership without humanity isn’t leadership at all.
The Reality of Grief in the Workplace
Grief is universal. So are illness, divorce, financial hardship, and caring responsibilities. Every single workplace has people navigating private storms. Yet too often, workplaces act as though productivity is the only currency that matters.
People think toxic workplaces are about shouting or open bullying. Sometimes it’s not.
Sometimes it’s a phone call when your world is falling apart.
Sometimes it’s the cold reminder that your pain is an inconvenience — and you’d better get over it fast.
For me, it was being told without words but with absolute clarity that I was disposable. That my grief, my motherhood, my humanity didn’t matter.
Do you know what that does to someone already in survival mode? It makes you feel smaller than small. It teaches you that speaking up about your needs is dangerous. It forces you to choose between your humanity and your livelihood.
And that’s not leadership. That’s abuse of power.
The Cost of Coldness
What happens when leaders respond to human suffering with detachment or pressure?
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People go silent. Employees learn quickly that vulnerability is punished or dismissed, so they hide it. The culture becomes one where no one dares to speak truth.
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Loyalty diminishes. When people feel unseen or disposable, they disengage. They give less of themselves because the organisation has given little in return.
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Fear takes over. And fear is contagious — it shapes the entire culture.
I was living proof. I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel seen. And I knew I had to survive for my daughter.
I swallowed my pain and went back to work before I was ready. I sent my daughter back to school before she was ready, leaving her to manage her grief in silence just as I was forced to manage mine. I left my parents behind when they still needed me, because survival demanded I get back to the job that paid the bills.
That’s what cold leadership does. It doesn’t just wound the employee — it ripples out to their children, their families, their communities. The damage spreads in ways that can’t be measured on a balance sheet.
That moment with my boss could have been just another scar. Instead, it became a defining moment in how I chose to lead.
Heart-Centered Leadership
I made a vow to myself: I would never treat the people I lead like that.
If I ever held power over another person’s livelihood, I would use it differently — to protect, to support, to see the human first and the job second.
Heart-centered leadership means responding as a human first, a manager second. It means understanding that performance flows from people — and people can only give their best when they feel safe, supported, and respected.
What would heart-centered leadership have looked like in that moment?
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A pause. Taking time to acknowledge the loss without rushing to logistics.
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Permission. Explicitly granting space to grieve, without guilt or pressure.
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Presence. Checking in as a human being, not a timekeeper.
Those three actions could have transformed my experience of loss at work.
No spreadsheet. No deadline. No quarterly result.
None of it is worth more than someone’s humanity.
Building Cultures of Compassion
This isn’t just my story. It’s part of an epidemic of workplaces that treat people as units of labour instead of as whole human beings. Breaking that cycle takes more than kind words in a policy document — it takes a cultural commitment to humanity.
Your words in moments of crisis matter more than any performance review you’ll ever give.
People may forget the goals you set, but they will never forget how you treated them when their world was falling apart.
A little compassion could have changed everything for me and my daughter.
The Long View
Looking back, I see how my brother’s death and the response I received changed me.
It hurt, yes. But it also clarified what matters.
Leadership is not about titles, authority, or financial results. Those are outcomes, not definitions.
True leadership is measured in how we show up for people when they are at their lowest.
The next time someone on your team faces a personal crisis, remember: your response will echo long after the crisis itself has passed.
They may forget the targets you set that quarter.
They will never forget whether you met their pain with compassion or with coldness.
I share this story because I know I’m not alone. Too many people have been threatened when they were already on their knees. Too many have been forced to choose between their survival and their humanity.
It’s time to stop pretending this is normal. It’s not. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Workplaces can be different. Leaders can be different.
That’s why I wrote my book, The Heart-Centered Leader.
It’s filled with stories like this — raw and real — because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did and feel invisible. I want leaders to know there’s another way.
You get to decide:
Will they remember your compassion — or will they remember your coldness?