The Subversive Power of Being Human at Work

I used to think my work was practical.

I teach leaders how to listen, really listen. I coach people to say the hard thing. I help teams slow down long enough to notice bias, power, and patterns before defensiveness takes over. I encourage people to take walks during the workday, to ask better questions than the ones they’ve been rewarded for asking, and to choose curiosity over certainty. For a long time, I thought of this as skill-building, leadership development, and even emotional intelligence.

Lately, I’ve come to see it differently. This work is subversive.

We live inside systems that prize speed, precision, efficiency, and control. Systems shaped by white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy teach us, explicitly and implicitly, that worth is measured by productivity, that authority flows from dominance, that emotions are liabilities, and that slowing down is a failure of discipline rather than an act of wisdom. And by the way, we cannot escape these systems. But, perhaps, we can resist them by being deeply human.