5 Ways To Maintain Your ‘Humanness’ In Competitive Corporate Businesses

By Helen Wada with Penny Power

For the latest episode of Human Wise, I sat down with Penny Power OBE. Penny is a builder of communities, dedicated to creating love and connection in business. She authored the successful Business Is Personal book and is a highly demanded keynote speaker, particularly on the subject of 'The Human Touch In A Digital World – Mastering Emotional Selling’.

When we are swimming in the corporate river, it is all too easy to be pulled by the fast-moving current into a mindset that has little to no room for our humanness. Instead, we put the shutters down and set our focus on profit, goals, making the next sale, beating our competitors and hitting our targets.

For women especially, this competitive mindset could even be seen as the most effective way to be treated as equals to our male counterparts in business. 

But for Penny Power, there was an innate resistance to this approach that meant she retained her humanness – her empathy, her vulnerability and her nurturing energy – all throughout her career. 

Penny: “I don’t think I was particularly strategic about it. I never allowed myself to get sucked into that attitude. And I ended up being the sales and marketing director of a company and I had about 300 people in my team, and an £80 million budget when I was 25. So I built a good career and I learned the commerciality of business, but I still felt there was something more to me.”

So what can we learn from Penny’s approach that will allow us to remain true to our humanity, even in such competitive environments as sales and business? And what is the ROI to this approach?

Let’s find out.

1. Do not define yourself with labels

As Penny points out on the podcast, we label ourselves in so many different ways – mother, father, daughter, son. Our job title is another label added to the list. These labels can become how we define ourselves.

Penny: “We start to validate ourselves externally all the time. This is how the world perceives me, this is what I do.”

When we allow our identity – and worse, our self-worth – to be determined by these labels, we reduce ourselves from the multi-dimensional beings we are, into flat cut-out versions. Our humanness is too far-reaching and nuanced to be confined to a label. When we ignore this basic truth we begin to operate on autopilot, fulfilling our job description whatever that may be, without allowing our humanness to spill out around it.

This significantly limits our ability to innovate, develop and make connections. And as we’ll explore in this blog, connection is the bedrock of our evolutionary success.

2. Avoid comparison

Penny: “Especially now we’ve got social media, we’re in a world where we're always comparing… We could spend our whole life feeling less. And until we get internal self-validation, I don’t think we can really understand ourselves.”

Interestingly, Penny talks about having to coach herself from a young age, to give herself the love and affirmation she felt starved of as a child.

This speaks to the role of coaching in business today – not just in working with a coach, but in taking a “coaching approach” in our attitudes and interactions across all levels of business.

Our ability to contribute to others – to offer them something, to coach them – has a profoundly positive impact on our self-worth. The higher our self-worth, the less we are motivated by vanity metrics, and the less likely we are to compare what we don’t have to what others do.

3. Understand yourself and others

Taking time to understand who we are is not something that we are encouraged to do in the fast-paced corporate world.

Penny: “We have to accept that people are driven by different things. And that’s where you have to think ‘what is love? And what does it feel like to receive love?’ Love in business can be quite challenging, but let's break down this human experience. We’re not robots. No matter what personality type, at a human level, we have the need to feel significant to others.”

It is this latter point that is so important: we have the need to feel significant to others.

An employee needs to feel significant to their employer. They need to feel that they matter, that they are not just a cog in a corporate wheel. Otherwise, how can they be expected to invest their best efforts into a business that makes them feel replaceable? The feeling of belonging is hugely important to going that extra mile.

Similarly, a client needs to feel significant to a supplier. Penny touches on times she has felt unimportant as a client – sitting on hold for hours, no loyalty rewards, increased fees with decreased service – these things communicate to a client that they are not important.

Identifying what makes us feel significant and what makes others feel significant informs where our strengths lie and the value we can add.

4. Know that our desire for connection is rooted in our evolutionary biology

To a tribe of Homo sapiens 70,000 years ago, it was important that each member of the group contributed in some way. Everyone had a role, and most often those that didn’t were rejected from the community, and subsequently more at risk. This is woven into our evolutionary makeup – we are hardwired to seek belonging and contribution.

Penny:“We have to have love and connection. It’s such a critical need, otherwise we feel lonely and isolated, and that has all sorts of mental health challenges. We have the need for growth – both personal and professional – so we feel like we're not stagnating, that we’re managing to grow as a person. For me, all of this is encompassed under love. And that’s why I build community, because community is love to me.”

5. Don’t be afraid to show love

The word ‘love’, as it pertains to connection, is probably one of the rarest words in corporate language. Many people might immediately dismiss such an idea, claiming that love has no place in business.

But is that true?

Might it be that we are denying our evolutionary drives for connection and the innate instinct for community that has shaped so much of our humanity?

Penny:“I see the importance of love in business. When we break down what love is, it’s not sexual, it’s not intimacy, it’s actually deep affection. And how wonderful it is when you feel somebody has deep affection towards you, who’s got your back, who makes you feel significant, wants to contribute, wants you to grow. Whether we call it servant leadership or love in business, it’s just being somebody who brings love into a department. You can change a culture one person at a time.”

The ROI

Building love into an organisation is not ‘wasting time’ on fluffy, fanciful ideas. It’s an investment that will be returned tenfold.

Penny: “I totally respect an organisation’s need to make money. But companies need to have less attrition, they need loyal staff, they need staff that want to do more than they’re being asked.”

This starts with building a loving culture and a community. That is the ROI – loyal staff who are committed to excellence and will go the whole nine yards, not only for the business but for their clients too.

A coaching approach

All of this makes up a coaching approach to business, and it’s a message I am incredibly passionate about. When we can integrate the skills of a coach into wider conversations with our teams and stakeholders, both inside and outside the business – we open so many doors.

➔   Loyal, committed and invested staff

➔   Long-term and more lucrative client relationships

➔   Positive reputation

Penny: “If you can bring love into business, your business will change so much inside that it will also change the external brand that your business has.”

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The full conversation with Penny Power is available here.

For more information on Penny, head over to LinkedIn, check out her website, or purchase her book on Amazon.

Human Wise releases new episodes bi-weekly and is available on all major podcast platforms.