When did the organization become “them”?
A recent interaction stayed with me longer than I expected.
A friend and I were trying to clarify something that had been confusing on an organization’s website. It was not really a complaint. It was an observation.
The response we received was essentially an explanation of what my friend should have done differently.
I pushed back.
Not because we did not understand what to do. We did.
The issue was that the website itself was creating confusion, and I wanted that confusion to be seen rather than explained away.
At one point, the person helping us made a comment about how poor the organization they worked for was.
And that was the moment something shifted for me.
Suddenly, this was no longer about a website.
Here was someone representing an organization to the public, yet speaking about that same organization as though they were completely separate from it.
It had become “them.”
Their website. Their problem. Their failure.
And yet this person was part of the organization.
I found myself wondering how we get to this place.
When responsibility becomes distance
I do not believe most people begin their careers wanting to disconnect from the places where they work.
Perhaps they have raised concerns before and nothing changed. Perhaps they are exhausted by processes they did not create. Perhaps frustration has simply become part of the culture.
But I also think we need to be careful about assuming that employee frustration automatically means leadership has failed.
Sometimes leaders have listened.
Sometimes they have tried to support their teams, make changes and navigate difficult realities, only to encounter resistance, frustration or a problem for every solution offered.
Leaders are human too.
They are often carrying expectations from above, needs from below, increasingly complex systems and responsibility for outcomes they may not fully control.
So perhaps the problem is larger than employees or leaders.
Perhaps both are trying to function inside systems that have not kept pace with the humans working within them.
We are asking for human skills we have not always taught
Much of traditional leadership was built around a different assumption.
The leader knew.
The leader decided.
The process followed.
Leadership training focused on performance, decision making, problem solving and measurable outcomes.
Those skills still matter.
But the world of work has changed.
People are navigating uncertainty, constant change, increasing complexity and very different expectations of leadership, work and communication.
And yet we often continue to rely on systems built primarily around process.
What we have not always taught people is how to remain connected when things become difficult.
How do you listen without immediately becoming defensive?
How do you express frustration without disconnecting from responsibility?
How does a leader remain open when every proposed change is met with resistance?
How does an employee challenge something that is not working without turning the organization into “them”?
These are not simply communication skills.
They are human skills.
When another human becomes another problem
What struck me most about the interaction was not actually the comment about the organization.
It was what happened before it.
An observation about a confusing process was heard almost immediately as something that needed to be defended or corrected.
The person in front of us seemed to stop hearing another human saying, “This is confusing.”
Instead, another problem had arrived at their desk.
And I wonder how often that happens across our organizations.
The frustrated employee becomes a problem for the leader.
The exhausted leader becomes a problem for the employee.
The customer becomes a problem for the frontline worker.
Everyone begins protecting their position.
And somewhere in the middle, we stop seeing the human being in front of us.
Listening takes capacity.
Presence takes capacity.
Curiosity takes capacity.
When that capacity disappears, it becomes easier to defend the process than to question it. Easier to assign blame than remain in conversation. Easier to teach people how to work around a system than ask whether the system itself should change.
Interestingly, the website was eventually updated.
The problem was fixable.
Someone simply had to stay with the conversation long enough for the problem to be seen.
Perhaps that is one of the leadership challenges of this moment.
Not leaders who have all the answers.
Not employees who quietly accept every decision.
But people who can question, disagree, listen, take responsibility and remain connected while doing it.
Maybe The Human Way begins there.
With creating organizations where leadership and humanity are not separate skills, and where the systems we build still leave enough room for people to meet one another as human beings.
© 2026 Dr. Jaspreet Soor. The Human Way™. All rights reserved.