The part of leadership no one sees

Dignity is a practice.

Weekly essays on what we're left with, and what we leave behind.

Leadership is measured in what people experience.

The Human Leader Project™ is a weekly essay series about the moments behind the frameworks: how people know they are safe, seen, trusted, and worth telling the truth to.

Written by Matthew Barbour for leaders who believe the way we achieve the work matters as much as the work itself.

Join the project
Matthew Barbour

How leadership is experienced, not how it is intended.

I've spent twenty-five years inside large organizations, most of them banks — the first half leading teams, the second in enterprise HR. Long enough to watch how decisions land on the people they get made about, and to notice how rarely anyone finds out. My graduate work at Pepperdine was on disclosure and belonging at work, which is another way of saying I've been circling this for a while.

I'm a North Carolinian, married to my husband, Jonathan, and this project is my ongoing practice of looking closely at what people actually carry out of the rooms we lead them through.

Read Matthew's story

Make room for it.