THE DISEASE YOUR COMPANY CALLS “PEOPLE MANAGEMENT”

There is a silent misconception operating at the very heart of contemporary organizations, so deeply naturalized that it is rarely questioned: the belief that knowing people means categorizing them. We call this “talent management,” “workforce segmentation,” “targeted programs.” We create ever more sophisticated taxonomies — millennials, sandwich generation, senior workers, women in reproductive transition — and convince ourselves that by naming these groups, we are understanding them. But what if this compulsion to classify is precisely what prevents us from seeing who is truly standing in front of us?

Something deeply disturbing happens when an HR director looks at a 52-year-old employee and first sees a “demographic profile” rather than a singular trajectory of choices, renunciations, learnings, and transformations. When she mentions difficulty concentrating, the organization already has a ready-made answer: “older workers need adapted digital tools.” But no one asked whether she is grieving a recent loss, whether she is renegotiating the meaning of her own existence, whether she is going through an existential crisis about everything she has built professionally over the past three decades. The category has already provided the answer before the real question was even formulated.

The problem is not that organizations offer too little support. The problem is that they operate under a fundamentally flawed epistemology: they assume that complex human beings can be adequately understood through demographic variables. It is like trying to understand a symphony by analyzing only the duration of the notes. Technically correct, ontologically empty.

When a CEO rolls out “caregiver support programs,” he believes he is responding to a real need. And he is — on some superficial level. But what he fails to see is that, in doing so, he is simultaneously reinforcing a conceptual structure that treats the experience of caring as a variable extrinsic to professional identity. As if someone were “a project manager who occasionally has to care for an elderly father,” rather than a human being whose capacity to care profoundly informs how he leads, how he negotiates conflict, how he sustains long-term relationships within the organization.

The story we never tell is this: the woman who is simultaneously caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s and a teenage daughter has developed, in those years of impossible navigation between irreconcilable demands, a capacity for prioritization under pressure that no MBA could ever teach. She has learned to make decisions with incomplete information, to handle extreme emotional ambiguity, to sustain multiple registers of presence simultaneously. But the organization does not see this. It sees only someone who “needs flexible hours” and “presents periodic drops in productivity.”

We are systematically blind to the embodied knowledge people accumulate simply by living. We treat lived experience as noise that interferes with the productive signal, when in reality it is the only real ground on which any genuine competence can be built. A sixty-year-old man going through an acute awareness of his own finitude is not merely “a senior worker who needs psychological support.” He carries a lucidity about what truly matters that could completely transform the culture of artificial urgency that dominates the organization. But no one thinks to listen to him about it, because his experience has already been coded as “age-related mental health issue.”

What we lose by reducing people to manageable categories is not merely their abstract humanity. We are losing concrete, strategic, irreplaceable organizational intelligence. Every person going through a crisis, a bereavement, an illness, an existential transition is being forced to do something extraordinarily sophisticated: integrate incommensurable dimensions of experience. They are learning, in practice, what no “resilience” workshop can teach — how to sustain continuity of purpose amid the radical rupture of all certainties.

And what do we do with this expertise forged in the fire of real life? We treat it as a deficit. As something to be “accommodated” until the person “returns to normal.” As if normal were valuable and transformation were a problem.

Consider the symbolic violence contained in the expression “significant life event.” As if life were a straight line of productivity occasionally interrupted by “events.” As if there existed a default state — working — and exceptions that need to be managed. Reality is exactly the reverse: life is what is constantly happening, and work is merely one of the forms through which we navigate it. Yet we have completely inverted the ontological hierarchy, treating productivity as substance and existence as accident.

When an organization says “we need programs to support women’s reproductive health transitions,” it is unwittingly saying: “we have built an environment that only works for bodies that do not change, that do not bleed, that do not gestate, that do not undergo profound hormonal metamorphoses.” The problem is not the absence of the program. The problem is having created a structure that makes the program necessary in the first place.

A truly lucid leader would not ask “what benefits should we add?” He would ask: “what assumptions about the human are embedded in the very architecture of this organization?” And the answer would be uncomfortable: we assume people are modular, interchangeable resources whose biographical particularities are irrelevant to the roles they perform. We assume knowledge is something acquired in training sessions, not something embodied through living. We assume professional experience is what appears on the résumé, not what is inscribed in the body, the psyche, the relational history of a person.

The practical consequence? Organizations systematically waste the most valuable resource they have: the wisdom accumulated in each person’s singular biography. The woman who survived cancer is not merely “someone who needs ongoing health follow-up.” She now knows something about urgency, about what is truly essential, that no strategic plan can capture. But no one thinks to include her in discussions about organizational prioritization because her experience has been coded as “personal medical issue,” not strategic intelligence.

What is really at stake here transcends HR policies. It is a question of how we conceive the very act of knowing another person. Categories give us the illusion of understanding without requiring the effort of truly encountering someone in their irreducible singularity. It is easier to say “millennials value purpose” than to ask each individual what, specifically, gives meaning to their work. It is more efficient to create “programs for senior workers” than to recognize that every 55-year-old carries an absolutely unique configuration of losses, achievements, disillusionments, and wisdoms.

But efficiency is not the same as intelligence. And perhaps we are discovering, too late, that organizations built on categorical efficiency are structurally less intelligent than they need to be to navigate contemporary complexity. Because complexity does not respond to categories. Complexity demands real encounter, specific listening, attention to the unrepeatable detail of each trajectory.

The true organizational revolution will not come from better well-being programs. It will come when a CEO finally understands that the person on his team who is dealing with a dying father does not just need “compassionate leave days.” She needs someone to ask: “What are you learning about leadership as you accompany your father to the end?” And then, miraculously, actually listen to the answer. Really listen. And consider that perhaps — just perhaps — the experience of sustaining presence in the face of finitude teaches something about leading teams through crisis that no Harvard course ever captured.

We are not talking about humanizing organizations. We are talking about waking up to the fact that there has never been anything but humans organizing themselves, and that our entire managerial apparatus was built on the systematic forgetting of this obvious truth. Every category we create is one more veil between us and the possibility of truly knowing who we are working with. And every veil is a monumental waste of intelligence, creativity, genuine resilience.

The question that should keep any leader awake at night is not “are we offering enough benefits?” It is: “How many people in this organization have we reduced to manageable categories, completely ignoring the singular intelligence that only they, with their specific stories, could contribute?”

The answer, most likely, is: all of them.

But there is a gesture so simple, so radically obvious, that its absence in organizations exposes the true nature of our blindness. Imagine a board of directors that, instead of approving yet another “generational diversity program,” decides to do something disturbingly direct: summon five employees over 55 — chosen by no criterion other than age — to a three-hour strategy meeting with no agenda, no slides, no measurable objective. The only rule: each may speak for as long as they need about “what life has taught me that this organization still does not know.”

Imagine the initial silence. The bewilderment. The hesitation of those who have never been called upon as oracles, only as executors.

Imagine the first trembling voice recounting the death of a child seven years ago and how, in the unspeakable despair that followed, they learned that quarterly targets are fiction when pain has no deadline. That the idea of “returning to normal” is symbolic violence against those who have been irreversibly transformed. That the only leadership that matters is the one capable of sustaining presence when all certainties have collapsed.

Imagine the second speaking of how caring for a wife with ALS taught them to detect imperceptible signs of exhaustion in team members before they themselves notice. How they learned that care is not concession, but radical attention to what is really happening before it becomes crisis. How they developed a relational intelligence that no engagement dashboard will ever capture.

Imagine the third revealing that, at 61, they are teaching themselves to code at night because they need to prove to themselves they can still start over. That this throbbing hunger, this refusal to fossilize, is exactly what is missing from the company’s innovation projects — not because they are poorly executed, but because they were conceived by people who have never had to completely rebuild their own relevance.

Imagine the CEO not knowing what to write down, because there is no KPI for that. Imagine the entire board, for the first time in years, without frameworks, without corporate escape vocabulary, simply listening to humans who had never been summoned as bearers of strategic wisdom — only as “resources to be accommodated.”

And then the realization that should be obvious: we don’t need any new program. We only need to stop treating lived experience as a manageable deviation and start treating it as the only curriculum that truly matters. We need to stop asking “how do we adapt these people to the organization” and start asking “what do these people know that the organization still cannot see.”

On that day, the organization will not become “more human” — that vocabulary is already contaminated by the logic that must be abandoned. It will simply cease to be blind. And it will discover, too late, how many decades it wasted treating as a problem precisely what could have saved it.

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