WHEN DID WE DECIDE THAT UNDERSTANDING HUMANS WAS OPTIONAL?

When simplifying the human becomes a trend on social media, the entire organization loses. Why demanding results without understanding people is just managerial laziness disguised as pragmatism. By Marcello de Souza

You’ve read that type of post before. It appears in your feed with the certainty of someone who has discovered something the world stubbornly ignores. The text is short, direct, has rhythm. It says, in essence, that companies are being swallowed by fragile employees, that the Human Resources department has become a clinic for lamentations, that results are the only criteria that matter, and that any conversation about emotion at work is, deep down, an excuse not to deliver.
The post gets thousands of likes. Leaders share it with the comment ‘finally someone said it’. Managers save it to use in meetings. And the thought spreads — not because it’s true, but because it’s convenient. Because it validates what some already wanted to do without having to think too much.
Whenever I see this, I ask myself: when did we decide that understanding the human was optional? When did depth become weakness and simplification become intellectual courage?
Before I continue, I need to be honest about something: there is a real point in this type of narrative. There is, indeed, a contemporary tendency to medicalize experiences that are part of the normal human condition. There is, indeed, the strategic use of emotional discourse as a shield to evade responsibility. This needs to be named without hesitation. The question isn’t whether the problem exists — it’s whether the proposed response has any chance of solving it. Spoiler: it doesn’t. Because the remedy for exaggeration was never ignorance. It was sophistication.
The Dangerous Elegance of Caricatured Thought
There is a reasoning structure that has become epidemic on social networks and, more seriously, in meeting rooms. It works like this: it takes a real phenomenon — the abuse of emotional discourse, the culture of justification, the inflation of diagnoses — amplifies its most extreme cases, ignores everything in between, and presents this caricature as if it were the norm.
The result is an argument that sounds logical, has immediate impact, generates engagement — and is, in essence, dishonest. Not because it invents facts. But because it chooses which facts exist.
This type of thinking has a cost that rarely appears in the metrics. The manager who adopts it believes they are being objective — but they are being simplistic. And managerial simplism has a measurable cost: it’s the layoffs that cost three times more than it would have cost to act earlier, the culture crises that exploded after years of ignored signs, the talents who left without anyone understanding why. The problem isn’t that these managers are bad leaders. The problem is that they stopped learning about the only resource you can’t buy ready-made: the human being.
And there are still people who wonder whether HR should be a confessional or not. This question, in 2026, says more about who is asking it than about the subject they intend to discuss. It’s like asking whether a hospital should have doctors or not — the question reveals that the person never understood what a hospital does.
Mental Health Is Not Synonymous with Burnout — And That Changes Everything
When this type of narrative talks about mental health, it operates with a single reference point: the employee who claims exhaustion to justify low output. As if that were the only possible face of human illness at work. As if someone who has never closely seen the real spectrum of organizational suffering had the authority to reduce it to a caricature.
Burnout became the trendy term — and precisely for that reason, it became empty. It became a generic synonym for tiredness, which paradoxically gives ammunition to those who want to discredit the entire topic. But the real spectrum is vast and invisible to those who haven’t developed the eye to see it.
Chronic anxiety that fragments concentration without the person knowing how to name what they feel. Unprocessed grief that paralyzes decision-making. Relational conflicts that silently erode the capacity for collaboration. Professional identity crises that freeze those who have always been high performers. Organizational trauma accumulated over years of exposure to environments of veiled humiliation. Each of these phenomena manifests differently in behavior, delivery, relationships — and none of them appears on a spreadsheet. No Friday motivational event reaches this.
Official data from the INSS, released in January 2026 by the Ministry of Social Security, recorded 546,254 leaves of absence due to mental and behavioral disorders in 2025 —a historical record, with a 15.66% increase compared to the 472,328 cases in 2024. Burnout, in particular, tripled between 2023 and 2025: from 1,760 to 6,985 cases, according to an ANAMT analysis based on the same data. These are not projections. They are consolidated figures. And they are not institutionalized victimhood —they are real costs, human, social, and economic. Companies that treat people like cogs discover too late that a cog does not innovate, does not stay when a competitor offers something more meaningful, and does not carry the organization on its back when the market turns.

The HR professional who deals with this daily — who knows how to distinguish real pain from strategic evasion, who knows the names of the people behind the indicators — doesn’t need validation from a social media post. They need an organization that understands that the work they do is not operational. It is civilizational.
What Metrics Will Never Capture
Measuring organizational climate with a form is just another spreadsheet. You measure what people are willing to say — and they don’t even feel anonymous, because the culture of distrust has contaminated even the promise of anonymity. The number appears, the manager presents it at the meeting, everyone applauds. And the real reality remains buried.
Listening to essence is something completely different. It is the ability to perceive what is not said. The employee who responds ‘I’m fine’ with empty eyes. The silence that falls when a certain name is mentioned. The meeting where no one disagrees — and that, instead of looking like harmony, should sound like an alarm. The person who always delivered and suddenly starts asking for deadlines where they never did before.
No human being exposes their vulnerability in an environment that has not yet proven safe to receive it. Trust cannot be decreed. It doesn’t appear because the manual says the company has an open door. It is built slowly, in small gestures, in consistency between discourse and practice, in leaders who have demonstrated — not promised — that listening has no cost.
When this trust doesn’t exist, the employee learns to perform normality. They learn to say what the environment wants to hear. And then the manager thinks everything is fine — until the day the most valuable professional on the team quits without notice, or absenteeism explodes without apparent cause, or the company discovers it was managing shadows while believing it was managing people.
Those who simplify this as ‘corporate victimhood’ have never had to have that difficult conversation with someone who was a reference on the team and reached a point where they simply couldn’t go on anymore. They never had to understand why. They never had to rebuild what was lost. For those who have never experienced this, it’s easy to reduce everything to a matter of grit.
The Great Absentee in This Entire Conversation: Culture
There is something this type of narrative never mentions. And this silence is not forgetfulness — it is a structural blind spot that compromises the entire analysis.
Organizational culture is the invisible environment that determines what is allowed to be felt, what is allowed to be said, what is rewarded and what is punished — silently, every day, in every interaction, in every decision that leadership makes or avoids making. Culture is not in the values manual framed at the reception. It is in the behavior that is tolerated when no one is watching.
A culture that punishes vulnerability does not produce resilient professionals. It produces professionals who hide their limits until they collapse. A culture that rewards blind compliance does not produce innovation. It produces conformity. A culture that treats questioning as a threat does not produce engagement. It produces strategic silence — which is the most expensive form of organizational dysfunction, because it doesn’t appear in any indicator until it’s too late.
The employee who ‘delivers little and explains a lot’ — taken as a symbol of a supposedly failed generation — could be exactly the product of the culture that the organization itself built over the years. They could be someone who learned, within that specific environment, that explaining is safer than making mistakes. That asking for validation is the only way to protect oneself in a system that punishes initiative as much as it punishes omission.
Ignoring culture and talking about performance is like trying to understand the behavior of a fish without mentioning the water it swims in. And this denial of culture as a determinant leads directly to another denial: that of the very biology of the human being who works.
The Factory Gate and the Brain That Never Shuts Down
There is a nostalgia that frequently circulates in these speeches: the time when personal problems were left outside the factory gate. This idea was tested for entire decades. The result wasn’t high performance — it was high compliance. And compliance and performance are radically different things.
The brain experiencing grief or a family conflict at seven in the morning does not shut down at nine. The nervous system that reacted to a threat does not reset because the workday started. This isn’t fragility — it’s biology. Ignoring this doesn’t increase results. It merely postpones the collapse — and transfers to the organization a cost that could have been avoided with much less effort than what will be needed to repair it.
And there’s something else this type of narrative systematically ignores: the generation that now occupies the job market is inserted into a reality of structural uncertainty, information overload, and relentless acceleration. When they ask for support, they might not be asking for less work. They might be asking for something the work environment rarely offers: clarity, predictability, and a sense of purpose that justifies the effort. The yearning for an environment that listens could, in fact, be the yearning for an environment where one can truly perform with wholeness.
But it’s easier to call this generational fragility than to ask what the organization itself did — or failed to do — to create the conditions where that performance was possible.
The HR We Need: Neither Confessional Nor Machine — Strategically Strengthened
Imagine a company that decides to go through a restructuring. Areas will be merged, positions eliminated, teams redesigned. The decision is financially justified. The board approves it. The timeline is set.
In an organization where HR is operational — a process executor, payroll manager, communicator of decisions already made — what happens is predictable: the announcement comes as a surprise to the teams, leadership wasn’t prepared to conduct difficult conversations, talents who had options in the market leave before the process ends, and the restructuring that was supposed to generate efficiency produces, in the first two years, a drop in productivity, increased absenteeism, and a culture of distrust that will take years to rebuild.
In an organization where HR is strategically strengthened — with a real seat at the table *before* decisions are made — the process is different. HR doesn’t just execute: it maps out, before the announcement, which leaders have the emotional maturity to conduct the conversations to come. It identifies the cultural knots that the restructuring will expose. It designs the narrative that needs to be communicated so that people understand the context without feeling disposable. And it establishes the clear criteria that distinguish who needs transition support from who simply no longer fits the project.
The difference between the two scenarios isn’t empathy versus results. It’s organizational intelligence versus managerial amateurism. A strategically strengthened HR doesn’t choose between the human and the business — it is the bridge that makes both sustainable.
The HR professional who has read this far and recognized the second scenario as their daily work — often without the recognition they deserve, often fighting for a seat at a table that still sees them as a support area — needs to know: what you do matters. And it matters precisely because it requires what shallow thinking cannot offer: systemic vision, deep human understanding, and the courage to speak truths that the business is not yet ready to hear.
Responsibility and Context: A Relationship, Not an Opposition
Individual responsibility is real, undeniable, and irreplaceable. No healthy organization survives without it. But individual responsibility does not exist in a vacuum — it develops, strengthens, or deteriorates within specific contexts.
An employee who performs well in an environment of trust can gradually lose their productive capacity in an environment of chronic fear. Not because they are weak. Because they are human. And humanity is not a manufacturing defect.
When an entire team shows a drop in performance, the intelligent question is not ‘what is wrong with these people?’. The intelligent question is: what is the system producing that it shouldn’t be producing? Sometimes the answer points to the employee. Often it points to leadership. Eventually it points to the entire culture. Only a systemic view allows us to see with precision — and act with real effectiveness.
Reducing this level of complexity to ‘people who don’t want to work’ is not pragmatism. It is the confession that one never learned to truly read an organization.
The Real Price of Shallow Thinking
Every time a post simplifies what is profoundly complex and gets ten thousand likes, an invisible price is paid. The price is the normalization of shallow thinking as effective management. And organizations that operate based on this normalization produce shallow results — until the day the bill arrives. And it always arrives.
The market rewards performance — this is true. But the most lasting results, those that resist crises and market shifts, are built on cultures that understood that people are the only asset that thinks, creates, adapts, and innovates. Treating people as cogs might work for a cycle. But a cog doesn’t imagine the company’s future. It doesn’t solve the problem no manual predicted. It doesn’t stay when the competition offers something more meaningful — because there is no bond, no shared purpose, nothing but a transaction.
The question that remains is not whether HR should be a confessional or not.
That was never the real question.
The real question is: what kind of organization do we want to build?
And even more: what kind of human beings do we want to be within them?
Answering this honestly requires something that caricatured thinking cannot tolerate: the willingness to sit with complexity, resist the temptation of the easy answer, and recognize that the human — in all its unpredictability, in all its depth — does not fit into a social media post.
If this text provoked something in you — a doubt, an agreement, a reasoned disagreement — I invite you to continue this conversation. On my blog, marcellodesouza.com.br, there are hundreds of publications that explore in depth human and organizational cognitive-behavioral development, healthy human relationships, and the dynamics that shape who we are inside and outside organizations. There, thinking doesn’t fit into boxes. It expands.
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