This is the first in a series of blog posts highlighting the importance of building our own values-aligned systems, especially when the systems we live and work within do not prioritize or support our humanity.
“How you do the thing matters just as much as the thing you do.”
Erica Williams Simon
At Leverage to Lead, we help leaders, teams, and organizations build systems—lowercase s systems—that prioritize humanity and foster creativity. Because how we work together matters just as much as what we’re trying to accomplish.
We all live and work within capital S Systems: capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and entrenched classism. These systems all interact together synergistically and have created a hierarchy of people, ranking worthiness by socially constructed attributes (and continues to expand upon this hierarchy in real time). This hierarchy feels like a norm and significantly impacts everyone’s welfare. These Systems shape our culture, institutions and how we run our businesses, but perhaps more powerfully, they shape our beliefs. Beliefs about who is worthy of opportunity, whose voice matters, and what success looks like.
These Systems that we all live and work within operate from a particular set of values—often prioritizing control, individualism, separation, and outward performance.
At Leverage to Lead, we invite people to challenge this socialization by noticing when and how these values show up, and how we might also act from values that center humanity: compassion, curiosity, connection, and relationship. This isn’t about abandoning structure or accountability; it’s about expanding the range of values we draw on in our leadership.
For example, if you need to fire someone, the decision may be rooted in control and separation—but it can also be grounded in relationship, transparency, and the discomfort of staying present with the impact. Ideally, this isn’t the first time the person is learning there’s a problem. When our systems are rooted in humanity, we pair accountability with care. The values aren’t in opposition—they work in synergy when we bring awareness to how we lead.
The Cost of Reward: We All Experience Harm
These Systems don’t only harm those excluded or marginalized within them. They impact everyone. Even those perceived as winning or rewarded within a given System pay a cost; often a profound disconnection from their own humanity. The closer you are to the top of a System’s power structure, the more isolated you can become, and the more pressure you feel to perform, conform, and produce at all costs. Reward and punishment are two sides of the same coin.
This is where many leaders find themselves stuck: holding significant responsibility, yet unsure of how to hold their values and integrity. They feel the pressure of performance and fiscal responsibility. They want to care for their people. And they know that the systems around them aren’t built to support both.
It’s Not Hierarchy That Hurts—It’s the Hierarchy of People
What’s often misunderstood about hierarchy is that it’s not inherently the problem. Many of our clients come to us hoping to build a flat organization. But it’s the hierarchy of people, not of responsibility, that does harm. Organizations do require a hierarchy of responsibility, structure, and decision-making. But when Systems assign greater worth or dignity to certain people based on identity, role, or perceived excellence, they degrade everyone’s humanity.
This is why so many people feel resistant to hierarchy itself—because we’ve been socialized to associate leadership with dominance, extraction, or control. Think of how leaders are portrayed in media: powerful, unrelenting, untouchable. This cultural narrative reinforces a zero-sum view of power, one that doesn’t hold collaboration, humility, or shared accountability.
In all honesty, we can’t opt out of these Systems. Instead, we have to build something different within and alongside it—something rooted in humanity, clarity, and care.
That’s what we help our clients do.
Rewriting the Rules: Systems That Reflect Our Values
In our Identity and Deep Listening session of ANCHOR, we help people name how they’ve been socialized by Systems to understand their worth, see their belonging, and hold appreciation for their full selves.
This is how ANCHOR helps us build lowercase “s” systems that reflect our values—not the ones handed to us by dominant systems, but the ones we choose with intention. These systems—your feedback practices, decision-making norms, conflict navigation, and measures of success—create the cultural container for how you work.
They make space for:
- Curiosity when faced with assumption
- Belonging as a trade for conformity
- Learning without the need for perfection
- Accountability without shame
When we build in this way, we don’t just resist dehumanizing Systems—we replace them.
At Leverage to Lead, our work helps organizations create these systems with clarity and alignment. The Human-Centered Practices embedded in ANCHOR guide individuals and teams to define their standards and show up in accordance with them. And through one-on-one Strategy Sessions, we help leaders examine where their systems may be reinforcing what they never intended—and reimagine what could be possible instead.
Because the truth is: the Systems are always operating. But so are we. And when we choose to build structures rooted in dignity, agency, and care—we create the possibility of transformation.