When looking through the Top Ten of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2025, there were common job attributes people mentioned; culture, co-workers, and management (Great Place to Work, 2025). While this Top Ten is just a small sample from an even bigger Top 100 list, it highlights the impact that other people can make on a work environment. Making employees happy isn’t just to claim bragging rights on lists such as Fortune’s, as business research shows that high job satisfaction is linked to high job performance (Buckingham, 2008). Many jobs can supply employees with the correct tools, procedures, and pay to make an individual satisfied with the work itself. However, not every employer can make a person feel important, listened too, and foster an environment of growth, those skills take a good manager. As First, Break All the Rules : What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently states, “people leave managers, not companies.”
So, how do we translate the emphasis on our human recourses to actual results? One strategy is to focus on employee strengths, not weaknesses. These negatives should not be ignored entirely, but tailoring an employees role to help them better succeed can increase results and satisfaction (Breitfelder, 2008). This approach requires many of the favorable manager traits mention above, you need to listen to employees, tell them where they are succeeding, and encourage growth. Managing teams with this mindset is something I hope to practice in the workforce, however I can anticipate it coming with challenges when it comes to conflict management. While focusing on positives can be beneficial, that does not mean you can ignore shortcomings, especially if it is affecting group dynamics or broader company culture.
After graduating, I hope to work in Human Recourses, and this upcoming summer I will be working in a coordinator position as a manager of several employees. To these roles I hope to carry out a very human centered management style, working with individuals and tailoring to their unique needs, goals, and aspirations. This mindset comes from my academic studies as a Cultural Anthropology scholar, a field where deep ethnographic research is a common way of obtaining qualitative information. An article by Harvard Business Review discussed ways in which ethnography was used in business in a companies approach to finding quality managers, as they got to deeply know a small group of people to better understand what leaders and teams value. Approaches to business management cannot be strictly statistics, data, and rigid procedures as many employees value quality human connection tailored to their personality. My hope is that I can bring a mix of quality data obtained through anthropology inspired methods to the workforce to foster a more human-centric approach that is valued in many Fortune Top 100 companies.
Buckingham, Marcus, and Curt W Coffman. First, Break All the Rules : What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Gallup Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.pro (pages 7-39).
Garvin, D. A. (2013). How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management. Harvard Business Review, 91(12), 74-82.
Breitfelder, M. D., & Dowling, D. W. (2008). Why Did We Ever Go Into HR? Harvard Business Review, 86(7/8), 39-43.
Great Place to Work. (2025). Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2025. Great Place to Work®. https://www.greatplacetowork.com/best-workplaces/100-best/2025
