I spent a day with more than 100 students, faculty and staff at Coastal Carolina University. As I left campus, I felt something you don’t see much in business headlines: optimism. And it came from a place many executives overlook — the humanities.
Since the trip, I have been thinking about the power of the humanities in a business context. The coursework and ideas at the heart of a humanities-based education provides leaders with the raw materials we use under pressure: judgment, ethics, story, listening, resilience and the craft of clear communication. I saw firsthand how these critical mental models were being put to work in Coastal’s Edwards College of Fine Arts and Humanities and its Department of Communication, Media, & Culture.
Other WRAL Top Stories
Start with human dignity — and build everything on top of it
The humanities begin with a simple idea: people have worth. In business, that means dignity is the foundation for how we operate. We start by asking: Who’s affected? Who needs a voice? Who gets real opportunity, and who is excluded from the conversation?
When dignity is the baseline, it changes leadership at the micro and macro level, including product choices, policy language, AI implementation and even how leaders run meetings.
Practical ways to begin implementing these ideas:
● Add a 10-minute “voice of the team” slot to your staff meetings: Use that time to discuss what the team is hearing and one action they can take to solve a business challenge.
● Move from mentoring to sponsorship: Put two emerging leaders on your personal slate each quarter and attach your name to a career-building opportunity.
● Publish decisions with three lines of metadata: Who decided, when and with what input. That transparency shows respect for your team on a daily basis.
Do this and two things happen fast: psychological safety increases and cycle time drops. People surface issues earlier, fix them sooner and get back to serving customers.
Build practical wisdom into your weekly rhythm
The humanities don’t stop at ideas. Engaging with them develops practical wisdom, particularly judgment in context. Data matters, yet people are at the center of most decision-making. The leaders I coach who make consistently strong calls share a habit: They bake small rituals of clear thinking into the week. They ask, “What assumptions are we making? What evidence is enough? When should we pause?”
Three ways to develop practical wisdom:
● Assumption Audit (15 minutes): In your product, service or policy review, list any assumptions behind a decision. Ask if they apply; if not, adjust as necessary.
● Principle Finder (5 minutes): After a roadblock is uncovered, ask: “What did we learn as a result?” Write it down and share it with the team.
● 10-10-10 one-on-ones (30 minutes): Spend 10 minutes on progress, 10 on blockers, 10 on growth. Then, close with a two-sentence summary you both agree on.
These micro-rituals push teams past hot takes or emotion into reasoned action. They also rebuild civil discourse.
What I saw at Coastal were students who genuinely looked out for one another and were trying to do better work together. Their willingness to listen and then build — especially across differences— was a reminder that respectful argument is a workplace skill. Leaders can champion it by creating forums where truth can surface without penalty. Or, more succinctly, they can employ my motto: “the best ideas win.”
Treat story as a management tool — and as quality control
The humanities are the foundation of storytelling. In business, story isn’t spin or lying. I encourage leaders to think of the company as a living entity in a broader narrative. Leaders set the plot (purpose), diminish contradictions (policies that don’t match values) and make sure the ending (results) fits the overall theme (mission). When the story is clear, customers know why you exist, and employees know what “good” looks like. That clarity travels fast.
Here are some suggestions for putting story to work:
● Write the customer paragraph: Work with your team to create one paragraph anyone can recite: who we serve, what we help them do and how we measure success. If you can’t say it plainly, the team can’t execute it consistently.
● Replace jargon with direct language: Give managers two or three sentences to explain a change: why now, what’s different and how we’ll measure it.
● Show the work: Short, regular demos are better than long decks. Changing the way you think and sharing it effectively builds trust and surfaces problems early.
The outcome is a stronger culture built on strength, including fewer crossed wires, re-dos and more energy and focus on the work that matters.
One more place the humanities lead: the AI era
Humanities training helps leaders pair speed with responsibility. History reminds us how past technologies amplified bias when innovation guardrails were weak. The answer isn’t to slow-roll innovation. Instead, leaders need to emphasize human oversight and integrate strong ethics into tool adoption.
Here are some ways to think strategically and contextually: Use a simple framework, including clear ownership, stage-gated experiments, audit trails, and defined human review. Implementation based on these tactics helps ensure that AI serves people, not the other way around. This is applied ethics and a smart way to engage with this critical (but controversial) topic.
Why I’m hopeful
The Coastal Carolina students and grad students asked direct, respectful, and demanding questions:
● How do I become the kind of leader people trust?
● How does AI change the way we work without dehumanizing the work itself?
● How do we promote civil conversation when everything feels polarized?
These are humanities questions: focusing on meaning, judgment, and responsibility. And, they are exactly the questions winning companies need their people to ask.
If we want more civil discourse in the country, we can start in the workplace. Leaders can be role models by creating forums where disagreement is welcomed and examined. They can reward people for changing their minds in the face of better evidence. These are not “soft skills,” but the leadership traits that lead to high-trust, high-performance cultures.
The humanities don’t slow business down. Critical thinking and broad contextual habits actually make the work world smarter, fairer and faster. That’s what I saw at Coastal Carolina: a generation of future executives and citizens ready to ask better questions and do better work. Our job as leaders is to meet that optimism with clarity and courage worthy of their talent.
About the Author
Donald Thompson, EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2023 SE Award-winner, founded The Diversity Movement, a Workplace Options Company, to fundamentally transform the modern workplace through diversity-led culture change. Recognized by Inc., Fast Company and Forbes, he is the author of Underestimated: A CEO’s Unlikely Path to Success, now available as an audiobook. An expert on leadership and the executive mindset, Thompson’s latest book is The Inclusive Leadership Handbook: Balancing People and Performance for Sustainable Growth, co-authored with Kurt Merriweather, Vice President of Global Marketing at Workplace Options. Follow Thompson on LinkedIn for updates on news, events and his podcast, or contact him at info@donaldthompson.com for executive coaching and speaking engagements.