Strategic wellbeing leader Emily Pearson is challenging CEOs and boards to ask the question: is the way we have designed our organisations actually sustainable for the people expected to deliver them?
Pearson, founder of the Wellbeing Lead Academy, argues that the real determinants of human sustainability sit upstream – in workload, targets, operating models, management capability, restructures and reward. And those decisions are made by leaders, not wellbeing teams.
Her first book, Solving a CEO’s Blind Spot: Human Sustainability, published this week (10 September), sets out the case for making human sustainability a core strategic and governance responsibility rather than something delegated to wellbeing teams.
Wellbeing is shaped by decisions made at the top
According to Pearson, many of the factors that have the greatest impact on people’s ability to thrive at work sit outside traditional wellbeing strategies.
Workloads, performance targets, operating models, management capability, restructures and reward systems all influence whether work is sustainable. Yet these decisions are rarely viewed through a wellbeing lens – and they are typically made by leaders rather than wellbeing professionals.
“Boards can see the cost of losing people. What they cannot see are the design decisions that cause it, because those decisions are never filed under wellbeing,” Pearson says.
She describes this as the “blind spot” and argues that human sustainability provides a framework for bringing those decisions into the boardroom.
From wellbeing activity to human sustainability
Published by Intellectual Perspectives Press as the first title in The Human Sustainability Series, the book introduces Pearson’s Human Sustainability Framework, a board-level operating model built around nine areas of stewardship.
The aim is to shift organisations from a predominantly reactive approach – providing support when people are struggling – towards preventative thinking about how work itself is designed.
That distinction has important implications for HR and wellbeing leaders. Rather than being responsible for fixing the consequences of organisational decisions, wellbeing functions can play a more strategic role in challenging whether those decisions are creating sustainable conditions for people to perform.
A personal perspective on a systemic problem
Pearson writes from personal experience as well as professional expertise. While scaling a wellbeing consultancy during the pandemic, she experienced burnout and addiction and subsequently rebuilt both her leadership approach and her business around what she describes as the structural answer she had been unable to find at the time.
Her message to business leaders is ultimately a simple one: wellbeing cannot sit downstream from the decisions that shape people’s working lives.
As Michael Hall, CEO of EQS, puts it: “The most competitive organisations of the next decade will be led by CEOs who understand this message.”
For employers increasingly focused on productivity, retention, performance and sustainable growth, Pearson’s argument is that human sustainability belongs alongside those priorities – not in a separate wellbeing box.
You can purchase “Solving a CEO’s blind spot: Human Sustainability” here.
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