You may have heard managers describe themselves as having a people first leadership style. It’s so incredibly safe. Who has ever got in trouble for declaring themselves to put people above all else in some vague, detail-free fashion? How could anyone argue against it? Well hold my weave because I’m going in.

Looking at how it plays out in practice, stripped of its emotional appeal, “people first” could be seen as a euphemism for discrimination and plundering the common good. That’s bad.

I’m going to compare and contrast it with something I call people third leadership, which has the following set of priorities:

  1. Ethics (Universal Principles)
  2. The Business (The Commons)
  3. People (Individual Interests)

I’m going to argue that by placing people third, we actually create a better environment for them.

Ethics vs. People: The Rule Of Law

To understand why ethics must come first, we must distinguish between universal principles (ethics) and individual interests (people).

When a manager puts “people” first, it prioritises personal affinities and individual desires over objective standards. This creates a tyranny of personalities, where the rules change based on who is being managed. Conversely, putting ethics first is a “rule of law” approach. By prioritising universal principles such as honesty, transparency, and fairness, we ensure that no individual’s comfort or loyalty can override the moral requirements of the collective.

If people are above ethics, unethical behavior is the only logical outcome. In practise, “people first” doesn’t extend to all the people. The people being put first are the most likable — people who look the same, sound the same, who come from the same cultural background, and who are the best at kissing up. This is a breeding ground for discrimination, in all its various forms.

The Business vs. People: The Integrity Of The Ship

If ethics provides the laws, The Business™ provides the vessel. In this model, the business is the ship that everyone is sailing on, and the people are the passengers and crew.

Putting people before the business is a form of local optimisation that leads to global failure. If a crew decides to burn the wooden hull of the ship to keep the passengers warm for one night, they have put people first. In the short term, the passengers are comfortable. In the long term, the ship sinks, and everyone has a bad time clinging to bits of flotsam while sharks nibble at their toes. Sacrificing the health of the business to satisfy immediate individual demands is a slow-motion shipwreck.

The health of the business is a prerequisite for the safety and comfort of the people. The business is “the commons” in the economic sense — a shared resource that many people draw benefit from. The business pays everyone’s salaries, and if the business suffers so do the employees, in aggregate.

Mixing up the metaphor, trying to extract maximum personal benefit from a shared resource without concern for the health of that resource is the strategy of a parasite. All the nice cooperative cells in the host organism need to work harder to make up for everything being siphoned off by the parasites, and once the parasitic burden becomes too much then the host dies. Nature is brutal and amoral, but we’re talking about humans here, and one person behaving in a way that benefits themselves or their friends while hurting others is unethical in a pretty obvious way.

This concept also applies on a smaller scale — your immediate team, for example. Every team has a business purpose, and if a team isn’t fulfilling its purpose then it’s just a matter of time until the team gets deleted in some way. A team getting deleted usually has bad outcomes for the people in that team, so team members should care whether the team is healthy and functional in the eyes of the business.

It should not come as a surprise that employees are expected to keep the business healthy and functional. This is the spirit of every employment agreement. It’s what you get paid for. No business pays an employee to make it weaker — at least not intentionally.

I hate to sound like a corporate shill, but this is the most positive framing I can put on a business: a group of people cooperating to build something that they all benefit from. That’s the ideal I strive for, although I conceded that not all businesses fit that description.

Ethics vs. The Business: Defining The “How”

While the ship must be maintained, it cannot be the highest priority. If the business were placed above ethics, there would be no boundaries on how goals are achieved.

Without ethics as the primary constraint, a manager might justify piracy — achieving business growth through deception, corner-cutting, or exploitation. Ethics must explicitly precede the business to provide the baseline for behavior, ensuring that the pursuit of the mission remains within the bounds of integrity.

Conclusion

People third leadership is not an anti-people stance — it is an anti-discrimination and anti-freeloader stance. It suggests that the best way to serve people is to consider ethics first, the health of the business second, and only then consider individual interests. This affords people the best outcomes, in aggregate.

It’s not intuitive that being third provides the greatest benefit to the people involved, but it works via two mechanisms:

  • Fairness: In a “people first” system, success often depends on political alignment, likability, or being part of the favored group. A “people third” system aims to remove this source of discrimination by explicitly placing ethics above “people”.

  • Maintaining the shared resource: Prioritising the health of the thing that pays everyone’s salaries results in long-term benefits for everyone, rather than short-term benefits for a select few at the expense of everyone else.

You could argue that putting ethics first is equivalent to putting people first. That is true in a way. However I think there is an important distinction between giving people what they want and doing what is right and fair. Quite often, doing the right thing involves people not getting exactly what they want, and that’s the whole point of this article.