People Are Not Commodities

When I worked at Sunkist, I watched orange juice trade on the futures market. It taught me that almost anything can become a commodity. And once price becomes the main factor, we lose touch with the quality of what we produce and with how people value it.

In a commodity market, oranges from one grove are worth exactly what oranges from any other grove are worth. The grower who takes extra care, the variety with better flavor, the story behind the fruit all disappear into a single number on a screen. Anyone who wants to be valued for quality has to fight to be seen as something other than a commodity.

That lesson has stayed with me for decades, because I've watched the same thing happen to people at work.

The Commoditization of People

Listen to the language organizations use: headcount, FTEs, resources, capacity. We talk about people the way traders talk about bushels. When we do, we stop thinking of them as individuals. People become interchangeable units to be added, cut or, increasingly, automated.

It shows up everywhere. Performance systems rank people against a single standard and reward sameness. Hiring screens for a specification instead of a person. Output gets measured in units rather than contribution.

The AI era has sharpened the temptation. When leaders ask which roles can be replaced, they often skip the more important question: what does each person bring that no system can? A commodity lens makes that question impossible to ask.

There is no way to evolve when we look at people through the lens of a commodity. Evolution depends on the very things that lens erases: individual strengths, perspectives, ambitions and the unexpected ideas that come from them.

Complacency Toward Difference

There's a quieter form of commoditization too: complacency toward difference. The workforce and the marketplace have become far more individualized. People expect to be seen for who they are, not sorted into categories. The demand to transform the workplace already exists, yet many companies are slow to respond.

Instead of creating new strategies to unleash individuality, they keep funding the same programs that underdelivered before, with new names and the same design. One-size-fits-all training. Generic engagement campaigns. Initiatives that treat difference as something to manage rather than something to use. And employees notice when the program is the one they sat through three years ago.

Repeating the same program and expecting a different result isn't a strategy. It's a hope. Accepting difference means changing how the organization works, so that each person's individuality becomes an advantage for them and for the business.

Break Down Self-Created Barriers

The last commodity trap is the one leaders build for themselves. You can't control everything, so stop trying, or pretending you can. Too many leaders protect their own domain with barriers: to other teams, to partners who can do what they can't, to ideas that didn't originate with them. That's survival mode, and survival mode stagnates growth.

Breaking those barriers takes three things. Be smart enough to know what you don't know. Be vulnerable enough to share all of yourself. Be courageous enough to be transparent about what you and your company are doing, including what isn't working.

Take responsibility and accountability for that transparency, and embrace the uncertainty that comes with it. Openness feels risky. Isolation is riskier.

Open the Ecosystem

When you open the ecosystem, something shifts. Partners bring capabilities you couldn't build on your own. Teams solve problems together that they couldn't solve apart. Employees stop guarding information, because no one is modeling that behavior at the top.

Consider how often the best ideas in an organization come from the intersection of two teams that rarely talk. Every barrier a leader removes creates more of those intersections.

Most of all, people stop feeling like cogs in a wheel. Leadership, and the people it serves, become more than the sum of their functions. That gives everyone, and the organization as a whole, the ability to evolve faster and grow.

Price Versus Value

Commodities compete on price. Distinctive products compete on value. The same is true of organizations and the people in them.

The organizations that thrive in the Age of Personalization will be the ones that refuse to let people become a line item. They'll know their people as individuals, invest in what makes each one distinct and open the doors that let that distinction reach customers.

Ask yourself three questions:

• Where does our language treat people as interchangeable?
• Which of our people programs repeat ones that underdelivered before?
• What barrier have I built that protects my domain more than it serves the business?

Stop commoditizing everything, starting with the people who make the business work.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.