By Anne Katrine Carlsson Sejr
Pride at work grows when leaders create people-centred cultures grounded in authenticity, autonomy, and meaningful purpose. This article outlines four themes: visible leadership, lived values, development through autonomy, and purposeful operational design, that help organisations move beyond slogans and build workplaces where employees feel respected, trusted, and genuinely connected to their impact.
Employees’ sense of belonging, purpose, and pride in where they work increasingly determine whether organisations thrive or stagnate. Drawing on lessons from my book Maneuvering Monday, which explores how transformation falters when people push back and leaders look away, this article outlines four key themes that can help leaders design workplaces for humans. These go beyond superficial perks and corporate slogans. They focus on creating a people-centred culture of pride, ownership and sustained engagement, where both leaders and employees bring their whole self to work.
First theme: Inspiring, visible and accountable leadership
 Role-modelling transparent leadership
When leaders visibly embrace the organisation’s purpose and make regular, authentic connections with teams, they send a message that they care. Employees see through polished slides when the lived reality differs.
In times of transformation, “aggressive transparency” can be a powerful antidote to uncertainty. Leaders should lean on the side of overcommunication and share not just what decisions have been made, but also why they have been made. This builds confidence, clarity, and connection.
But leadership is not only about communication. It’s also about emotional maturity. Today’s leaders must manage their egos, regulate their emotions, and model self-awareness. Pride in the workplace emerges when employees see leaders who respond rather than react, who admit mistakes, and who treat others with respect even under pressure. Emotional self-regulation is a leadership muscle, and it enables empathy, grounded decision-making, and psychological safety (and by the way, it is not only relevant for people in leadership positions).
Empowering distributed leadership
Every person should be not only allowed but encouraged to act like a leader in their domain. They should be empowered to make decisions and take responsibility. In great workplaces, initiative is rewarded and leadership is viewed as a behaviour, not a job title. This requires trust and courage from senior leaders, but the payoff is higher engagement, faster learning, and a sense of shared responsibility for success.
Second theme: Clear, aligned and lived values
Embedding your values in everyday routines
It is not enough to have a set of corporate values displayed on the intranet or mentioned at the annual town hall. Values must live in how people are recruited, recognised, developed, and held accountable. For example, if your value is “we learn together”, then your performance reviews, team rituals, and peer recognitions should reflect that. Embedding values into daily operations turns them from empty PowerPoint statements into habits.
Third theme: Development through meaningful autonomyÂ
Aligning tasks with meaning and autonomy
Offering training programmes is not the same as offering development. Growth happens when learning translates into meaningful work. Too often, organisations invest in leadership courses, digital academies, or mentoring schemes without asking the crucial question: what will this enable people to do differently on a Tuesday morning?
Real development comes from experience, autonomy, and reflection. Leaders must move beyond tracking training hours to measuring the impact of learning, e.g. how it influences decision-making, problem-solving, and collaboration. People don’t become proud because they attended a course, they become proud when they apply new skills to create visible, valuable change.
Autonomy is not a soft benefit, but a strategic enabler. It signals trust and drives accountability. When employees have the freedom to decide how to reach goals, they develop a deeper connection to their work and their organisation. Pride grows not from being managed, but from being trusted.
Leaders play a crucial role here. Granting autonomy requires them to manage their own need for control. Again, an exercise in ego management. It also requires confidence in their teams’ capacity to think critically. In a rapidly evolving world, critical thinking is not optional, it is the foundation of resilience.
Fourth theme: Operational excellence and purposeful design
Designing a system for people
It matters how we build the workplace. How meetings are run, to how decisions are made, to how remote and hybrid work is structured. These micro-practices send a message about how people matter.
Too many organisations unintentionally design systems that exhaust their people: endless meetings, unclear priorities, processes that serve hierarchy rather than purpose. When systems are designed for efficiency and humanity, balancing clarity with flexibility, employees experience respect.
Finally, operational excellence means connecting the dots between daily work and a larger purpose. People want to know not just what they are doing, but why it matters. When leaders repeatedly articulate how individual contributions link to impact, work becomes meaningful.
Conclusion
Creating a workplace people are proud of is not about flashy perks or trendy slogans. It’s about consistently and visibly aligning what the organisation says with what it does. It’s about building leadership behaviours that balance humility with courage, a culture grounded in lived values, and systems that give people autonomy and visible impact.
Ultimately, workplaces are human ecosystems. We bring our hopes, our frustrations, our emotions, and our egos to work every day. Today’s leaders must recognise and work with this reality, master emotional self-regulation, and cultivate genuine connection.
If your organisation consistently aligns what it says with what it does, and places its people at the centre, then you will truly create a workplace that people want to stay in, speak about, and feel proud of.
Alongside, Ivanna Mikhailovna Rosendal,
