Ep. 12 Reclaiming Dignity
"Dignity isn't a perk. It's not a leadership style. It is the foundation for safety, collective action, and honest work."
IN THIS EPISODE
In our Season 1 finale, Aparna and Lars lay down the ultimate baseline for what it actually means to be human in modern work structures. For months, we have built a meticulous structural, historical, and embodied case for why contemporary white-collar systems make us feel so profoundly small. In this episode, we bring it all home to a single, non-negotiable word: Dignity.
Featuring real, unfiltered field recordings from grassroots organizers, tech coalition members, and national culture changemakers, we break away from corporate compliance theaterto analyze how our current economic environments treat human value as a conditional commodity rather than an inherent truth. From backhanded managerial compliments to the paralyzing trap of professional code-switching, this final conversation unmasks how late-stage capitalism intentionally decommissions human agency - and map out exactly how we can start reclaiming it person-to-person.
THE QUESTION WE'RE LEAVING YOU WITH THIS SEASON
What choices would you make, and what would you build entirely differently, if human dignity were your absolute, non-negotiable starting point at work?
TAKE THIS WITH YOU INTO THE SUMMER - Dignity Cannot Be Earned
Stop outsourcing your self-worth to corporate performance ratings or manager validations; dignity belongs to you simply because you exist.
Exhaustion is Structural Extraction: When you feel physical wrongness but force your body to override it for the sake of "business as usual," you are actively participating in your own behavioral extraction.
Bring It Into the Room: Dignity is highly contagious when it is somatically and intentionally lived out; when you hold onto your own self-respect, you force the system to react to your truth.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill
The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines
Inside Organizer School — Founded by Jaz Brisack
CONNECT WITH US
Drop your career survival stories directly into our inbox pod@circleback.club
Thank you for walking with us through Season 1. Stay subscribed for exclusive mid-season drops, and get ready for Season 2.
Full Transcript
Lars Gallien: Welcome back to the Circle Back Club. I'm Lars Gallien.
Aparna Rae: And I'm Aparna Rae. Welcome to the podcast for workers who are completely done pretending that the system is broken or that everything is fine. I am back for this final episode of our very first season with my lovely co-host, Lars Gallien.
Lars Gallien: This has been an absolutely incredible season where we've been asking what it would look like to build something entirely different. Today, we're asking what we believe is the most foundational question of all, which is: what does it actually mean to be treated with dignity at work? What choices would we make, and what would we build differently, if human dignity were the absolute, non-negotiable starting point for us in the workplace?
Aparna Rae: Today is a deeply special episode because we are bringing in so many incredible voices from so many different places. We'll get to hear directly from Jaz Brisack, who is a phenomenal labor organizer and the founder of the Inside Organizer School. We're gonna hear from Madison Butler, an author and former corporate C-suite executive. We are also going to hear from workers and practitioners from the Tech Workers Coalition that Lars got to record out and about in the world, as well as voices from a national culture conference that he and I just attended this past week. Lars, do you want to go first talking about what dignity looks like and feels like to you?
Lars Gallien: It is always a little trippy to hear your own voice recorded. I really appreciate having that grounding of what I've thought of dignity from an explicit somatic standpoint. Inherently, dignity is non-negotiable. It is not something that can be taken away from us or moved away, yet we are constantly reaching and wanting it. What is so powerful about the human body is that it only ever communicates in the present moment. Your body is giving you real-time feedback right now. But something I keep coming back to about this topic that is incredibly complicated is how easily we put our dignity completely in the hands of another person, especially a manager.
I keep thinking about a time in my executive career when my entire team was laid off, except for me and one other person. The way I was delivered this news by my new manager was that he 'could have laid me off, but he didn't' because of my organizational reputation. It was this classic backhanded corporate compliment of, 'You get to be here.' When I felt that land in my body, I experienced a massive wave of fear. My system immediately said, 'Okay, you hold the keys to my physical safety and my dignity now.' I did exactly what a terrified, isolated person would do: at the very end of that meeting, I asked my manager for a hug. It is wild to look back on. We viscerally know what dignity is not at work, and we know exactly when we have negotiated or given it away. It is a complicated topic because it is both a baseline human right and an intentional structural condition we have to create. That specific moment always stands out to me because it was a visceral, physical time when I knew I had completely surrendered my dignity.
Aparna Rae: That is so incredibly hard to hear, especially because of who you are and how you move in the world now. There have been so many moments throughout the arc of my career where I’ve had deeply similar experiences. Recently, one of those moments came back to mock me in a really challenging way. An older individual reached out to me over LinkedIn, someone who I deeply looked up to as a professional mentor in my early 30s. Years ago, when I was experiencing severe workplace bullying from one of their direct peers, this person explicitly told me to 'suck it up' and 'play nice' with the people who were harming me. I hadn't had a single one-on-one interaction with them for probably six years. They saw an article I wrote in Forbes and sent me a message saying, 'It's good to see that you finally found your voice.'
I read that message again and again while ruminating. All I could think was: you are one of the exact people who tried to steal my voice away from me by telling me to shut up, stay small, and get in line. You watched me get targeted by an executive who was 20 years older than me, and your response wasn’t to come to my defense; your response was telling me to comply. The relationship that exists there is completely bereft of dignity and respect.
Lars Gallien: To Jaz Brisack's point, it really boils down to whether our fundamental humanity is respected. In both of those corporate scenarios, people are forced to operate without real self-respect. We end up mirroring the compliance of a politician rather than acting out of our core values.
Aparna Rae: It is deeply hypocritical. When I look back at our professional lives, we have spent the majority of our careers advancing variations of equity, inclusion, fairness, policies, and data, all in an explicit effort to make organizations work better for everyone. It always strikes me—and it genuinely keeps me awake at night—just how many people climb the ladder in these diversity and culture professions by actively stepping on the people below them. It is a massive act of professional indignity to weaponize the language of fairness while showing up in ways that are patently unfair, extractive, and unkind.
Lars Gallien: It is a truly twisted, hyper-individualized game that we are forced to play in late-stage capitalism. How do we untangle ourselves from this infrastructure, and how do we actively protect our humanity when the structural incentives are designed to pull us apart? Listeners, we dropped you right into the deep end of this conversation because dignity has to be physically felt before it can be neatly defined. The explicit invitation for you today is to sit back and be as honest as humanly possible with yourself as you listen to us map this out.
Let's ground ourselves in where this entire season has taken us. We have spent this entire season building a rigorous structural analysis of modern work. We unpacked the 1970s shift toward shareholder primacy in episode two with Bachul Koul. We exposed the unwritten psychological contracts that demand employee silence in episode four with Leilani Lewis. We analyzed the severe psychosocial hazards the system deliberately produces in episode six with Dr. Nicole DeKay. And we dismantled the individualistic self-advocacy trap in episode eight with Hala Saleh. All roads lead exactly to this intersection: the word underneath all of it is dignity. So, what is it, actually?
Aparna Rae: Dignity is not a perk, and it is absolutely not an optional leadership style. It is the structural precondition and the foundation for everything else. We cannot have physical or psychological safety without dignity. We cannot engage in meaningful collective action if we do not value the inherent dignity of every human being. It is the absolute prerequisite for an honest workplace. The reality is that almost nobody in corporate America—and really, all of modern white-collar work—has actually designed or built organizations with dignity as the starting point.
Lars Gallien: 'Precondition' is the perfect word. I think of Prentis Hemphill's definition in What It Takes to Heal: 'Dignity is the capacity to feel inherent value simply in the fact that we exist. It is the seat of agency, of choice.' When you evaluate a modern corporation founded entirely on bureaucratic output and power-over dynamics, you see immediately that they are not designed for dignity. At its core, dignity cannot be earned, bought, or bestowed. So the real question isn't whether individual leaders want to treat their people well; the question is whether corporate structures and financial incentives ever even let them do that. Let's listen to what this looks like out in the field.
Aparna Rae: Hearing Madison talk about what she had to sacrifice to climb the ladder, and the exhausting survival mechanisms required to exist in the C-suite, is a massive reality check. It connects directly back to our conversation with Hala Saleh about self-advocacy operating as an individual coping strategy rather than a systemic solution. It is incredibly limited in its ability to deliver structural equity. Sure, learning to negotiate your salary can offer short-term personal gains. But it ultimately ends up feeling hollow because dignity does not live inside the foundation of these policies.
Think back to our conversation with Hebba Youssef on the wellness industry. We talked about a standard three-day bereavement leave. If an organization were genuinely centering human dignity, would we ever quantify grief and say that three days is a sufficient, neat amount of time to handle both the emotional devastation and the logistical nightmare of losing a immediate family member? It is an absurd act of corporate avoidance.
Lars Gallien: To design policies that refuse to accommodate the spaciousness of the human experience is an act of deep cultural avoidance. The people designing these corporate restrictions aren't giving themselves the space to be human or to grieve either, and if we can't grieve, we can't change anything. Let's listen to this clip from Chris Powell on how this manifests in people operations.
Aparna Rae: Chris notes that there isn't even a basic shared definition of dignity inside most corporate environments. His quote is so sharp: 'If it's defined in an organization, it's not well lived. And if it's not well lived, it's not well coached, developed, or supported.'
Lars Gallien: It exposes the core flaw of what we are constantly measuring. We have built a professional managerial culture that is exceptional at talking about equity and writing values statements, but completely incapable of practicing it because we don't design the structural space to live it, coach it, or support it.
So, Aparna, let me ask you: what does dignity actually demand structurally that even the most well-meaning individual leader cannot provide alone? From a politicized somatic framework, dignity requires rigorous structural analysis and history. We have to explicitly look at how the system was created to exploit labor. You cannot just plop a wellness program or a dignity statement on top of an extractive infrastructure. It requires real structural repair, radical corporate transparency, and metrics centered on human well-being rather than just capital return.
Aparna Rae: You know what's funny? I actually studied the systemic framework of dignity back in graduate school. When I was in grad school, I used to constantly battle with my professors because I wanted immediate, hyper-practical answers. But as I've gotten older, I realize that learning structural analysis is exactly what matters. Modern society is obsessed with telling people to focus exclusively on STEM, entrepreneurship, and how to hustle. But a rigorous education forces you to sit with history and locate the root cause of inequality. Without that structural lens, DEI and collective liberation just devolve into diversity literacy without action.
Let me ask you a serious question: what is the explicit connection between dignity and power? Madison Butler talked about the importance of getting marginalized people into seats of power because it grants you a little bit more space and safety to show up authentically. But what does that imply about the thousands of workers who will never have access to a corporate C-suite seat?
Lars Gallien: I want to pull directly from Staci Haines' book, The Politics of Trauma, because she draws an brilliant distinction between inherent dignity and structural privilege or entitlement. Privilege is granted by socio-economic systems, leaving certain groups with an inflated sense of worthiness because their dignity has never been systemically targeted. But that is not an embodied sense of dignity; it is built on completely false ground because it depends entirely on oppression and power-over dynamics. Therefore, the dignity it claims to grant is always fundamentally limited. To your point, Aparna, dignity does not come with structural power.
Aparna Rae: In fact, corporate power explicitly corrupts dignity. We have asked our community all season: can capitalism and dignity at work actually coexist? With the exception of one middle-aged white man, every single practitioner, organizer, and worker we spoke with said absolutely not. Capitalism fundamentally requires human extraction and the exploitation of labor, and there is zero dignity to be found in extraction. That applies to highly compensated labor too—even tech workers pulling in a quarter-million dollars a year to train AI models to eventually replace their own jobs are trapped in a system bereft of dignity.
Let’s play this unprompted clip from Jeff Harry, which takes us right back to our second episode on Milton Friedman and Jack Welch.
Aparna Rae: Jeff reminds us that prior to the 1970s, corporations only executed mass layoffs during literal bankruptcy. Then, Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy model changed everything. Dignity wasn't just lost; it was actively decommissioned and phased out of corporate design so that a tiny fraction of people could become obscenely wealthy.
Lars Gallien: That historical critique is completely necessary. But we also have to ask what workers and leaders can actually do right here and now inside these imperfect systems, rather than just waiting for the revolution to arrive. Aparna, how do we think about scaling dignity? Is it even scalable in a profit-driven system?
For me, dignity starts with the individual reclaiming their 'inherentness'—the understanding that your worth cannot be given or stripped away by a corporation. When you fully live that truth, it transforms how you show up in relationships. It becomes scalable person-to-person through collective interdependence, not through a corporate HR program.
Aparna Rae: I believe dignity can become completely contagious when you bring it into a room with deep intentionality. Because it is felt somatically in the body, it has the power to disrupt corporate manipulation. I’ve spent the last six years trying to intentionally show up as the kind of leader and colleague I desperately needed when I entered the workforce in my 20s.
I read an incredible article yesterday in The Atlantic titled, 'Actually, Democracy Dies in HR.' The tagline noted that new research sheds light on how mediocre, frustrated, middling workers looking to get ahead help would-be authoritarians maintain organizational power. It is a brutal read. We are actively being trained to comply with authoritarian dynamics by way of how modern workplaces are structured, and the missing piece in resisting that compliance is reclaiming dignity in our interpersonal relationships.
Let’s listen to what dignity feels like to people out in the world. Lars, what struck you most from the field recordings at the culture conference?
Lars Gallien: When people talk about dignity, their entire pace slows down. They have to tap into an internal, somatic space to express it. Every recording confirms that dignity is entirely relational. It forces a mechanism of collective interdependence. The most concrete first step toward a life of dignity is simply looking at the person across from you and seeing them fully. It requires a level of absolute honesty that changes how we converse, how we design, and how we organize. What stood out to you?
Aparna Rae: I keep coming back to a conversation with a woman named Chrissy, who worked in K-12 education for 25 years. She transitioned from a classroom special needs educator to an administrator, and she shared a beautiful poem with us that contained the line: 'If I love you, I love me. If I can see you, I can see myself.'
This entire first season of the Circle Back Club has been about naming the things we desperately need to unlearn. Yes, we need structural analysis, but at the end of the day, it requires bringing relentless honesty into our interpersonal relationships consistently—not just when it's convenient for our careers. Reclaiming our humanity in the middle of the daily struggle is exactly where dignity lives.
I want to share a quick somatic realization from my own life. I have been consistently going to yoga for the last six months. I still completely suck at it. But my teacher, Janine, creates an incredible container in her class. She walks into the room and ensures that every single person can live into their own dignity even as we are fumbling, tipping over, and struggling on the mat. I have never once felt a shred of corporate-style performance shame in her space. She allows us to live into the best parts of who we are in moments of processing. Shout out to Janine at YogaSix Redmond. Lars, take us into the structural possibilities of this practice.
Lars Gallien: I have a literal stack of books next to my desk today. I want to close our analysis with Prentis Hemphill’s words from What It Takes to Heal, mapping out what a society would look like if safety, belonging, and dignity became our metric for organizational health:
'We could make room for authentic connection, timely repair, and intentionally build more trust and transparency. We might study the resilient and life-giving aspects of our cultures and practice while being aware of what drains and depletes. We could be careful about how we bring in the most traumatized of us, making sure we scaffold them with care. We could use how we gather together not to numb ourselves from the pain we face, but to build a collective resilience that carries us over the long term. And we could source our work with our visions, not our pain. How we work is as important as the work that we do.'
Aparna Rae: 'Source our work with our visions, not our pain.' What a powerful framework. Can you imagine human resources being built that way? There is an absolute reality where entities inside organizations exist to care for people, because there is no organization, no innovation, and no economy without the human workforce. But to get there, we have to entirely change the metrics of what a healthy economy looks like. It cannot just be measured by what the S&P 500 is doing.
Lars Gallien: Let's ground this somatically. Dignity lands in the body first. Pay attention to your posture right now. If you are collapsed, adjust your spine and let it gently grow to be held in an upright position. When we sit up and inhabit our length, we gain access to entirely different information because we aren't protecting or shrinking our systems. When you feel the wrongness of an extractive corporate environment but choose to logically override it, you are actively participating in your own extraction. The question is not whether your mind can survive that; the question is what it costs your humanity.
Aparna Rae: This entire season has been about tracing the thread from that initial feeling that 'everything is not fine' to naming what right would actually feel like. And what right feels like is personal, relational, and deeply structural. The conference speaker who declared that we have to break these broken systems and create something entirely new and unimagined isn’t being utopian or nihilistic; she is exactly right. Reclaiming your joy and your dignity in an extractive system is a radical political statement.
Lars Gallien: Friends, this season we built the historical, structural, and embodied case for why work makes us feel small. We hope this finale gave you the true definition of dignity—not as a hollow corporate values statement, but as an absolute demand and an inherent calling that you can choose to stand in today.
Aparna Rae: If Season 1 was about relentlessly naming the problem, Season 2 is going to be about fiercely building the alternative. Stay subscribed for exclusive mid-season drops coming this summer. We are so incredibly grateful to everyone who walked this path with us this spring. I'm Aparna Rae.
Lars Gallien: And I'm Lars Gallien.
Lars & Aparna: We'll circle back.
