Last week I had the rare good fortune to see Oprah Winfrey speak at the SHRM Annual Conference. I expected to be entertained. I didn't expect to walk out with three leadership principles I haven't stopped thinking about since.
The first came from a story about the early days of her show. Her producers had pulled off what was then considered a coup, convincing a man to appear on stage alongside both his wife and his girlfriend to talk about his affair. Live, in front of an audience, he revealed that the girlfriend was pregnant. Oprah said she can still see his wife's face. In that moment she made a decision. This would never happen on her watch again. No more shows designed to embarrass, expose, or corner anyone. Her conclusion was simple. You can upset people, make them angry, even make them deeply uncomfortable, and they will recover. But humiliation is different. People never forget being humiliated.
Most of us would swear we would never do that. But humiliation in a workplace rarely looks dramatic. It looks like the pointed comment in a team channel where forty people are watching. It looks like a leader making an example of one person so everyone else gets the message. None of it feels like cruelty in the moment. It feels like candor, or urgency, or accountability. The test I have started using on myself is simple. Am I about to coach behaviour change, or diminish a person? Those are not the same act, even when the words are nearly identical.
The second principle came as a confession rather than a triumph. Asked about the biggest mistake of her career, Oprah named the decision to end her show and launch a television network at the same time. She knew it was time to end the show. What she did not know was what should come next, and in that uncertain space every external voice was telling her to move. Her instinct was telling her something quieter. Wait. She overrode it, because waiting felt like wasting an opportunity that might not come again. Her lesson, hard-won, was this. When you don't know what to do, do nothing. Get still enough that you know, and only then move.
This reflex is genuinely difficult to accept because we’ve been trained to do the exact opposite. Decisiveness is rewarded. Standing still looks like weakness. So, we manufacture certainty we don't have and call it leadership. But there’s a real difference between healthy urgency, which has a reason you can name, and FOMO disguised as opportunity.
The third principle is the one that ties the other two together. Oprah returned, more than once, to something Maya Angelou said. People will forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. She brought this alive by sharing a story about organizing a holiday celebration for children at orphanages in South Africa. Every single gift box had a specific child's name on it. Not a gift for a child. A gift for that child, chosen for them. She went on to say while those toys eventually broke, the feeling of that moment, of being recognized did not.
She then shone this light onto the room full of 25,000 HR and people leaders; she said our real work is not spreadsheets or performance reviews but to be custodians of culture. That the deepest thing we shape is how people feel about coming to work, about belonging somewhere, about whether what they do means anything.
This sentiment stuck with me. For so many organizations these days it seems that declaring “we have a great culture” supersedes the work of nurturing one. Long after someone forgets the policy you rolled out, they will remember whether working with you made them feel capable or small, seen or invisible, valued or merely employed.
So here is the question I left SHRM with. When people walk away from an interaction with you, a one on one, a hard conversation, a hallway hello, how do they feel? Because that, more than anything you will ever say, is what they will remember.