I-It or I-Thou: A Philosopher's Question That Will Change How You Lead Every Single Meeting

Before 'relational leadership' was a field of academic study, before 'psychological safety' became a management buzzword, before Harvard Business Review discovered the power of empathy in teams — a philosopher named Martin Buber was asking a more fundamental question.

Not: how do you manage people effectively? But: how do you actually meet another human being?

His answer, developed in his 1937 work I and Thou, distinguishes two radically different modes of encounter. And I want to spend some time with them today — not as philosophy for its own sake, but as a precise diagnostic tool for the leadership challenges you face every day.

Two Ways of Being in Relation

In the first mode — what Buber calls the I-it relationship — the other person is essentially an object. A function. A role. Something to be managed, leveraged, or moved aside. You 'experience' them, but from a distance: through the filter of what you already know about them, what they represent, what they can do for you. The I-it relationship is transactional and instrumental. It is also the dominant mode of most organisational life.

In the second mode — the I-Thou relationship — something entirely different happens. The other person is not an object but a presence: a full subject whose inner life you genuinely acknowledge, engage, and allow to matter to you. The I-Thou says: I am through my interaction with you. It takes place not in the past (filtered through expectation and accumulated disappointment) and not in the future (filtered through strategy and fear) but in the present moment of real encounter. It is personal, egalitarian, and transformative for both parties (Buber, 1937).

"Most meetings are I-it encounters dressed up as collaboration. You can feel it immediately — when someone's presence in the room is merely procedural. When the outcome was decided before anyone spoke."

What This Looks Like in the Organisation You Are Building

In my research, I use Buber's framework to describe two fundamentally different organisational models. The organisation of the past was what theorists call 'mechanistic' — built on the premise that human beings are, essentially, isolated productive units, related to each other only when necessary, coordinated through external rules and authority. This is the I-it organisation: efficient, predictable, and profoundly limited in its capacity for genuine creativity or innovation.

The organisation of the future — the one that can actually thrive in a knowledge economy — is what Whitehead (1967) calls 'organic.' In this model, connectedness becomes interconnectedness: a living exchange in which every genuine encounter influences and transforms all parties. Coordination emerges from within the quality of relationships rather than being imposed from above. Communication becomes something more than information transfer — it becomes, as I put it in my published work, a sharing of the heart: a genuine desire to understand, to strengthen the interaction, to reach the best solution for everyone involved.

In such an organisation, each person can express both their uniqueness and their belonging — not one at the expense of the other. This is not an idealistic aspiration. It is a functional description of what high-performing, genuinely creative teams actually look like.

The Practical Question

So here is the question I want you to sit with: in your last important meeting, were you present in the I-Thou mode — genuinely open to being surprised, moved, changed by what someone said? Or were you managing the encounter from within the I-it — processing contributions as inputs to a decision you had largely already made?

Neither is a moral failure. The I-it is often necessary and appropriate. The problem arises when it is the only mode available — when the structure of an organisation makes genuine I-Thou encounter impossible, because power dynamics, fear, or sheer procedural habit fill every available space.

For many women entrepreneurs, the I-Thou mode is not unfamiliar. You have been practising versions of it your whole life — in the careful attention you bring to relationships, in the quality of your listening, in the instinct to create conditions in which people feel genuinely seen. What has often been missing is the recognition that this is not just interpersonal warmth. It is strategic capability of the highest order.

The future organisation is a community of genuine encounters. You may already know more about how to build that than you have been given credit for.

Research Foundation: This essay draws on Buber's dialogical existentialism (1937) as a framework for relational leadership, developed in my published chapter "From 'I' to 'We' Through 'Female' Leadership." The contrast between mechanistic and organic organisational models draws on Whitehead (1967) and Ims & Jakobsen (2006).

Philosophy becomes strategy when you know how to apply it. If you want to explore what I-Thou leadership looks and feels like as an operational model for your venture — the meetings, the culture, the way decisions get made — this is exactly the kind of work I do with women founders. NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu                                                                                                    — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation