Human Side Up: Jason Lauritsen on the human side of management

Jason Lauritsen is a workplace culture strategist, keynote speaker, and the co-founder and CEO of Check-In to Thrive, an organization that helps leaders build better relationships with their teams. A longtime advocate for relationship-based leadership, Lauritsen believes that meaningful connection is the key to driving better business outcomes. He joined CLARA Founder and CEO Natasha Nuytten on Human Side Up to explore how trust, transparency, and candid conversations can transform how we lead.

Drawing on his past experience as Director of Client Success and Director of Best Places to Work at Quantum Workplace, Lauritsen shares why human connection is often the missing ingredient in performance management. He reflects on his journey from corporate HR to author and speaker, and why his work continues to center on helping people feel seen, valued, and supported at work. With insights featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and HR Executive Magazine, Lauritsen brings both rigor and humanity to conversations about leadership. In this episode, he and Natasha dig into what it really means to show up for the people you lead.

Authenticity and integrity, earned and inherited

For Lauritsen, authenticity is a lifelong practice. Not a trait, but a process: “I think around 40-ish, or somewhere between 40 and 50, I finally came to a place where I think I really understood who I am and what I'm about,” he says. It took time, intention, and a willingness to shed the beliefs and expectations placed on him earlier in life. “I spent probably 35, 40 years of my life trying to unpack all of that... to try to understand who I really was and how I really wanted to be in the world.”

Integrity, on the other hand, was instilled from an early age. “I grew up in a house where your word was everything,” he shares. The connection between the two is core to his leadership philosophy: “True authenticity has to mean that the way you're showing up in the world is aligned with who you are. People know exactly what they're going to get with you.”

Lauritsen’s own turning point came in college, during a conversation that shook his belief system to the core. “I got my ass handed to me,” he says, laughing. “That certainty I had was built on nothing... so what else is?” The journey from devout conviction to thoughtful skepticism helped him rebuild not only his worldview but his ability to engage with others. “Now, I don’t hold any beliefs that are precious. They’re all up for discussion. If I’m wrong, good—I’ll replace it with something better.”

Questioning systems, not people

Lauritsen spent a decade in corporate HR–an experience left a lasting impression. “I'm really good at the work I do today because of that journey,” he says, “but I was really annoying and dangerous as an internal leader because nothing was sacred.” His instinct to challenge the status quo made him an early critic of performance appraisals and other long-standing HR rituals. “Everybody hated it, but nobody was willing to talk about it.”

One of his biggest frustrations is the oversimplified narratives in HR. “We love to say people leave managers, not jobs,” he says. “But most of those ‘bad managers’ are good people who were never equipped. Let’s stop blaming them for a systemic problem.”

Lauritsen pushes for a more precise and compassionate understanding of workplace dynamics. “Let's solve the problem and support those managers so we can change the course,” he says. That mindset has shaped much of his consulting work, which centers on retooling management practices for a more human future.

Work is a relationship, not a contract

Much of today’s management philosophy, Lauritsen argues, is a relic of the industrial era. “Management was designed to engineer humanity out of the workplace,” he explains. “We inherited a system built to make people act like machines. But humans are messy. We get tired. We want to talk to our neighbors.”

At the same time, the way companies treat work—as a contract—undermines how employees actually experience it. “Employees experience work like a relationship,” he says. “Unless we fix that, we’re going to keep spinning our wheels.” For Lauritsen, the path forward is clear: rethink management through the lens of connection. “It's helping managers learn how to have better conversations, understand their people, and support them as whole humans—not machines to be optimized.”

Clarity is the turbocharger of performance

When things go wrong at work, Lauritsen believes the root cause is often a lack of clarity. “At the heart of almost every relationship problem is either a lack of clarity or a breakdown in communication,” he says. He encourages leaders to start by asking whether expectations, measures of success, and timelines have been made crystal clear.

To help, he offers a practical tool: the clarity check-in. Before a conversation, both the employee and manager independently write down the top three priorities of the role and how success is measured. Then they compare notes. “Anytime you do a clarity alignment exercise like that, you will identify misalignments,” he says. “Once you fix those, everything else gets more simple.”

Lauritsen is quick to differentiate clarity from micromanagement. “Micromanagement happens in the how, not the what,” he says. “Defining what needs to be done and why it matters—that’s good management.” His golden rule for leaders? “If it matters, put it in writing. Because clarity only exists when the person on the other end understands it exactly as intended.”

Leadership without fear

For Lauritsen, the journey toward clarity and connection has also been one of courage. “Because I’m not protecting my own belief system from challenge, I can see the world in all its colors,” he says. Whether discussing management, spirituality, or systems of inequality, he returns to the same core idea: we can do better when we’re not afraid.

“Clarity is hard work,” he admits. “But it’s also the turbocharger of engagement, performance, and even inclusion.” Leaders willing to do that work—willing to listen, align, and show up with integrity—will not only see better results, they’ll create the kind of workplaces people want to be part of.

To hear more from Jason Lauritsen on management, clarity, and what it means to lead with courage, watch the latest episode of Human Side Up here.