About Cat Howland
Cat Howland is a communications strategist and former ABC Radio producer with fifteen-plus years in communications and employee experience. She led internal communications strategies for Yahoo’s Global People Team through a stretch of upheaval and AI adoption, where the internal comms team took home a 2024 Axios HQ Award. Before that, she ran comms for the billion-dollar Hawai‘i Community Foundation and United Way’s Aloha Chapter, earning Emmy and PRSA recognition. In 2025, she became a #WeLeadComms honoree. She writes Human Doings / Human Beings, a forthcoming book and ongoing publication about what changes when a workplace sees the person instead of the output. Cat has a master’s in psychology and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Show Summary
Justin and Virginia sit down with Cat Howland, a communications strategist who has spent fifteen years changing companies from the inside, where leaders make the calls, and someone has to write the words. Her distinction is simple enough for a sticky note and subversive enough to rattle an earnings call: some workplaces are built for human doings, and some are built for human beings. The first wants you to behave like a robot who never has a doctor’s appointment or a family to tend. The second sees the person, lets them thrive, and the business is stronger as a result.
Cat is a quieter sort of system shaker. Her clients are CEOs, HR leaders, and comms teams. She’s there to help them communicate — but she’s also there to make sure the employee voice is in the room before the words get written. That shift — upstream, before decisions are locked — is where real change happens. She points to Sam’s Club, where fairer pay and predictable scheduling pushed sales up forty percent and cut turnover by a quarter. Care comes first; results follow.
Justin floats a dairy farmer metaphor: be kind to the cows, and they give more milk. People, he adds, deserve more than a herd, and Cat operates a level above the analogy. One orthodoxy sits under the whole conversation: Milton Friedman’s gospel of shareholder value, the quiet enemy of anyone who wants to treat employees like humans.
In the Second Show, Virginia presses further. Moral clarity opens the door, and skill walks through it; the myth that collective, participatory change costs more time and money runs backward. Compassion, both agree, is systemic. Treat one person as a human being, and the effect ripples outward, to their family and to the rest of us.
Key Takeaways
The human doings test: one workplace treats people as output and expects them to pretend the rest of their lives away; the other sees the whole person and builds for the long haul.
Care is a profit strategy. At Sam’s Club, fairer pay and predictable scheduling moved sales up forty percent and cut turnover by a quarter. Free coffee and catered lunches sit in a different category.
The idiosyncrasy credit: we watch a cruel leader succeed and assume the cruelty is the cause. Adam Grant’s research points the other way: such leaders succeed in spite of how they treat people, and would do better without the cruelty.
Leaders own the culture. Wellness apps and Taco Tuesdays sit on top of a system without touching the patterns that produce the culture. Leaders model it from the top, or the job falls to an HR team too small to fix it alone.
Change comes one meeting at a time. A middle manager without the CEO’s authority still owns choices about which project or policy gets a more human design. Influence the decision in front of you, and the wins compound.
Moral clarity needs skill. Good intentions open the door; leading a whole system through change is a learnable craft, and the belief that participatory change costs more time and money runs backward.
Tell Your Story
Cat is collecting stories for the blog and the forthcoming book, from everyday employees and the people who manage and lead them. Some are anonymous, some with a name attached. If there was a moment your workplace saw you as a human being, or a moment it saw only the human doing, she wants to hear it. Submit your story or sit down with her for an interview: head to her Substack and click Tell Your Story.
Links
Human Doings / Human Beings (free to read and share)
