Uncategorized
Leaders with compassion need only apply
On 15, Jan 2020 | In Uncategorized | By ReneeBlake
“A leader must be loyal to both his superiors and to his men. He must inspire loyalty.” – Best-practices in leadership, circa 1950s.
The perception of a high performing employee has definitely changed since the 50’s. The definition of the workplace has certainly been dramatically transformed. So why is it that our perception of today’s leader has not evolved more significantly to keep pace?
I don’t think anyone expects a gold watch at the end anymore, however we clearly still experience many company cultures that spend a great deal of time “managing up,” and overtly demonstrating their “loyalty,” as the primary value exchange. Ironically, as marketers, we focus much of our attention on the “customer journey,” and yet, many leaders aren’t placing enough emphasis on their employees’ experiences, (while studies have shown that when your company culture matches your external brand, it produces phenomenal business results.)
Today, people are seeing the difference between someone who inspires and someone who just has a fancy-pants job title. If companies want leaders in management, they will need to look for employees that can coach and motivate coworkers, not just have tenure or high sales. Power of influence is also proving to be more effective. Less experienced, non-managerial employees can hone leadership skills even if they don’t have any responsibility over their peers. And the more we see flexibility in working remotely, the more managers will need to build autonomy and trust because their job won’t be to monitor their team members all day. Leaders of transparency and ownership will be the new value exchange.
Make decisions that will stick.
Strong leaders demonstrate they can adapt well and guide employees through uncertain times. They serve as change managers and inspire teams to work through change on their own. Employee survey results have always shown that they expect their leadership teams to make tough decisions. Increasingly, they also expect the decisions to be kept. This builds mutual trust as well as the decision is more likely to be carried out successfully when decision makers have demonstrated contextual thinking as well as maturity in organizational design that informed the decision. By investing in decision implementation, companies can focus on how they are introducing change, understand how employees are adapting to it, and ideally have their team’s optimize from there.
Attract and retain talent whom you can learn from.
When employees feel valued and supported, they rise up to their best selves. Great talent can inspire leaders at all levels. The smart leaders know to bring in folks that can show them their blind spots. Instead of demanding levels of education and experience, more companies are focusing on what candidates can do, and how they are different or additive to the team, rather than how they will blend. This allows teams to hire for their futures and to organically push existing employees to continue to grow.
Tech is making companies more human-centric.
As more routine tasks are automated, companies are looking for employees with soft skills, like critical thinking, professional maturity and high EQ. The need for a partnership between AI and human intelligence will increase and require execution built on trust and an understanding of the inputs/outputs. The dependency of this collaboration continues to grow as the complexities of what we need AI to do for us, evolves.
Increase in Female Leaders
A report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found a direct correlation between female leadership and profitability: “A profitable firm at which 30 percent of leaders are women could expect to add more than 1 percentage point to its net margin compared with an otherwise similar firm with no female leaders.” As a society, we generally know that diversity in thinking is good for business, however cultures and structures are not moving as quickly as the demand, and we therefore need leaders to understand how up-and-coming female talent need to be supported. It is often different from their male counterparts as well as they face new challenges compared to the generation of women that came before them. Both male and female managers will need to lead with courage and curiosity to achieve best-in-class hiring and retention practices, to attract the highest caliber of talent.
Overall in 2020 and beyond, the strongest leaders will focus on more soft skills rather than merely building their resume credentials. They will be partnering with technology more thoughtfully, and learning to lead a diverse team with new, modern challenges. The days of leading via “loyalty” alone, are no longer going to propel the business forward. Companies will hire leaders who inspire a team to think, make and move with transparency, accountability and compassion.