What I have learned over the past 20 years working with all types of organizations is that supervisors and managers have the most significant impact on business results and organizational effectiveness. Leaders need to be able to build and lead effective teams. This requires behavioral skills that aren’t necessarily intuitive and can be difficult to master.
With the increase of younger and less experienced employees in our workforce, there is an expectation that employers will provide development and career opportunities. In response, employers are promoting their high-performing and technically skilled people into supervisory and leadership roles; however, they are not equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to be successful. The skills that they used to get results in their prior roles are not necessarily relevant for people leadership, and their performance can begin to suffer.
Xenium’s leadership development programs are designed to equip current and emerging leaders with practical knowledge and tools to proactively lead others and make decisions with confidence. We know from direct experience that when leaders are able to inspire, coach, and support employees in doing their best work, everyone wins.
Understanding the Basics: What Employees Need from their Supervisors
The Gallup organization researches employee engagement and the top factors that contribute to engagement. We know that engaged employees are more invested, productive and take better care of customers—all leading to better business results. Gallup conducted research in 2009, which is included in the book Strengths Based Leadership. Its research team asked more than 10,000 employees what the most influential leaders contribute to their lives. The top responses were: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.
Trust
Trust is created when vulnerability, credibility, and reliability are greater than individual self-interest. It’s not just about keeping your word (though certainly reliability is still foundational to leadership) trust adds in factors such as vulnerability: Do you ask for help or admit when you’ve made a mistake?
How we go into a conversation and hold the other person at the center matters. If leaders avoid building relationships with employees because they’re concerned about a minimal downside risk, they’re not considering its huge upside value. Our behavior directly impacts our relationships with others, and it also has the ripple effect of impacting trust of the team and workplace culture.
If leaders avoid building relationships with employees because they’re concerned about a minimal downside risk, they’re not considering its huge upside value.
– Suzi Wear
In the book Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey uses the analogy of a bank account. Consider trust-building as adding to a bank account. Each of our employees has a unique trust account balance, depending upon their experience with us. In each interaction, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that we are reliable and genuinely invested, which adds deposits to the trust account. The adverse is also true. When employees question our intentions or we are inconsistent in our interactions and responses, the trust balance goes down (i.e., withdrawal). Here are examples of trust-building behaviors that are likely to add to others’ trust accounts.
- Keep promises.
- Be kind and courteous.
- Give credit and recognition.
- Direct conversations.
- Ask instead of tell.
- Listen to understand.
- Apologize.
- Set clear expectations.
- Meet people where they are.
Notes about Trust Accounts:
- Recognize that each relationship has a trust account.
- All deposits and withdrawals are not created equal.
- Withdrawals are typically larger than deposits.
Compassion
The practice of compassion is about going from self to others. In a way, compassion is about going from “I” to “we.” Switching from “I” to “we” is the most important process of becoming an authentic leader.
Components of compassion (understanding people and empathizing with them) tone down our ego, and thereby create the conditions for humility.
Empathy is an important competency for compassion. Empathy is understanding another’s emotions, needs and concerns. This doesn’t mean fixing, solving or sympathizing. It is simply being present and honoring their feelings.
It is important to note that while we usually have good intentions, we may not be demonstrating empathy. It can be difficult for us to simply sit with someone in their discomfort, so we may be inclined to say something to try to relieve their stress or pain, or even our own feelings of discomfort. As supervisors “in charge,” we may attempt to fix, console, sympathize or relate by telling our own stories. What is most beneficial to the relationship is to just listen and acknowledge the feelings of others without offering our personal input or problem-solving.
Supervisors show empathy by asking questions to understand, versus jumping to their own conclusions. Generally, employees do not intend to do a poor job or work against us—they are usually doing what is natural to meet their needs.
Another important competency that contributes to compassion is service orientation. This is the ability to use our understanding to meet the needs of our employees. Compassionate leaders demonstrate a genuine concern and also hold employees accountable to performance expectations. In fact, we do not show compassion when we allow people to struggle and do not step in to understand the barriers and help develop an action plan for improvement.
Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they’re doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization.
– Suzi Wear
Stability
At a very basic level, people need to know that there is consistency in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed. They need to believe that they’ll have a job several months down the road and that their company will be better off a year from now than it is right now. It’s just hard to get your work done on a day-to-day basis if you have real insecurity about where your organization is headed.
As we’ve discovered through the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they’re doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization. This is even more important when communication is limited to email, phone or video. Look for opportunities in team meetings and one-on-one employee meetings to share what is going on with the business. (This can include upcoming changes, including the “why” and “how” it will directly impact them; successes and setbacks; or progress toward initiatives—even if it’s just an update that decisions are still being evaluated.) In the absence of regular communication and facts, employees tend to assume worst-case scenarios.
Hope
One of the things that poses a real challenge for leaders is instilling hope—especially in the face of uncertainty and challenge. Leaders need to find the right balance of providing stability in the moment while giving followers hope and inspiration for the future.
Followers/employees need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Hope creates an aspirational factor and gives people a reason to stick around. Hope suggests that the future will be better than the present, and that what we’re doing as an organization now will contribute toward creating that future.
According to Gallup, you can’t build hope without trust and stability (a belief that the future will be better). Consider how you may provide opportunities for brainstorming around innovation and improvement. Decisions may be approved at the leadership level, but encouraging involvement and ideas can create a greater sense of purpose and contribution.
Learn more about Xenium’s training and development programs.