Leadership: Our Own and Our Team’s

In a study of the workforce conducted awhile back, 75% of employees listed their immediate manager as the most stressful part of their job. We have to be better than this, and we have to help our other senior mid-level leadership and our managers out in the field to be better as well. If our people are stressed, their work suffers.

Happy employees do better work!

As further evidence of the need to improve leadership, more than half of those in the workforce do not feel they have a constructive, helpful working relationship with their manager. Think this adversely affects our business, e.g., productivity, service and morale? You bet it does! 

I could write an entire book, actually I have, on the principles of highly effective leadership, but to summarize in this short article, here are values and practices I believe we should all very seriously think about, as morale will soar with their implementation.

1. We want to treat our people as teammates, not employees.

2. We want to get out of our office and out of endless meetings and regularly walk the halls, be with our people and ask how they are doing, and for their ideas, and how we may help them.

3. We want to have one-on-one conversations with our team members and other colleagues as often as we can, ideally weekly. Managing by email does not offer the magic that individual conversations do.

4. Understand that questions are our best friends.

5. Listen with interest to understand and learn (listen 80%, talk 20%).

6. Have a genuine interest in our people. They want to know we care about them.

7. Help our people learn and grow. Everyone wants to do a good job and be successful.

8. Develop and maintain productive, helpful working relationships with everyone. Discuss with each person our expectations, needs and wants from them and invite them to explain what they need from us so they may do their best work. Remember, clarity is a strength.

9. We want to be friendly and warm so people are comfortable speaking with us, coming to us, and feel at ease. Being likeable matters; it matters greatly!

10. Express our appreciation and gratitude for good work and dedication.

11. Address problems, conflict and difficult people promptly. If we do not, people lose their respect for us. Having the difficult conversations is an important skill for us to be comfortable with even though by nature we may be conflict-avoidant. This is our responsibility as a leader.

12. Being positive, encouraging and optimistic – always. Just in the past few weeks, in facilitating a 360 leadership assessment, someone said his boss is exceptional as she is positive and absolutely never talks about someone behind his back. Simple, isn’t it? Yet, it says a lot!

13. We must respond to email, calls and texts at our first opportunity. Again, I hear people praise their manager, their leader, because she is always quick to respond.

While this is simply an outline, these principles and practices are really common sense and enable us to treat our people with respect and dignity, and that means everything to them. 

We must be certain that these principles are followed at all levels throughout our company.

I hope this is helpful and will welcome your feedback.