Reflection on Leadership as 2020 Nears

Earlier this year, I posted a short article that received a great deal of grateful feedback as it reflects highly effective leadership – honoring our responsibility to help our colleagues feel appreciated, valued and heard, and our helping them learn, grow and succeed.

As 2020 nears, now is a good time to reflect on leadership, our own as well as that of every manager in our company, and I believe it may be beneficial to repost the essence of my previous article.

We have all heard that, generally, people don’t leave their company, they leave their manager. Knowing that norm, it is not only important that we as senior leaders embrace highly effective leadership principles, we must assure that our mid-level managers throughout our company are adequately trained, that they understand their responsibility as stated above “to help their colleagues feel appreciated, good about themselves, and our helping them learn, grow and succeed”. We must hold them accountable for their leadership.

We want everyone in our company to do their best and to have pride in their team and our company. As happy employees do better work, it is imperative that they admire and respect their immediate manager.

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 we should all embody to assure likely success in 2020.

• We want to treat our people as teammates, not employees. They are really our internal clients.
• 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, for their ideas, and how we may help them.
• 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.
• Understand that questions are our best friends, purposeful questions, e.g., How can we improve? What could we do better? How can I be more helpful? What should be our priorities going forward?
• Know the best ideas are bottom up.
• Listen with interest to understand and learn (listen 80%, talk 20%).
• Have a genuine interest in our people. They want to know we care about them.
• Help our people learn and grow. Everyone wants to do a good job and be successful.
• 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.
• Be friendly and warm so people are comfortable speaking with us. We want them to come to us. Our being likeable matters greatly!
• Express our appreciation and gratitude for good work and dedication.
• 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 learn even if by nature we may be conflict avoidant. This is our very important responsibility as a leader.
• Being positive, encouraging and optimistic – always. Earlier this year, in facilitating a 360-leadership assessment, someone told me his boss is exceptional as she is so positive and absolutely never talks about someone behind his back. Simple, isn’t it? Yet, this says a lot!
• 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.

These principles and practices enable us to treat our people with respect and dignity, and that means everything to them.

Let’s be certain that these principles are followed at all levels throughout our company. I hope this is helpful and welcome your feedback.