Being a great leader means that you must motivate and inspire your employees not only do do great work, but to also get them to do things they may not want to do. Every day, you are going to be faced with many obstacles and you are going to need your team to respond in a positive way. This means that they are looking at you first when something goes wrong. How you choose to respond and the attitude you portray will play a vital role in how they follow. So, if you want your employees to push through difficult times and overcome adversity, you must lead by example.
Good Leaders Maintain A Positive Attitude
Attitude is the perspective through which we view and react to our surroundings and circumstances. Our attitude determines how we think and behave; it has a profound affect on our success and the success of those around us.
Think of the people you know and work with. Some view their world negatively, exhibiting debilitating characteristics such as cynicism, criticism, defeatism, and self-pity. Others are perpetually positive, demonstrating constructive traits such as optimism, collaboration, perseverance, and pride.
A leader’s attitude is contagious; it infects and affects individuals and entire organizations. What kind of attitude are you projecting and what impact is it having on your team’s performance?
Good Leaders Have Empathy
If you have decided to be an effective leader, congratulations. You have distinguished yourself with excellent performance, proven integrity, and steadfast determination, and been rewarded with a progressive career into management and leadership. There’s one thing you may be forgetting: what it’s like to be in the beginning of your career, when you had less authority and less experience.
When an issue or problem emerges from the workforce and reaches your level, you may have lost some of your empathy for how the employee(s) involved really feels, and your actions could result in a severe negative impact to that employee’s engagement in your organization.
You didn’t intentionally lose your empathy for your coworkers as you climbed the ladder, but you have evolved into such a different person due to your experience in the workplace that it can be hard to remember what it was like to be in their shoes. Your work life is marked by decision-making, direction-setting, strategic planning and meetings with clients and other executives. You have the ability to influence your work world and the experience to know how to adapt to challenging circumstances.
Dealing With Difficult Situations
That’s not necessarily the work world that your staff lives in. Most employees have less influence and less ability to deal with difficult situations (especially with other coworkers). When they have an issue, they typically try to ignore it and hope it goes away (it never does). When whatever they do to try to deal with the issue doesn’t work, they talk to coworkers. Coworkers offer suggestions and “I’m on your side” support. They may escalate it to their supervisor, if the supervisor isn’t the one creating the issue. And then they may go to HR. Employees continue suffering with the issue while going through a weeks- or months-long resolution process. By the time the issue is brought to your office, it’s because no one else has the authority or know-how to resolve it.
When the issue arrives at your desk, remember: It’s worse than you think. That employee is intensely unhappy about a chronic issue. When an employee is dissatisfied or distracted, hours of productivity will be lost. Coworker or client relationships may have been damaged. The employee may be looking for another position, putting at risk all your investment in their training and development.
It’s also a big deal to the employee’s supportive coworkers, who are all on the employee’s “side” and watching you carefully to see how you’ll handle it. Will you walk your talk and demonstrate how much you care about your employees? Will you deal with everyone fairly?
So when an employee issue works through the process, and you are asked for an action, remember what it was like to be in your employees’ shoes. Address the issue promptly. Take action to relieve your employees from a highly dis-satisfactory situation. Don’t wait until you come back from that business trip, or let it slip off your priority list in favor of another high-level meeting. Demonstrate your integrity by respecting the employee’s perception of the situation and devoting the time that your “most important asset” deserves. Promote your employees’ engagement in your organization by showing that you care about the quality of their work world as much as you care about a strategic plan.
Bring In A Motivational Speaker
It is very common for employees to lose their fire and ability to work hard as they can get in a lull. This is why many organizations will contact a motivational speaker to help teach their employees certain tools and techniques that can help with what is going on in the company. These speakers are great at telling stories that inspire the audience and get them to have a more positive attitude.
As the leader of your organization, your team might get tired of hearing the same voice and perspective which is why it can be very beneficial to bring in someone else. A professional motivational speaker has the experience and insights to bring in this fresh new perspective which can help spark your employees imagination and get them to see things in a different way.
Good Leaders Are Great Listeners
Why is it so hard to listen? After nearly thirty years of helping people succeed in various settings, I have come to the conclusion that so many of the challenges we face as leaders center on a failure to listen. We are capable of hearing without listening, and that, more than anything, keeps organizations locked in cycles of confusion and conflict. In my thinking, hearing is the physical activity of identifying sounds, but listening is a much more complex and troublesome activity that takes both time and energy.
However I can state emphatically that learning to listen by using all your senses will produce a tremendous boost to your leadership ability. In thinking about how to address this broad subject, it occurred that in the space we have it would be good to address three applications of listening in leadership: listening as the new leader, listening to persuade, and listening by wandering around.
Libby Sartain discusses listening as the new leader, in her book HR From the Heart. She offers great advice about when to listen. She recommends that listening is the perfect behavior for a new member of a team, committee, or board. Even if you’ve studied and worked for years to acquire your new membership, stop, look and listen during your first of many meetings with the group and absorb how the team interacts, what its history is, its culture and values. Listen, and stop yourself from blurting out all the fabulous input and advice you’ve spent years preparing. Listening for a long time (longer than you’d really like and are comfortable with) will help prevent you from accidentally touching on a sore subject, or stepping on toes, or any of the other embarrassing, relationship-straining things one can do in an unknown environment.
If you have ever seen some of the top leaders speak on stage, you will see that they all focus on accountability and great listening skills. They know through experience that if they want their team to respect them, then they must listen.
Good Leaders Connect With Their Team
You may be familiar with the old jokes about Americans speaking English to foreigners in a loud, slow voice, as if the communication barrier was volume, not the inability to understand the language. I see people repeat that funny situation at the office frequently, except the miscommunication isn’t a language barrier, it’s a values barrier. To engage in a conversation, you have to be speaking the same language as the other participant, and this doesn’t refer simply to English, Spanish, or even Farsi, but the “language” of values or priorities.
Each time this situation occurs, the speaker turns up the volume insistence of their message, but it’s not their audience that isn’t listening, it’s them. The leader is not listening to the clues the other person is sending about what influences their decision-making. Some people don’t decide based on facts alone; the effect of an action on relationships, or a different (more or less optimistic) vision of the future, is their primary decision factor.
If you have tried repeatedly to persuade someone unsuccessfully, you need to listen to where their objections come from and re-frame your talking points to address their “hot buttons.” Listen to their conversation. Do they discuss current financial reports, or share their vision for the future? Do they reference individual situations, or do they report on task completion? Do they use words like, “I think….” Or “I feel…..”? So much of leadership is persuasion, and to lead effectively you need to be able to use persuasive listening.
Good Leaders Interact With Their Team
Finally, leading by walking around has been a popular concept in leadership circles for many years, but the more important aspect of leading by wandering is to listen during the wandering. The idea is that a leader should interact regularly with their team members through informal encounters in order to understand what’s really going on. The spontaneity and “here and now” nature of this allows a manager to get a more accurate understanding for the issues, barriers and real-life operational tactics of his team.
Most leaders will readily agree to the value of this concept, but stall out on its implementation. “What do I say to them?” they ask. And anyone who is an experienced practitioner of listening (went to the workshop, got the certificate!) will immediately identify the problem: Management by walking around doesn’t require ”saying” anything – it demands listening. The question managers should ask is, “How can I behave to encourage the most frank interaction possible from my team?” Management by walking around, rather than receiving formal scheduled briefings, is like the difference of listening to a live broadcast compared to a taped program.
The answer to the right question, “How can I behave to encourage the most frank interaction possible from my team?” can be answered this way: borrow from standard interviewing techniques and prepare a variety of open-ended questions to let the team members know what you’d like to learn about, and then use your best listening techniques to gather information about your employees’ real work. Resist the urge to offer solutions or resolve problems right away. Doing that would require you to be talking, and you’re supposed to be listening. Keep asking follow-up questions, and wait to provide your comments at a later time.
Listening does not come naturally to many leaders, but developing this skill to add to your leadership tool chest will enhance your ability to effectively lead.
