What Makes Great Leaders

The Great Resignation

In November 2021 employees quitting their jobs reached 4.5m, or 3% of the workforce, up from 3.3m and 2.3% of the workforce one year earlier (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Despite the end of Covid unemployment benefits and a series of stimulus checks, employees are quitting their jobs in record numbers. This exodus has been labeled, the Great Resignation and is accelerating despite efforts the retain employees with higher pay, more schedule flexibility and work at home options.

Most people quit Managers, not Companies

Few great leaders are born, most are taught, most often by example. What makes leaders great are the same, no matter where you work, in what industry or where in the world you are. Great leaders focus on people, and people generally have the same needs and expectations of their leaders. They want a connection, they want to be heard. they want their jobs to fulfill more than financial needs and they want to be respected.

If higher compensation, increased benefits, schedule flexibility, and work from home options are not improving employee satisfaction and engagement, and in turn retention, what will?

Empathy

93% of employees are likely to stay with an empathetic employer

While there are many elements of great leadership, empathy is one of the most impactful. A common definition is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. Most of us have experienced leaders who could care less about our feelings, let alone understand them. Hopefully most of us have had the opportunity to work for leaders who strived to understand and connect with us in a way that made us better.

A recent study of 889 employees found empathy provides significant workplace benefits:

• Engagement - 76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged vs. 32% who experienced less empathy.

• Innovation - when working with leaders they considered empathetic 61% of employees considered themselves innovative, vs only 13% with less empathetic leaders

• Inclusivity - 50% of people with empathetic leaders felt their workplace was inclusive, compared with only 17% of those with less empathetic leadership

• Work Life Balance - When people felt their leaders were more empathetic, 86% believed they were able to navigate the demands of their work and life— compared with 60% who perceived less empathy

(Catalyst, Why Empathy Is a Superpower in the Future of Work, October 5, 2020)

Take a moment to reflect on leaders who motivated you and how they exhibited empathy. How did you feel about your job with those leaders vs. others who were less empathetic?

The Process

So, how can leaders learn to practice empathy?

It is easy to ask leaders to be empathetic, and most will say that of course they are. There are countless articles, leadership books, and business discussions that focus on elements of great leadership, of which empathy is often a key part. Whatever process or provider used, it should include the means to help leaders consistently and effectively exhibit empathy with their employees that includes:

• giving leaders the tools and training to practice empathy

• measuring progress and utilizing feedback to continously improve

As an executive leader in a Fortune 50 enterprise, we implemented a leadership development program from a well known, global company. They provided a proven process that met our needs, including training, feedback, metrics and global leadership benchmarks, most everything we were looking for.

LEADERSHIP STYLES

The first element of our leadership framework addressed “Leadership Styles” as a way to develop and practice empathy (other elements were Leadership Competencies and Climate which I will discuss in my next Blog) . As part of the 360 degree process we assessed ourselves and were rated by those who led us, our peers, and those we led. As leaders of leaders, we were expected to continuously practice and teach our leaders to broaden leadership styles, build energizing climates and strengthen competencies. As executive level leaders, we were expected to spend a minimum 40% of our time developing other leaders, a level of leadership engagement that was a major contributor of our success in developing excellent leaders.

THE STEPS

Choose a Framework

There is a large body of work around Leadership Styles, and depending on the size of your organization, a number of providers available to support training and data analysis. You can start by choosing a style classification you like (eg: Hay/Korn Ferry - Directive, Visionary, Affiliative, Participative, Pacesetting and Coaching or Harvard Business Review - Power Holder, Tactician, Constant, Perfectionist, Intuitionist, Miner, Teller). If you chose to engage an external company they can teach your leaders the elements and characteristics of each and manage the data capture and analysis. If you chose to work with your own staff, chose a framework that has sufficient information to teach and develop internally and has the capability to utilize 360 degree feedback.

Develop Self Awareness

The next step is to understand yourself. In order to lead effectively you must understand how you lead, work and interact with others. Your self-evaluation must be honest, comprehensive and especially brutal. A good start is noting how you interact in meetings. Do you dominate the conversation or are you more comfortable as a listener? Are you open minded and flexible to others ideas and suggestions or do you explore others ideas? Do your meetings have strict agendas and time slots or are you open to a free-flowing open discussion? None of these approaches are necessarily right or wrong and are often situational. Each situation merits its own approach, depending on the objectives and the makeup of the team. But before you can understand your team members you must understand yourself and opening yourself up to others input is a critical step.

Establish a Personal Change Initiative

Once you have completed your self-evaluation you will have established a starting point for your personal change initiative. When you understand your dominant, secondary and infrequently used styles your next step is to develop your ability to use those styles which are least comfortable. There are a numbers of ways to do this. You can ask people who work closely with you to note which styles you use and review periodically. You can utilize an internal or external 360 degree survey of your colleagues, employees and leader, or you can establish a process within your organization to observe and regularly meet to discuss progress. Whatever process you use should provide leadership, peer and employee feedback to support continuous improvement.

Once you have completed your self-evaluation, applying your chosen framework to your learning will provide a starting point for your personal change initiative. The objective is to be able to exhibit each style appropriately, depending on the task and make up of your team.

Develop Inter-Personal Emotional Awareness

Once you understand yourself, you need to develop an understanding of your own leaders emotions and dominant styles. This takes significant time and effort and is often a moving target as people move, but will allow you to interact with them more effectively and purposefully by utilizing your leaders and individuals dominant styles in teams and projects that would benefit from their strengths.

When you understand yourself and your leaders you have the opportunity to work with your leaders on their own styles and ability to exhibit empathy. This is where your self evaluation and improvement efforts provide the greatest benefit. You are now able to extend your learning throughout the organization and improve employee engagement, satisfaction, commitment and innovation, all critical to growth and retention.

This is a mistake, this is not me!

The first time I received my results I couldn’t have been more surprised, to the point that I suggested I received someone else's results. While I thought I strongly exhibited Visionary, Pacesetting and Coaching styles, my raters only saw Pacesetting, not one of the best styles in developing people. In order to provide a global benchmark of our progress and effectiveness, we used the Hay/Korn Ferry process that captured results from other companies and benchmarks for our leaders. Four years after we started our journey, and with nearly 2000 employees, I was exhibiting all styles (except Directive) 80-95% of the time with overall leadership metrics in the top 5% of leaders globally.

The ability to understand the unique personality of others and adjust your own style in interacting with them requires empathy, and the ability to understand how others learn and their motivations. Our leaders were expected to purposefully develop various leadership styles and practice every day. We gave them the tools and feedback mechanisms to develop their skills and see their progress. We modeled our training and feedback around our process and used 360 degree evaluations to measure progress and provide feedback. The feedback from the evaluations were key but even more importantly we provided a framework - tools and training to turn that feedback into positive results - key elements of any successful change initiative.

Exceptional Return on Investment

Our leaders results were beyond our expectations. We saw leaders who had demotivating, bottom 25% work climates move to energizing climates and top 10% of leaders in year 3, and top 5% in year 4. This is significantly changing a work culture, and not a quick fix, but a journey. It takes time, effort and commitment, and not everyone succeeds. Leaders that did not meet their goals were moved to non-leadership jobs or left. Many of those who stayed turned out to be great individual contributors and were much happier without the responsibility to lead others.

As a direct result of this initiative, our employee engagement and satisfaction metrics improved dramatically, with equally impressive improvements in business results including Quality, Delivery and Cost.

Why Now?

Employees are resigning in record numbers, at a time when many companies need capable and experienced workers more than ever before.

It’s not a geographic, industry, job role or even compensation issue, its about the workplace!

The “Great Resignation” is not about the company, position or compensation, it’s about being energized and excited about your work, colleagues and career and starting the day excited for what could be accomplished. Over the last couple of years, while suffering sickness and losing friends and relatives, people have realized that they were missing a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in their work. Companies reacted by introducing remote work, improving compensation, adding environmental and societal goals to their charters. These efforts were, appreciated but did not address employees most basic needs - to be led by someone they respect, are respected by and bring out the best in them,

Now is the time to take the opportunity to develop Great Leaders

Over the last couple of years the definition of a workplace and the way we interact with colleagues has changed quickly and dramatically. We are still learning how to make “remote and “hybrid” work and hopefully work better than 100% office environments. Employees are leaving their jobs for more “rewarding” opportunities where reward does not equate to compensation but to self-fulfillment, and they are leaving in record numbers. The ability to practice empathy and lead effectively has become much more difficult with fewer or even no personal interactions. These tools and techniques that help leaders practice empathy and connect with employees will be a key differentiator between merely "good" organizations and those that are truly "great".

I cannot think of a time where a better understanding of ourselves and those we work with was more critical to providing a more rewarding and satisfying work experience.

Watch for my next blogs on “What Makes Great Leaders” including work climate, leadership competencies and developing leaders for “remote” and “hybrid” work

@ www.leading-with-values.com.