I've Been a Leadership Coach for 20 Years. Here Are 3 Things I Have Found Most Leaders Drastically Lack
If you've ever had the privilege to work for a good leader, you've probably noticed that they have their people's best interests in mind. In other words, they genuinely care about the success of their people -- including their career goals and aspirations.
It is counterintuitive for most bosses to naturally gravitate toward caring and serving the needs of others due to competing demands, including pressures to meet their own performance expectations.
But as I've learned from the research, including having heard countless anecdotes told by global leaders who came on my show, putting the focus and spotlight on the people that make your business go around is very good for your bottom line.
All told, there are undeniable, high-impact business results found in leaders exhibiting specific caring traits, and those traits spread across an organization. The evidence is overwhelming.
Here are three attributes of the best leaders I have seen drastically missing in the majority of managers.
1. The best leaders are role models for transparency
Transparency built over time is the gateway to organizational trust; it will quell a toxic work culture where people are at odds, the political climate is heavy, and personal egos stifle teams. Transparency eliminates the likelihood of toxic behaviors like backstabbing, microaggressions, or vicious gossip. Essentially, transparency has always been and will always be about how teams work better together to get the best results.
In transparent work cultures, you can count on the guardians of the culture -- trusted team members and associates -- to watch out for politics or favoritism behind the scenes and squash such behaviors as soon as it happens.
The work of transparency must first and foremost be modeled by leaders at all levels to ensure it's a cultural norm for getting work done in an open, collaborative, and respectful setting. When people are not pulling their weight, leaders must have the courage to pull the plug by being real with their own feelings first, followed by being radically honest with those who need critical feedback on their performance.
2. The best leaders don't neglect the power of one-on-one meetings
Bosses who look to model caring behaviors must do their absolute best to know the status and condition of employees under their care. There are questions they must ask for open and productive dialog to take place. When they are curious enough to find out what's going on with their people and how they feel about things, their team members feel valued and give discretionary effort.
The best approach to make this happen hasn't changed over the years, but more and more people in management roles conducting work in digital environments are getting lazy and forgetting to meet through one-on-one conversations. The best leaders I've studied will spend sometimes up to half of their working hours meeting with their employees -- checking in with both line managers and front-line people to affirm them and let them know that they're there to help.
One-on-one meetings don't have to have an agenda. They're used mostly to find out how things are going and whether people have questions or concerns about the business or a particular strategy in play.
And then there are the questions most bosses never ask, which I recommend asking at the end of a one-on-one meeting:
Is there anything I can do to help you be better at your job?
Are there any problems that we're not addressing, but should be?
These two simple questions affirm the employee's value and voice and spawn great ideas for how to run the business better.
3. The best leaders foster an environment of psychological safety
The term "psychological safety" was coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who explains it as "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking."
What Edmondson found is that better-performing teams made more errors than worse-performing ones. You may see this as a negative but here's the catch: Edmondson found the best-performing teams were admitting to errors and discussing them more often than other groups did. In other words, what distinguished the best-performing teams was psychological safety, which facilitated a "climate of openness" to course correct and cut through problems faster.
Psychological safety curbs the fear that historically makes it difficult for workers to think clearly and act confidently on their own to make decisions. It helps to eliminate the authoritarian tactics of bosses yelling at workers for making mistakes or not knowing things.
Psychological safety also allows employees committed to displaying cultural values like honesty and integrity to challenge the incompetent authority of bosses who violate those same values. Lastly, with employee well-being a top priority, psychological safety decreases stress and burnout by giving people the autonomy to use their brains at critical times without asking for permission from micromanagers.