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Trust is one of those softer management qualities that people usually believe are good but whose value they have a hard time quantifying. Which is why I was pleased to see a new study from the Ken Blanchard Companies examining the connection between trustworthy leadership behavior and productive employees.
According to the study, the research showed a "large degree of correlation" between trust and numerous positive employee behaviors and attributes. These included:
- Discretionary effort
- Performance
- Willingness to endorse the organization
- Willingness to stay with the organization
- Desire to be a "good organizational citizen"
All of these are highly functional employee behaviors firmly aligned with any reasonable management agenda.
Trust always critical variable. Trust is always one heck of a critical variable. It's huge. I worked closely with leaders with whom I'd readily entrust the safety of my firstborn. And (not so proud to say) at times I worked closely with leaders whom I'd trust about as much as I would a timber rattler in tall grass.
My takeaway? People want to do their best for people they trust. There are motivating implications for all sorts of desirable behaviors from productivity to long-term retention. And the flip side of this management coin? How do employees normally respond to untrustworthy leadership? Well, let's just say people tend to give timber rattlers a pretty wide berth.
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Perfection is a lie. It’s an idea without an example, an unreachable goal. Perfection leaves no room for priorities, no space for humanness, no time for joy.
As long as you strive to be perfect, you will feel like you are not enough. You will feel inferior, and weak, and impossible, and hopeless. Perfection is a cruel, unreachable goal. You are not perfect. You never will be. No one will.
As long as you strive to be perfect, you will feel like you are not enough. You will feel inferior, and weak, and impossible, and hopeless. Perfection is a cruel, unreachable goal. You are not perfect. You never will be. No one will.
Unlike perfection, you can work with what’s imperfect, you can make imperfect ideas better, you can change imperfect objects, you can relate to imperfect people. Imperfection is opportunity.
Imperfection is reality. Perfection is fiction. Forget being perfect. Work instead with what’s real, with what’s important. Otherwise, you’ll only become perfectly miserable.
Being isolated at the top can compromise your decision making and leadership effectiveness, both of which require having as much firsthand information about a situation as possible. Senior executives tend to be shielded from organizational problems and data; they are given limited and filtered information about their operations, employees, and customers.
Deference to authority is deeply engrained in most societies. So it’s natural for employees, even at the highest levels, to occasionally hold back opinions and feelings that they fear might contradict or irritate the boss.
Subordinates will be even more fearful or sycophantic if the boss is insecure or capricious — and power may make leaders less likely to listen to others’ advice, as one study found. These CEOs become supported by a team of “yes-sayers,” people who don’t push back on bad decisions or offer different opinions.
So what can you do to reduce executive isolation?
First, raise your antennae to the possibility that you’re experiencing it. Isolation is often hard to detect. Are employees challenging your thinking, or just saying what you want to hear? Are you getting firsthand exposure to situations and seeing raw data, or is everything being filtered and prioritized to make it easier for you to get the big picture?
Second, get out of the bubble. All senior leaders are surrounded by physical or virtual trappings of office — the formal decor, the board dinners, the financial reports, the assistants that manage travel and scheduling, the intensive calendar that leaves little time for reflection. To break through the isolation, you need to periodically escape.
Finally, tell your senior team to push back when they disagree and to challenge your thinking. Make sure that you have team members who have the courage to speak up and can be critics. It won’t always be easy, and sometimes you may need a coach to help you with this process.
Executive isolation is an inevitable part of the senior leader’s job. Whether it compromises your ability to make decisions and to move the organization forward, however, is up to you.
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When private companies begin using military jargon to describe their organizational challenges, then it’s clear that something has shifted in the business landscape. Specifically, the term “VUCA,” is being heard in more private companies, a military term which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Three people who are very familiar with the term are Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch and Sean Lynch, all former military personnel. They now coach companies that want to learn better ways to handle a VUCA landscape by modeling military leadership and organizational strategies.
A recent Accenture Strategy report of 10,527 employees in 10 countries finds that 85% of workers are ready to invest their free time in the next six months to learn new skills and 84% say they are optimistic about the impact of digital technology on their jobs. More than two-thirds think that technologies such as data analytics will help them be more efficient, learn new skills and improve the quality of their work.
Accenture researchers say that organizations must help workers achieve such goals by investing more in technical and human skills involving creativity and judgment if they want to keep workers engaged and working to find solutions.
Angie Morgan, a former Marine, said “I think a big part of what I learned in the military is that you have to look at your own performance. Do others trust you? Have you proven through your performance that you’re a leader?
Organizations need to look for those who are consistently high performers, follow through on their decision making and show a willingness and curiosity to learn. As businesses become more global and matrices change reporting relationships, organizations need to decentralize decision-making and depend on individual contributors to get the job done.
Morgan says that without leadership from within the employee ranks, then organizations will lose their agility and instead get bogged down in centralized decision-making and overdependence on managers to move work forward. If organizations want to develop leaders at all levels of the organization to drive effective change and organizational efficiencies, they should be:
- Working on character development. By helping employees gain an awareness of what they truly value, they can then begin to think and act in ways that allow them to direct their lives and have influence over others.
- Developing accountability. When leaders show their accountability – by admitting when they make mistakes and looking for solutions – they will also inspire it in others.
- Learning to act with intent. What intentional actions can be taken to help themselves develop as leaders?
- Being of service. Managers should look for workers who don’t have to be asked to help, but are willing to jump in when they see a need.
- Building confidence. When employees are successful, they need to be encouraged to take the time to acknowledge what they have accomplished.
- Demonstrating consistency. Employees must understand that leadership means always sticking to their values and intentions no matter the circumstances. Are they focused on being effective and not just busy?
Everyone is a keeper of the culture. Everyone should be prepared to mentor and to coach leadership development. That’s an important lesson to be learned.
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