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Lets just get right to the bottom of this: What exactly do employees want in their leaders the most?
In a study published in the Harvard Business Review involving close to 20,000 employees around the world, there's one thing that leaders need to demonstrate. Aretha Franklin sang it 50 years ago:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
In a study published in the Harvard Business Review involving close to 20,000 employees around the world, there's one thing that leaders need to demonstrate. Aretha Franklin sang it 50 years ago:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
The numbers are staggering. Employees who reported getting respect from their leaders experienced positive outcomes across all five categories, including:
- 56 percent better health and well-being
- 1.72 times more trust and safety
- 89 percent greater enjoyment and satisfaction with their jobs
- 92 percent greater focus and prioritization
- 1.26 times more meaning and significance in their work.
- 1.1 times more likely to stay with their organizations than those that didn't.
- People who said leaders treated them with respect were also 55 percent more engaged at work.
The study found that over half (54 percent) of employees claimed that they don't regularly get respect from their leaders. More eye-catching from that small study was this: 25 percent claim that they don't have a role model for respect at work; they're just behaving as the leaders do -- monkey see, monkey do. Christine Porath, associate professor of management at Georgetown University, who authored the book Mastering Civility and has studied its effects for 18 years, drives home her argument by pinpointing where disrespect really comes from:
I've learned that the vast majority of disrespect stems from a lack of self-awareness. Only a masochistic 4 percent claim they are uncivil because it is fun and they can get away with it. More often people just do not realize how they affect others. They may have good intentions, but they fail to see how they are perceived.
For leaders who firmly grasp how respect leads to business outcomes, but may struggle with a lack of self-awareness to display it day to day, Porath offers them the following steps:
- Ask for focused feedback on your best behaviors from 10 people (coworkers, friends, family): After compiling the feedback, organize the data into themes. Look for patterns such as when, where, how, with whom are you at your best? Use those insights to reinforce what you're doing well.
- Discover your shortcomings. Identify a couple of trusted colleagues who you believe will provide direct and honest feedback. Ask for their views about how you treat other people. What do you do well? What could you do better? Listen carefully.
- Work with a coach. Coaches can uncover potential weaknesses and unearth some of the underlying assumptions, experiences, and personal qualities that make one prone to uncivil behavior.
- Ask, specifically, how you can improve. Once you get clarity on which behaviors you want to improve (first), use the "feedforward" method (popularized by Marshall Goldsmith) to gather information, suggestions, and creative ideas from others about how best to go about this.
- Repeat by asking additional people. Enlist your team in keeping you accountable. Choose one change that could improve your behavior and then experiment with them, asking team members to help let you know when they see improvement.
- Make time for reflection. Keep a journal to provide insight into when/where/why you are your best and when you are uncivil. Identify situations that cause you to lose your temper.
Leaders must scan the world for signals of change, and be able to react instantaneously. We live in a world that increasingly requires what psychologist Howard Gardner calls searchlight intelligence. That is, the ability to connect the dots between people and ideas, where others see no possible connection. An informed perspective is more important than ever in order to anticipate what comes next and succeed in emerging futures
To find their way in societal shifts, leaders cannot rely on static maps, nor can they hope to manage complexity through fixating on the details. Reinvention and relevance in the 21st century instead draw on our ability to adjust our way of thinking, learning, doing and being. Leaders must get comfortable with living in a state of continually becoming, a perpetual beta mode. Leaders that stay on top of society’s changes do so by being receptive and able to learn.
As we attempt to transition into a networked creative economy, we need leaders who promote learning and who master fast, relevant, and autonomous learning themselves. There is no other way to address the wicked problems facing us. If work is learning and learning is the work, then leadership should be all about enabling learning.
Sustainable competitive advantage depends on having people that know how to build relationships, seek information, make sense of observations and share ideas through an intelligent use of new technologies. To help leaders do that, we’ve developed a process we call Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM), a lifelong learning strategy. It is a method for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making, and sharing.
- Seek is about finding things out and keeping up to date.
- Sense is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we learn.
- Share includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. Sharing is a contributing process where we pass our knowledge forward, work alongside others, go through iterations and collectively learn from important insights and reflections.
By seeking, sensing, and sharing, everyone in an organization can become part of a learning organism, listening at different frequencies, scanning the horizon, recognizing patterns and making better decisions on an informed basis.
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There will always be an endless list of chores to complete and work to do, and a culture of relentless productivity tells us to get to it right away and feel terribly guilty about any time wasted. But the truth is, a life spent dutifully responding to emails is a dull one indeed. And “wasted” time is, in fact, highly fulfilling and necessary.
“There’s an idea we must always be available, work all the time,” says Michael Guttridge, a psychologist who focuses on workplace behavior. “It’s hard to break out of that and go to the park.” But the downsides are obvious: We end up zoning out while at the computer—looking for distraction on social media, telling ourselves we’re “multitasking” while really spending far longer than necessary on the most basic tasks.
“Wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering,” he says. Taking time to be totally, gloriously, proudly unproductive will ultimately make you better at your job, says Guttridge. But it’s also fulfilling in and of itself.
At the end of the day, all of us have the urge to while away time flicking through a magazine, walking around the block, or simply doing nothing. We should embrace these moments, and see them as what they are: time well spent.
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Machines are getting smart. Really smart. So what does this mean for us humans?
Short answer: the benefits are limited only by our imagination.
For a longer answer, here’s what our faculty have to say about machines as counselors, coaches, chauffeurs, and full-fledged intellectual partners.
Short answer: the benefits are limited only by our imagination.
For a longer answer, here’s what our faculty have to say about machines as counselors, coaches, chauffeurs, and full-fledged intellectual partners.
1. Need to Vent? Try Talking to a Robot
Are therapist robots in our future? In a recent study, Kellogg’s Eli Finkel and colleagues had participants share a difficult personal story to a robot named Travis. When Travis reacted by moving and displaying supportive text, participants rated it as more social and competent. They even leaned in and made better eye contact when they spoke to the robot, signals of warmth and openness. “We might not have to look too far in the future before robots might play an emotionally significant role in our lives,” says Finkel.
Are therapist robots in our future? In a recent study, Kellogg’s Eli Finkel and colleagues had participants share a difficult personal story to a robot named Travis. When Travis reacted by moving and displaying supportive text, participants rated it as more social and competent. They even leaned in and made better eye contact when they spoke to the robot, signals of warmth and openness. “We might not have to look too far in the future before robots might play an emotionally significant role in our lives,” says Finkel.
2. A Robot to Keep You Steady on Your Feet
Therapy machines already exist, in the form of exoskeletal robots. These wearable robotic devices assist people in rehabilitation settings. These machines, designed to work with rather than for humans, are programmed to push us to our limits without letting us fall over.
Therapy machines already exist, in the form of exoskeletal robots. These wearable robotic devices assist people in rehabilitation settings. These machines, designed to work with rather than for humans, are programmed to push us to our limits without letting us fall over.
3. Dislike Driving? Trust Your Car to Do the Job
We use machines all the time. That doesn’t mean we are ready to let them get behind the wheel. What would it take to make our interactions with robots less fraught? Research by Kellogg’s Adam Waytz suggests a way forward. “Typically when you humanize technology, people tend to like it more,” says Waytz.
4. Want to Be Smarter? There's a Machine for That
David Ferrucci thinks we are at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. With computers, that is. “One of our human frailties is we think we know what we need to know to make decisions. Do we?Computers are uniquely capable of taking advantage of the plethora of data newly available to us, he says. They can collect it, filter it, analyze it—and soon enough, they will be able to explain it to us in a way we can understand.
We use machines all the time. That doesn’t mean we are ready to let them get behind the wheel. What would it take to make our interactions with robots less fraught? Research by Kellogg’s Adam Waytz suggests a way forward. “Typically when you humanize technology, people tend to like it more,” says Waytz.
4. Want to Be Smarter? There's a Machine for That
David Ferrucci thinks we are at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. With computers, that is. “One of our human frailties is we think we know what we need to know to make decisions. Do we?Computers are uniquely capable of taking advantage of the plethora of data newly available to us, he says. They can collect it, filter it, analyze it—and soon enough, they will be able to explain it to us in a way we can understand.
5. Check that Algorithm Before Making a Big Decision
Speaking of good decisions—it turns out that your emotions rule.
Stock traders about to buy or sell would be smart to get a handle on their own moods before they pull the trigger. And there’s an algorithm ready to help them. Uzzi, along with a team of colleagues, analyzed 886,000 trade-related decisions and 1,234,822 instant messages from 30 stock traders over a two-year period. The researchers created an algorithm that tagged each communication with a probable emotional state—unemotional, extremely emotional, or between the two—based on the words the trader used.
One eventual goal? A machine-learning program that could mine digital communications in real time to provide traders with feedback about their current emotional state.
Speaking of good decisions—it turns out that your emotions rule.
Stock traders about to buy or sell would be smart to get a handle on their own moods before they pull the trigger. And there’s an algorithm ready to help them. Uzzi, along with a team of colleagues, analyzed 886,000 trade-related decisions and 1,234,822 instant messages from 30 stock traders over a two-year period. The researchers created an algorithm that tagged each communication with a probable emotional state—unemotional, extremely emotional, or between the two—based on the words the trader used.
One eventual goal? A machine-learning program that could mine digital communications in real time to provide traders with feedback about their current emotional state.
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