How Not to Screw Up a New Leader: People (Part 2 of 4)
You just promoted a new leader. Don't just throw them into the ocean of teams to see if they can swim. Give them the fundamentals of researched, proven critical elements of success. This is the second of a four-part series to give you an overview of that research. In our last newsletter, we discussed the first critical element of a great team leader: Trust.
Trust is comprised of Character (do you tell the truth, are ethical, do what you say you will...) Competence (do you know how to manage a team and have experience in common with people you will be supervising) and Caring (do you care about me as a person and my career and not just as a cog in the wheel of productivity).
This week, we look at People.
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#2 Critical Element: Treat People Well
Talented people are the lifeblood of successful organizations. And talent has been disrupted in a significant way—by COVID. There isn’t one industry not seriously affected by the “Great Resignation.”? After an extended time of isolation, illness, and even death of people near to them, many survivors are asking fundamental life questions, causing the re-evaluation of everything, including work. Also, baby boomers are eligible to retire at staggering numbers—some estimates are 10,000 a day.? Millennials are fast becoming the largest demographic in the workplace, and there aren’t nearly enough of them to fill the vacancies of exiting boomers. Therefore, leaders need to pay close attention to talent recruitment and retention because people matter a lot. Our research revealed that teams of talented people have three characteristics that leaders must both find and encourage: Diversity, engagement, and autonomy.
Diversity:?People are different, and diversity is good for teams solving critical problems and coming up with new solutions, products, and services. While ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity are essential to organizations that want to reflect their constituency, cognitive diversity is also very important to teams. Steve Jobs constantly told the folks at Apple to “think different!” When team members think differently, they approach problems from alternative cognitive points of view and are collectively better able to solve complex problems.?
Engagement: Gallup’s extensive cognitive strengths-based research has demonstrated that engaged workers far outthink and outproduce disengaged ones. And while only 35% of all American workers are fully engaged, they outscored their disengaged colleagues in every credible productivity metric.? To keep people engaged, leaders must keep them interested in their work and encourage them to become excellent at it. Simply put, when people work toward their strengths rather than trying to “fix” weaknesses, they produce significantly better results. Connected directly to cognitive strengths are character strengths. The VIA Survey of Character Strengths Survey—researched and developed at the University of Pennsylvania—has produced a reliable measure of what inspires others—their personal intrinsic values—much like Gallup’s StrengthsFinder helps accurately detect personal, cognitive strengths.? Such reliable instruments provide leaders and their teams with windows into how best to use their individual cognitive and character strengths to solve significant problems. And when a leader helps people use their best thinking styles and character traits every day at work, those people become engaged and energized. Also, when all team members understand both the way they think and their essential character strengths—often different from each other—understanding and synergy happen.
Autonomous: Talented people and teams appreciate and value when leaders give them autonomy—allow independent thinking. Unfortunately, vestiges of command-and-control leadership—anathema to autonomous thinking—still exist within too many leaders.? However, over the past two decades, coaching—an accelerator of autonomy—has emerged as an increasingly dominant leadership model. Indeed, the research by Google in Project Oxygen, Dan Goleman in Emotional Intelligence, and others confirms the strength and effectiveness of the coaching model. By asking questions, leaders show respect and even give status to their direct reports. At the same time, coaching leads people to discover the answers to their own problems—the very definition of autonomy. The model that we’ve written about appears in Leading Well: Becoming a Mindful Leader-Coach. It follows the 4 Ps questioning model: 1. Problem: Ask questions to determine the real problem, not just the symptom; 2. Present: Ask about the size and status of the present state—the impact of what’s going on right now; 3. Possible: What’s the ideal possible future state? 4. Plan: What’s the first intentional step you can take toward this possible future ideal state?
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