How Not to Screw Up a New Leader: People (Part 3 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 third of a four-part series to give you an overview of that research. In our first newsletter in this series, we discussed the first critical element of a great team leader: Trust and its three key components: Character, Competence, and Caring. In the second edition, we discussed People and its three fundamental components: Diversity, Engagement, and Autonomy.

In this installment, we'll discuss the third major component of great team leaders: Culture.

Critical Element: Create a Safe and Supportive Culture?

According to Edgar Schein, a world-renowned scholar at MIT, creating a healthy culture is the leader’s most important job. Culture defines "the way we do things around here”—the artifacts, symbols, and assumptions.

Think of culture as an ecosystem—the support system made up of several critical elements—just as the sun, oxygen, and water are necessary to grow plants in a healthy environment. Leaders and people immersed in a culture (an ecosystem) that is safe, connected, and purposeful—make a difference in the world. Briefly, this model is derived from the work of famed psychologists Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg. Here’s the Culture Triangle: People feel safe, connected, and purposeful.

Safe:? At the triangle’s base, psychological safety relates to a secure state of mind that people, teams, and organizations require to produce the kind of innovative thinking that propels them forward in the marketplace of ideas, data, and leadership. Indeed, when people are economically insecure, emotionally bullied, fearful, or hesitant to speak truth to power—their best thinking gets quashed, the truth gets drowned out, and people, teams, and organizations wither and become irrelevant. Great leaders promote safety by listening and treating everyone with respect. Moreover, a coaching leadership style, as mentioned above, is at the heart of psychological safety.

Connected: After people feel psychologically safe and secure, they need to feel connected. We’re pack animals—it’s that simple. Ever since humankind stopped being nomads, we settled down and established “place” as an essential sociobiological concept.? Why? Because together in a place—a tribe, town, city—we work together to support ourselves and to survive literally. When we moved onto farms, we needed each other to help harvest. When we hunted larger animals, we needed superiority of numbers to kill and eat animals that were stronger, larger, and faster than humans. In short, we use our social brains to compete and survive in the world. Today is no different. We must stay connected to compete and survive in a global marketplace.

Purposeful:? Meaning and purpose are linked at the hip. Research today has begun to make distinctions—meaning comes from doing what you do well and love to do. And purpose comes from doing what you love to do in service of the greater good—other people and society. Ultimately, we’re all part of a community—sustained by and sustaining others. It does “take a village” to survive. Leaders who help people do what they love to do and show them how it serves the greater good will attract and retain the best talent.

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