Mindful Leadership - How ‘Awareness of Others’ Helps Create Productive & Happy Teams

Let’s discuss practical empathy in leadership.

A core competency of an emotionally intelligent leader is Awareness of Others – the ability to appreciate another’s perspective and adapt an approach according to that perspective. We experience a leader with this key quality as being empathetic, and there is no greater demonstration of this functional empathy than recognition that all others have career aspirations and goals just as important to them as ours are to us.

Emotionally intelligent leaders encourage others to embrace their vision and adopt it as their own – by aligning themselves with the goals and aspirations of their people. It is this ability to create a truly shared vision that makes the emotionally intelligent leader so appealing to so many people – and it is this other-awareness that facilitates emotionally intelligent leaders in achieving the high levels of employee engagement that drive their superior results.

Emotionally intelligent people focus on answering the question every single one of us need answered before we can engage: ‘What’s In It For Me?’ (WIIFM). To become an emotionally intelligent leader you must customise your overall vision so that each and every member of your team sees specifically what making it come to pass will mean to them personally – assuring them that helping you to achieve yours will help them to achieve theirs.

Concerned about your ability to get to know all your staff? David Neeleman, charismatic founder of JetBlue Airlines advises, “We have one supervisor for every 80 people. I can’t know 7,000 people.” But I tell the supervisors ‘you can know 80 people. You can know who they’re married to, you can know who their kids are, what their challenges are’. They know we will deal with their issues, make them feel like there is a personal touch at the company.”

Personalising Your Vision

To personalise your vision in this manner you need to know more about your people:

1. What are their particular personal strengths - and how can you employ those strengths in a way that dramatically bolsters their self-esteem and sense of contribution? How will working toward your vision help them to become even better in their areas of strength?
2. What are their professional development needs - and how can you help them to overcome any challenges they have in their skill set or abilities? How can you help them to become all they are capable of becoming?
3. What are their personal goals – both inside and outside the organisation? What do they want to achieve in their lives? Where do they want their careers to take them? How can your vision help them to make theirs come to pass?
4. How do they define success? Until you know each of your direct reports’ definition of success is then you cannot help them to achieve it. You must know what is important to them. What will make them feel like they have really achieved? It’s not the same for all people. Facilitate a group workshop or individual meeting where you ask each person to write on a whiteboard (or document it) “What does success look like to you?” Use that as motivator. Encourage them to keep these goals on a whiteboard or pinned up in their office so they see them regularly.
5. What are their greatest interests: what motivates them? Are they doing what they would really passionately like to be doing? If so, how would success in making your vision a reality help them to get even more from their work? Is your leadership helping them embrace these interests?: Can you craft a career for them that they could not get elsewhere?
6. What can you they learn from you as they work with you on achieving their goals? How will your coaching and mentoring along the way set them up to more effectively target their life’s goals? What do you know that they’d like to know – and how can you help them to learn from you?

The primary way for you to uncover what you need to know about each of your people is one-to-one coaching, conversations and interaction. Spend sufficient time with each and every one of your people, on an ongoing basis, that you get to know their concerns as well as your own. Don’t just do this to be "seen doing it...” actively listen to your people. Document the conversations so you can monitor and ensure you’re both working towards your goals. These tactics will make you more empathetic – building engagement naturally with your people.

Then go one step further. Use this knowledge it to ensure that when you get what you want they get what they want – ensure it’s a genuine win-win for all parties involved. Any time you talk about your vision, you’ll be talking about theirs too – and when you talk of what you want and need from them to help the organisation succeed they’ll hear the response to the WIIFM question.

“In these days of talent wars, the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves—and then use that information to customize the careers of their dreams.”- Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People - Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, Harvard Business Review.

If you want to inspire your people and assure dedication and productivity required to make your vision come to pass... Create a vision that gives their work both a sense of meaning and mission – and ensure that when you benefit from a successful outcome then so do they.

That’s practical, productive emotional intelligence from an empathetic leader.

If you'd like to learn more about emotional intelligence and mindfulness in leadership, join our ongoing free Mindful Leader Programme.