Nurture

As with most things in life, balance is critical. As a people-centered leader, it’s imperative to strike a balance being setting a direction that leads your people to embark upon a challenge ("Direction" was the topic highlighted in last week’s LinkedIn article) with a genuine effort to support your people along the way. As I highlighted in "Direction," the requirements to be an effective, people-centered leader are simple in concept, but more challenging in practice.

People-centered leaders focus on three things — (1) setting direction so that their people are aligned in their efforts to embark upon a challenge; (2) genuinely caring by providing support along the way; and (3) motivating all toward continuous growth by developing themselves and their teams. 

-Katie Anderson

The Balance Between Challenge and Nurture

If a leader only pushes toward a challenge, but does not provide the necessary support to their people in achieving it, the culture of the team will not be a people-centered one. Similarly, if a leader provides lots of activity focused on caring for their team but does so without a direction that they are heading toward, the team may spend a lot of energy on initiatives not aligned with the needed direction. Direction and support — or what I also like to call “challenge” and “nurture” — are like the yin and yang of people-centered leadership. Setting a challenge while providing support are two critically important elements that leaders (and coaches) must provide to their learners to help them grow in confidence and capability – and achieve the necessary targets.

Creating a Learning Environment

Early in my discussions with Isao Yoshino, he shared with me this simple, yet profound, statement: “My role as a leader was to help others to develop themselves.” Over his 40-year career as a Toyota leader, Mr. Yoshino first learned how to lead and, then led others to learn for themselves. He discovered early on in his career that a leader can’t directly develop other people or get them to change; instead, leaders can provide an environment that is conducive to learning and create the conditions by which people can change themselves.

If you are a parent, you can relate to this concept. You can’t teach your child how to walk. However, you can support and nurture them by holding their hand as they stumble, and help them get up when they fall down. You can remove obstacles in your home so that when they get the confidence to take a risk, they can do so safely. There are many things you can do to create an environment conducive to learning, but your child has to take the first step.

The same holds true within your people. You can’t directly change a team member’s mindset, gift them with new skills, or be the source of answers to all of their problems. What you can do, however, is provide them the space to learn and fail, encourage them to learn from their mistakes and persevere when they experience set-backs, and create an environment that supports their success. You can be by their side while they learn new skills, or you can ask them questions to help them discover the answers themselves. You can support and nurture them as they grow and develop.

Providing Ongoing Support and Nurture

As you evaluate how you can best support your people to achieve the targets you’ve set out or the challenges in front of them, consider the unique forms of support that you can provide. Just how we are all given a unique set of strengths, each of us require a customized approach for support and nurturing. Below are three ideas to consider how you can help nurture and support your team as they work directionally towards accomplishing their goals.

• Set the conditions for success. Provide you people with ongoing experiences that help them strengthen their skillsets and develop their confidence. Create conditions that allow them to learn, develop, grow and change in the process. Provide room for learning — and for failing — and put as much energy in learning from failure as you do in celebrating success and achievement.
• Have patience. Learning doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient to allow time for people to think, struggle, fail, and learn. Don’t give in to giving answers just because you want “the answer” right now. Instead, reflect on your intention as a people-centered leader and how you can build in time to allow for learning, trial and error and discovery along the way. Ask more questions rather than just giving “your” answers. Patience will help empower your team to be innovative and take risks, to think more deeply, and generate even more ideas than you could alone, which in turn will create greater organizational. capability to achieve challenges in the future.
• Help when people are stuck. While it is important to allow space for struggle, as struggle is where learning happens, as leaders and coaches we also need to assess when someone is truly stuck. Sometimes, people need us to step in for more nurture and support, to empathize with their challenges, to teach them a new skill, or collaborate together to think through issues.

The role of a leader is to provide a challenge or direction AND support their people to be able to achieve it. Ask yourself how you can provide challenge and nurture – so that you and your team grow together and achieve your goals. Think about how you can be the kind of leader that allows your team to take risks while you take responsibility in creating the conditions for their learning and success. In doing so, you are build trust, camaraderie, and a lifetime of learning opportunities along the way. 

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Katie Anderson is the author of the book Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning, now available paperback and Kindle eBook editions. For more information about Katie Anderson visit www.kbjanderson.com.

Katie has created a series of LinkedIn articles inspired by her conversations with Mr. Yoshino and her own life. These stories highlight just some of the many lessons fully explored in the book.

You can read all the articles in this series via the links below.

1. Perseverance
2. Intention
3. Respect
4. Wisdom
5. Humility
6. Direction
7. Nurture
8. Celebrate

#L2LBook #LearningtoLead #LeadingtoLearn