PEr Chronicles: Culture starts with you

“Bare Minimum Mondays” and “acting your wage” were the “quiet quitting” slogans workers lived by during the Great Resignation. Now, around 1 in 5 employees are “loud quitting” or actively disengaged, according to a recent report from Gallup. The actions of frustrated loud quitters damage morale, reduce productivity, increase turnover, and increase burden of work on those who remain.

At some point along the way, the trust between employee and leader was severely broken. Credibility, like virginity, can only be lost once, and never recovered.

Influence is not the power to make people do things. Influence only comes through credibility – the extent to which your people know you, believe you, trust you and respect you.

Real is a two-way street.

I’m not a fan of the sandwich feedback technique so frequently taught in management training (ie, giving positive feedback, offer your criticism, close with something positive). It’s way to much for people to hear, and the positive aspects often end up feeling like BS. You’re much better off starting from a place of genuine caring and being direct.

People want the truth. Not spin. Most people will respect you far more for being real than any elegant positioning you can concoct.

Be open to the truth of others. Be real with your team and let them be real with you. It may not seem like it at the tie, but I’ve found that most folks do appreciate the truth, even when it’s hard to hear. Transparency doesn’t mean sharing every detail. Transparency means providing the context for the decisions we make.

We do not pay the best salaries. We don’t have the best employee benefits package. So what is the “special sauce” that makes people stick around? The answer is this: a powerful combination of passion, authenticity and purpose.

Even though I hope I am a fairly good boss today, I readily admit that I have been a far from perfect boss in the past. I can remember vividly how on so many occasions I simply did not handle stress or disappointment well. In fact, I was sometimes just plain bad. In the early years of my career, I would often confuse a desire to get a job done with the real capacity for someone else to actually do the job. In other words, back then if people were not getting something accomplished, often-times it was because I unreasonably expected them to be superhuman or because I was not giving them the time or the tools to achieve the task at hand.

Today I show up with a simple question for our employees: “What can I do to help you do your job?” Most of the time the answer is, nothing at all, but staff members usually appreciate that I asked, and that I really listened when they responded. Employees want to know that their leader takes an interest in them for the long term and wants them to succeed.

?Leadership boils down to making those who work for you successful.