Why care and compassion must be prioritised to truly engage your workforce

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 is now out, and, as always, an interesting read.

The key message from their reports over a number of years has been that to improve life at work, ie engagement, focus on leaders, and developing leadership capability. In work environments where people are cared about, supported to learn and grow, and recognised for doing great work, they thrive.

Gallup provides an important message around one of the big topics for discussion throughout the pandemic – stress and wellbeing – it isn’t that we feel stress that is the problem. We don't get out of bed if we don’t feel a little stress, and we don’t solve difficult problems without some stress – in this regard, stress is a normal, helpful part of daily life, and it’s inherent in doing a job well.

It becomes a bad thing when workplaces that don’t pay attention to – or actually completely disregard – the stress levels of their workers, and when workers are not attuned to notice and manage their own stress levels themselves.

Not surprisingly, the Report repeats what we know from burnout research: the most common sources of stress are unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, unclear communications from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressures. That’s pretty much the recipe for burnout. And it’s pretty much about how the boss treats you.

A manager’s effect on a workplace is so significant that Gallup can predict 70% of the variance in team engagement just by getting to know the boss.

Why an engaging leadership style should be our #1 priority

The pressures on leaders are equally high – perhaps more so. How do you get your own work done and take care of everyone else in an unrelentingly demanding environment?

That’s what this article is all about. It’s not about beating up leaders! It’s all about how to help leaders get above the daily grind, and get back in touch with their caring selves. Pressures, the grind, they all distract you from your basic humanity, a bit like water torture, one drip at a time. Before you know it you’re fractured from yourself, you’re not leading as you intend to, and there you go, now you’re beating yourself up and that’s yet another source of pressure!!

Let’s take a pause….. how to get back to the ‘real you’? How to get back into alignment with what you feel is right, and with the leader you mean to be. You can refocus your leadership style and actions back to what it is that helps people to feel engaged at work, and that helps you to feel congruent and satisfied as a leader.

Your actions should facilitate, strengthen, connect and inspire people. When they do you help people to fulfill their basic yet important needs for autonomy, competence, relatedness and meaning at work. When these needs are fulfilled, energy, dedication and absorption, otherwise known as work engagement, also increases. And then directly affects the performance of both individuals and teams.

Why leaders still need to be more caring in 2023

Being caring and compassionate is the best way to counteract the issue of heavy workloads and expectations of more, more, more that are following us into yet another year. It’d be good to think that we can change those conditions - after the tumultuous last few years we might have been hoping for a bit of ‘steady as she goes’…… However, 2023 is shaping up to have its own challenges with the economy, layoffs, environmental considerations and the many uncertainties we face there.

In his recent book Josh Bersin implores us to create organisations that are ‘Irrestistible’ and he lays out the 7 ‘secrets’ of the most employee—focused organisations globally.

While his book explores how to do this more from an overall organisation and HR leadership perspective, there are some simple things that leaders can do every day that will make their teams and their leadership irresistible, and it starts with caring and compassion.

If you care about your teams and their experience of work, truly have compassion for them, then you will be prepared to gift them your time. This isn’t at all easy to do, as there are many demands on your time.?Setting up the right systems and processes to remind you to regularly spend quality time with your team members allows you to:

• Understand what motivates them to do the work they do, and help them find meaning and purpose in their work
• Understand what inspires them, and help them to stay inspired
• Give them a sense of hope that their efforts have value and encourage them to persevere to grow their confidence and success into the future
• Provide them with recognition – show how the work they do creates value and how appreciative you are of what they contribute.

Which of these areas might it be helpful for you to tweak? How might you find more ways to show your team you care?

Let's explore this model of how, and where to invest your time, in more detail.

How to expand your time by gifting it regularly to others

Time is the greatest gift a leader can give, said Phil Turnbull in Episode 9 of Leadership Amplified a year or so ago.

Back then, Phil said that giving time to team members is always important, especially in our then COVID-19 environment.?With hybrid ways of working, it remains important even if it is perhaps a little less clear how you do it effectively remotely.

Phil says that there should be a deliberate, intentional focus on investing time in team members, it’s not something that’s incidental. A genuine, open and honest conversation should buoy up both team members as well as the leader.

As a caring, compassionate leader, you prioritise time to spend with your team. It is the greatest gift you can give – your time, and your attention, to focus on creating connection through purpose, increasing inspiration, promoting optimism and hope, and providing recognition for what they contribute.

Doing this deepens the leader:team member relationship and that enables you to lead that person more effectively, boosting their growth and opening their thinking to new ideas and change. Richard Boyatzis and Anthony (Tony) Jack explain the science behind this in their article ‘The Neuroscience of Coaching’.

Even better, this process of listening and attending with compassion helps to activate our ‘rest-and-digest’ mechanism, reducing stress and promoting renewal.

This is possibly the best wellbeing program an organisation could have – meaningful relationships between leaders and their team that promote purpose and inspiration, create positive emotions, promote safety and enable personal growth.

Your time expansion comes from both the feeling of renewal as well as a more committed, more capable, higher performing team.

All it needs is your time. Time just doesn’t magically create itself – if only it did – so to prioritise the time you spend with your team:

• Create your intention – be clear with yourself first about what it is you want to do and what result you seek
• When you’re clear about it, communicate your intentions to your team. Signal what you will be doing, ask for their feedback and suggestions
• Set aside time in your calendar – both structured time AND reminders to interact less formally – this time is not about the problems you want solved stat, but is about the person and their growth
• Keep a reflective journal to notice what’s changing and/or use the progress principle of a daily checkin with what’s working, what’s not, and what you will do differently tomorrow to spend more time with your team.

How satisfied are you with how you spend your time? Is there enough focus on your team? What can you do to improve the way you spend your time, and how might you gift more of your time to your team?

How to help people see how their purpose is honoured in their work

When I coach leaders, an important part of our conversations is purpose. What is their purpose, how much does their work enable them to live their purpose, what, if any, contradictions exist between their purpose and what they do?

It is surprisingly difficult to nail a succinct purpose description. The broad intent is usually very clear, to make a difference, but just what that difference is can be somewhat harder to articulate.

‘I help people see things clearly’ was how one executive recently nailed it. (Which was apt in more than one way!) It might seem pretty basic for an exec engaged in complex negotiations where there are multiple, conflicting views and it’s easy to get stuck. What they do and how they do it clamour for attention, creating a wordiness and a formality to earlier versions that just complicated the expression of their purpose.

What we want to identify is why they do what they do, and this of course in part is why they are good at it. In this simplified form, it was easy for the exec to see how the purpose applied not just to work, but to other areas of their life, and how it has been a hallmark of their approach to all sorts of circumstances over their adult life.

Why does this matter? Allowing people to be authentic in their self-expression delivers better organisational outcomes than traditional practices that have people fitting into organisational norms and identities. Work shouldn’t just allow, it needs the expression of individual’s purposes and purposefulness to thrive.

Most people want to feel a good sense of fit and alignment to their organisation as much as it benefits organisations when they do. To get a common sense of purpose you need to help people feel congruent, that there is a strong perception of person-organisation fit.

The better the sense of person-organisation fit, the more the basic psychological needs for meaning, connection and belonging are met.

Here’s how to honour individual team members purposes:

• Engage your caring, compassionate self
• Take the time to know what people’s own sense of purpose is – spend time, listen attentively and help them figure it out if it’s not clear
• Talk about purpose in the team, identify disruptions and connections between the organisation’s and team members’ purposes
• Show the alignment between what is most meaningful to the team and what the organisation strives to do.

By doing this you honour the person, and their work.

What opportunities do you have to build greater connection between individual’s purposes and the organisation’s?

Six questions to help you discover what others find most inspiring in their work

Just by showing up in your work relationships with a caring and compassionate mindset, and devoting time to building relationship with your team, you’ll make a big difference to them. Just doing that will inspire them.

I’m in strong agreement with - inspired by - this Diane Ackerman quote:

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the full width of it as well.

My motivation for work, and my sense of accomplishment from work has to be inspiring to grant me that.

Discussing the power of inspiration in a recent coaching conversation, the exec said, ‘but I’m not inspiring’. The good news is you don’t have to be an ‘inspiring person’ to inspire others. Instead, if you understand how inspiration works, you can set others up to experience it.

As Boyatzis, Smith and Van Oosten say, the heart of inspiration AND influence is helping people dream big and supporting and encouraging them to achieve their dreams.

Inspiring conversations about who we are and who we want to be make us want to develop and change, and they help us to put the effort in to do so. Granting your time to your team to help them understand who they want to be is a powerful gift.

What can you do to have more conversations that inspire? Ask big open questions about the person and their aspirations.?Here are six to play with:

• What is your personal vision for the future?
• What is your ideal self at work?
• What do you find most inspiring about your work?
• In what circumstances are you at your very best at work?
• How are you fulfilling your purpose at work?
• What are you most hopeful about?

Don’t ask them all at once! Keep the focus positive and optimistic, don’t fall into the trap of focusing in too soon on what’s going wrong, or what’s not possible. Start with possibility and once that’s identified and you can see the energy that’s created, then move on to work out what needs to be done to make it a reality.

How to increase hope through more confidence and perseverance

I can imagine some people reading this heading and thinking what does hope have to do with engagement, performance and outcomes? That’s a good question, and should be asked!

Organisations cannot survive without hope.

Every time a leader sets a goal or attempts to do something new, there is an expectation that the goal will be achieved or the new thing accomplished. That takes hope.

Hope is a positive motivational state that involves having a sense of goal-directed energy (I can do this) and an awareness of how to achieve your goals (I know how to make progress). According to Shane J Lopez, hope leads to a 14% increase in productivity.

Hope is a hidden wellspring for organisations, despite it being taken for granted. I think, if we think about it at all, we tend to see hope as a limitless well from which to draw. Yet, not succeeding is always a possibility. And sometimes a reality.

The well can run dry, as Katina Sawyer and Judy Clair pointed out recently.

Hope, it’s complicated.

Things they think you should know about hope, to use it more effectively:

1. Hope isn’t a guarantee – it can be a double-edged sword and requires the recognition that the present is not ideal and that while success is desired, failure to eg, achieve a future vision, is also possible
2. Hope is contagious - the more hopeful you are, the more hopeful others will be
3. Hope takes effort – a vision for the future should be realistic so that a sense of hope can be maintained.

To inspire hope, you can:

• Engage people in setting their own goals, as well as team and organisational goals
• Be realistic and positive about what can be hoped for
• Demonstrate confidence by telling people you know they can do it
• When there are setbacks, focus discussion on what is still possible and/or remind people of what it was like in the past when they were making good progress
• Celebrate progress, particularly by focusing on their sense of personal agency and perseverance in working towards goals.

How do you use hope to encourage and support people in their work? How could you increase the sense of hope that (you and) your team members experience?

Six ways to help people feel appreciated and recognised for their work

Appreciation is an important part of showing you care because it lets people know they are valued. As Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan say,

Appreciation is like pumping oxygen into the system.

Appreciation breathes life and energy into people.

A lot of leaders value their teams more than they let on. In a recent conversation with a leadership team there were as many views on this as there were people. Some think it but don’t say it as much as they would like to. Some feel awkward and aren’t quite sure what to say. There are some who think it’s a little gratuitous. Some make it a priority.

The first thing to do is to tune in to what others are doing.?The next is to take a particular mindset:

I want what’s best for you.

Appreciation and recognition then flow with a generative energy that will be welcomed by your team.

The six levels of appreciation and recognition range from small pieces of admiration?and appreciation up to public awards. Their place in the pyramid suggests both how much that type of recognition should be used, and also how public it should be. (It’s a guide, not a prescription.)

• Admiration and appreciation should be given frequently, regularly, and in private, eg ‘I’ve really enjoyed our discussion, you’ve given me something to think about’
• Positive feedback should be regular and about small daily achievements, eg ‘I’ve noticed that you are saying quite a lot more in our team meetings and that’s helping the team pay better attention to what our customers are asking for’
• Constructive feedback, designed to focus on what can be improved is best given privately, regularly (It doesn’t have to be deficit focused, but might be), eg, ‘Saying more in our team meetings is having a terrific impact on our decision quality; what would be a great next step would be to push back against some of the more risky ideas that other team members suggest. You have some great insights that would help us even more.’
• Personal recognition is about calling out an individual’s achievements and contribution over time, for example, consistent performance, helpfulness, meeting of challenges. It might be private, but might also be given in the team
• Team recognition is low key public recognition, for example, employee of the month for the team/department, or calling out a person’s particular contribution towards a project milestone
• Public awards are whole of organisation awards that are very public, are awarded less frequently, and might also be competitive.

Which of these kinds of recognition is your comfort zone? How might that affect the recognition you give to others? How might you increase people’s sense of appreciation and recognition? What gaps can you fill?

Caring increases engagement increases performance

Overall, in their Global Workplace Report Gallup found that 21% of employees are engaged and 33% of them feel that they are thriving.

In Australia and New Zealand the numbers are lower than the Global average, and alarming: 17% of employees are engaged and 11% are thriving.

There’s plenty of room for improvement.

Given that Australia and New Zealand rank highest of all regions on ‘Living comfortably on present income’ (55% versus the global average of 22%), the focus for leaders is clear. It's not (so much) about the money – instead increase your care and compassion to increase people’s connection and sense of meaning at work.

My blueprint shows you four levers by which you can do this, and you will increase energy, dedication and absorption in work. And the good news is that it’s not just your people who will thrive when you do these things, you will too! The even better news is that individual and team performance will improve in tandem.

Want to realign with the real you? I can help you with that - click on the link below to discover more about how my coaching can help you to be the leader you mean to be.

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