I’m watching every member of my immediate family go through a challenging workplace change. For some it’s a change in location, for one it’s a complete coworker migration, and for some it’s an unplanned change of employer.
For all of us it’s been a somewhat stressful time.
In every case, the root cause is the same: they suffer from crappy leadership.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes, King Soloman declares: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
So it is with leadership.
I’ve noticed Leadership Development trends go through the same cycles every aspect of business that is hypothesized, analyzed, and reimagined goes through. The Good Idea Fairy comes down and introduces a new way of thinking, doing, and communicating, and a few years later the nay-sayers get their turn to decry the waste of resources trying to do something different.
That could explain why some in senior leadership roles seem to think they’re above leadership development. They don’t participate in the development of others and certainly won’t willingly participate in their own. In both cases, leadership development efforts are wasted.
Nothing new under the sun.
To validate Kevin Berchelmann’s belief (which I share) that nothing much has changed about leadership in the past couple thousand years, I traveled back in time to see what the trends in effective leadership have been in the past. Here’s how some of those who have experienced effective leadership described them to me:
The BEST leaders are “trustworthy approachable, open to feedback, humble, good communicators, willing to help, team players;” they “listen, care, motivate and encourage, build rapport, give recognition, and follow up.”
It naturally follows that the WORST leaders are not… and don’t…
These were not new trends ten years ago, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. But these are just trends. Leaders do these things (or not), but they aren’t the essence of leading. The workplace will never stop changing, but leaders will always have to deal with human nature.
I love this description of leadership, recently penned by W.C.H. Prentice in HBR:
“Effective leaders take a personal interest in the long-term development of their employees, and they use tact and other social skills to encourage employees to achieve their best. It isn’t about being “nice” or “understanding”—it’s about tapping into individual motivations in the interest of furthering an organizationwide [sic] goal.”
By “recently,” I mean in 1961.
See, once you understand and embrace the belief that a leader’s role is to empower others to be more successful for the benefit of the organization, you can’t unknow it.
If you’re in a leadership position, it doesn’t matter that you were the best project manager, the best lawyer, the best nurse, the best widget maker, hell… even the best consultant in the whole world. It’s not about you anymore; it’s about them.
- We have to be concerned about the well-being of our others. If they don’t believe we care, they’re not going to give us their discretionary effort, and we know that stressed out workers are less productive.
- We need to have emotionally intelligent leadership skills: compassion, empathy, self-awareness, and effective communication. Contrary to popular belief, EI wasn’t invented by Daniel Goleman in 1995. And these are skills that will atrophy if not used.
- We have to work to rebuild trust where it’s damaged or missing. Trust is often called the currency of leadership, and I can only describe the level of trust in many organizations as abysmal. To be trusted, a leader has to have competence, compassion, and integrity, and you have to give it before you get it.
- We need to have – and communicate – a vision that keeps up with changes in the market sector and in the workplace. Maybe especially in the workplace, because work is something you do, not somewhere you go. Whether or not we subscribe to hybrid work, DEI (which is dead, by the way), or AI in the workplace, we can’t pretend our workforce isn’t thinking and talking about it.
That may seem like a lot of need to and have to, but no one – not even wise old King Soloman – ever said leading was easy.
If you need a quick check up on how to be the kind of leader Professor Prentice described, Kevin B. recently posted a piece that cuts through all the fluff to make it about them for the benefit of the organization. It’s worth the quick read.
Crappy leadership isn’t new. But it doesn’t have to be part of our future.
It’s up to you, leaders.
