Welcome back to Relationships At Work – Your guide to building workplace connections and avoiding leadership blindspots.. I’m your host Russel Lolacher
I’m a communications and leadership nerd with a couple of decades of experience and a heap of curiosity on how we can make the workplace better. If you’re a leader trying to understand and improve your impact on work culture and the employee experience, you’re in the right place.
This mini-episode is a quick and valuable bit of information on top of our regular show.
Inspired by our R@W Note Newsletter, I’m passing on to you…
Passing Our Daily Leadership Tests
Curiosity is essential as a good to great leader. Asking questions. Digging deeper. A lack of curiosity is one of the 7 deadly sins of leadership I talk about. But it's not just about the environment and cultures we impact that we need to be curious about, but about our leadership. Ours. How we show up. How we interact with others. How we act? How we don’t act?
How do we know how good our leadership really is? I was going to say "how effective our leadership is" but bad leadership can also have a hell of an effect too.
So, let's focus on the quality of our leadership.
What are our regular leadership tests for yourself? We need these to assess ourselves, so that we can adjust, tweak, realign… whatever you want to call it, so we aren’t hurting our teams or cultures. How else will we know what training we need? Or what kind of leadership we’re modeling for others?
Here are a few opportunities for that leadership self-assessment to consider:
1. Response to Failure or Crisis: How we as leaders react to failure or a crisis is a significant test of our leadership. Great leaders take responsibility, learn from their mistakes, and view challenges as opportunities for growth. They remain calm and composed during these events, providing clear direction and support to their team during difficult times. Because if the leader is calm, it signals to the team that they have less to worry about.
A bad leader gets defensive, lays blame, panics, and doesn't learn for next time.
So lets look at a recent failure or crisis – big and small. It could be the size of the pandemic or an email that didn’t have the right tone. For example: If we feel like we did an amazing job and have no notes for ourselves to improve, that’s a pretty big red flag.
2. Employee Engagement and Satisfaction: The level of engagement and satisfaction our team members have is a direct reflection of a leader’s effectiveness. Leaders who inspire, motivate, and respect their employees will more likely have teams that are more committed, productive, and satisfied with their work. The opposite, not so great. It includes regular turnover, high number of sick days, lack of innovation, lack of communication. Regular feedback from team members, through surveys or open forums, can provide insights into how we as leaders are impacting on our team. We can’t just assume any problems have nothing to do with us. Or jump to excuses if we don’t like the answers. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn.
3. Decision-Making Process: Observing a leader’s decision-making process can reveal so much about their leadership style and effectiveness. Great leaders make informed decisions by gathering necessary information, considering different perspectives, weighing the pros and cons, being decisive and owning the consequences. They are also transparent about their decision-making process, explaining their rationale to their team. Not so great leaders keep their reasons to themselves, lack collaboration, have an "I know best" approach or take no accountability for their decisions. Employee impact isn’t a real consideration. So, how open is our decision-making processes. FYI – that includes hiring.
4. Adaptability and Learning Orientation: The willingness and ability of a leader to adapt to changing circumstances and to continuously learn are crucial. It’s far too fast paced of a world for it not to. Good leaders are open to new ideas, embrace change, and are committed to their own personal and professional development through that change. They are far more likely to lead their organizations successfully through this change and any innovation. Bad leaders on the other hand, again, the oppositive of all that. Are rigid, keep talking negatively about any new changes, or don’t listen or respect anything to do with legacy. They’re either too stuck in the past to embrace change or too far into the future to respect what’s come before.
As leaders, where do we sit if we were to assess ourselves? No one is going to be perfect. There’s always room for improvement. That’s the point. But we need to make sure we’re tipping in far more of the good direction than the bad.
And we can’t be an island in this. It’s important we add to our self-assessments by getting feedback from staff and weighing that feedback far heavily than from our colleagues and our bosses. Our teams are the ones being led after all. Leadership quality is measured by the teams we lead, not by who we report to or work beside.
So what's next? Information or data, like this is meaningless if we don't do something about it.
Curiosity. Then Information. Then action.
Leadership is not something bestowed upon us. We aren’t the royal family. For the betterment of ourselves and our teams, we have to operationalize our leadership or it gets taken for granted. It will become about productivity. Not Leadership.
This is something we have to earn, every single day.
