Why leadership needs to change

We keep saying that the world around us is changing, but in many ways we continue to lead, engage and develop our people like we did in the 1980’s. Our leadership approach still tends to be ‘command and control’ and we often follow tired old processes based on ticking boxes to achieve compliance.

Every leader, in every organisation in every sector is trying to create more of four things to ensure we survive and thrive – more agility, more productivity, more collaboration and more innovation.  If we are going to enable our people to be more agile, productive, collaborative and innovative then we need a fundamentally new way of leading them. Here’s a new approach to leadership where we treat employees as adults, individuals and human beings – a framework for leading that can help

Let’s break this down a bit.

Treating employees as Adults

Most organisations have been very parental towards our people. We have the caring parent where we spoon feed everything for them and then we have the critical parent where we try and protect our organisation from the worst behaving employees. Unfortunately, we try and deliver this protection, not by dealing with the small percentage of people who will behave badly, but by creating rules and policies for every eventuality and applying it to everyone.

We are seeing more leaders waking up to the fact that if they want their people to:

● Embrace new ways of working
● Respond to changing customer needs
● Be open to new skills
● Be prepared to speak up and challenge and so on

Then they need to lead in a more adult to adult way.

Adult to adult is about starting from a position of more trust not just to behave well, but to use your judgement and know what’s best for you and your team. It involves moving to high level principles, not policies.  It means changes to our processes so employees themselves can take control of their performance, their career, their development.  And it means new leadership styles that encourage innovation and agility.

Here are some things you could try:

1. Ask your team – ‘which are the rules or policies that frustrate you or get in the way of you doing your best work?’
2. Question whether you lead from a starting point of assuming good intent?
3. When you’re asked for permission or your opinion – try responding with ‘I trust you, use your judgement’ or ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’
4. Use ‘tight, loose, tight’ to help you manage people flexibly, ie:

• Be tight on expectations/outcomes
• Loosen up around how, when and where they deliver
• Get tight again on accountability

Treating employees as individuals

In our human lives we expect our individual needs and preferences to be met through having choices. So why would we think one-size-fits-all leadership approaches would have the right impact?

Leaders can adapt and adopt consumer marketing and product design techniques to help identify what really matters to their team members and provide a tailored approach that really meets their needs and makes them feel valued and perform better. So, for example, you can find out how they like to be managed, how they feel valued, how they like to be communicated with – and adapt your style accordingly.

Here are some things you can try:

1. Ask your team questions to find out more about what makes them tick such as:

• If you were managing you – how would you do it?
• How do you like to be appreciated?

2. How could you change what you do to get the best from them?
3. Ask them ‘what’s the best reward they ever had at work?’
4. Try having ‘stay conversations’.  So many people say that their manager could have done something to prevent them leaving.  Ask questions like ‘Is this role meeting your expectations?’ ‘Am I doing anything that your previous boss did that made you decide to leave?’

Being a Human Leader

We have SO many people processes, but unfortunately, most of them are not actually informed by how humans can say, be encouraged to perform or be more inclusive or feel valued or encouraged to learn new skills. Fortunately, we’re seeing that many of these processes are being redesigned with the human being at their centre.  For example, instead of cumbersome appraisal processes, we’re seeing the move to frequent check-ins with no ratings. Instead of training programmes where learners will forget around 80% of what they’ve learned in 30 days, we’re seeing bite size sessions, or so-called ‘nudge’ learning where you suggest one small thing they can try. We’re also seeing leaders dropping the formal, detached style and just being more – human – so their people can relate to them better.

 Here are some things you can try:

1. Lead your next one to one meeting with questions rather than allocating tasks.
2. At your next team meeting, review how the week/month has gone – and start with reflecting on what you wish you had done differently to make it OK for others to open up.
3. Do you share what’s worrying you with your team? Stronger, confident leaders are comfortable with being vulnerable.
4. How well do you know yourself? How do you react to stress?  If you’re not sure, ask someone you trust to give you some honest feedback.

 Leaders who treat their team members as adults, individuals and human beings are more able to survive and thrive in this disrupted world. It’s time to bring our leadership up to date.