The Leadership Caffeine™ series is intended to make you think and act.
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“Care for followers is the second most important leader attribute that influences the development of trust… .” from Leadership in Dangerous Situations.
While a leader’s competence is viewed as the most important attribute to engender trust, the fact that he or she genuinely cares about team members is a critical number two.
The emphasis in this excellent collection is of course for military, first-responders and our life-safety (police, fire) public servants, but the content is spot-on for our less threatening but still challenging corporate world. And while I suspect a good many readers may wonder who decided their boss was competent, I’ll leave that for another day and focus here on the caring dimension of leadership.
Simply stated, we can use a whole hell of a lot more authentic caring about our people.
I have the good fortune of gaining hundreds of exposures per year in workshops and classrooms to people who describe the leaders who have helped them change their lives, and it’s no surprise they consistently describe these leaders as people who took a strong interest in them as human beings, rather than as interchangeable parts. Sadly, they also describe these caring leaders as being significantly outnumbered by their more transactional or distant counterparts.
I long ago learned to hire and promote for both brains and heart…my equivalent to the competence and trust highlighted in Leadership in Dangerous Situations. Today, I choose my leadership coaching clients based on a preliminary interview where I have the opportunity to better understand what drives the individual. If it’s all about career climbing based on the efforts of others versus lifting others up and succeeding in the process, I politely opt out. (It’s hard to coach “heart.”)
Some may confuse this issue of caring with being soft. There’s no connection in my experience. Some of the toughest, most professionally demanding s.o.b.s I’ve encountered were the first ones to show up at the loss of a loved one and the first to volunteer help, resources or time when team members faced a crisis. These demanding leaders served as rocks to support rebuilding or recovering. They also suffered visibly when team members they invested in let the team down.
What I love about the caring leaders I’ve known either as an employee, a leader or a consultant/coach, is how comfortable they are in their own skins. They understand their business mission intimately, they take pride in honing their skills and pushing themselves hard and most of all, they recognize and aren’t afraid to show how important each and every individual is as a human and as a team member. They practice what they preach and they unabashedly and unashamedly put the team and their team members ahead of themselves in all things. This takes self-confidence and knowledge of self.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Careers are both long and insanely, ridiculously fast at the same time. In hindsight, there are points in time when I got my priorities out of whack. I suppose I can rationalize my actions as doing what I had to do for the people who mattered, but it’s not always that clear. My advice to my younger self most definitely is to not compromise my conviction for caring…not suspend my humanness in pursuit of someone else’s numbers or transactional goals. Beyond your own competence as a professional, there’s nothing more critical for building trust and ultimately driving results, than showing your team members you genuinely care.
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Absolutely sympathize with this running my own small software business. I’m lucky enough to have a small team of people who I’ve hired over the years largely through personal networks. That’s because I think working with people you trust and like makes caring so much easier. But it is always tough knowing where to draw the line on performance and relationships in a team.
As you say, they are symbiotic but they can also seem like either/or’s when you face challenges around either.
Well said, Andy! I empathize with the challenge you face. Kudos for thinking about/through this challenging topic.