Emotional Intelligence. Relationship building. Put all the psychology, leadership trends, and buzz words away and you’re left with Care.
Over time our patriarchal society has infused the workplace with the message that caring is weakness. Terms like emotional intelligence have become popular and if it makes caring seem more acceptable, I’m all for it. Call it whatever name or phrase that you need to so that you do it. It all boils down to caring.
I have transformed organizations – exceeding business goals, executing strategies, modernizing business areas, improving culture, and raising the performance and profile of previously maligned work groups.
The secret to all of the above? I care.
What does care mean to you? Does it sound weak? Do you feel caring doesn’t have a place at work (except for caring about products, services, or the bottom line)? Are you afraid to be vulnerable with or humble before your people?
Consider the stereotypical boss characterization. Demanding long hours or yelling at personnel to meet a deadline. He cares, of course. Now survey his team. I guarantee their opinion of him won’t be good. His care is misdirected. If we’re optimistic his care is, at a minimum, out of balance.
The greatest success for a leader is a reputation of care for your people.
Reflect with me. If you care about someone you get to know them. You strive to understand what they like or don’t like. That’s relationship building and you already intuitively know how to do it.
Let’s imagine that you coach a soccer team and your personality clashes with one of your players. You would naturally be inclined to build less of a relationship with them. Alternatively, the player might not want a relationship with you except “coach” so you let that play out. Then, they get injured and you race across the field to them because you care about the team performance.
The player sees that connection came only when their contribution and output was in question and internalizes they are a mere commodity to you.
Did it register with you who else made that same internalization? The rest of your team. The “what if’s” begin. Overall performance suffers as a result.
A great coach would seek out that player and identify common ground (hint: they’re both in soccer so something is there). You would then understand what motivates them, or their interests, and determine how to maximize their performance. You might change their assignment to something that better fits their natural abilities or interests. Either way you improved the team because you were emotionally intelligent or, you guessed it, cared.
A focus on outcomes and people drives optimized results.
Care is vital to success. When employees know their manager cares about them the positive outcomes increase.
- Communicating ideas
- Job satisfaction
- Productivity
- Sense of belonging
- Thinking “outside the box”
Knowing your business, implementing processes and controls, and understanding how your work unit contributes to the whole is important and needed for success. However, caring for and about your people will return results that exceed your expectations.
You can’t, and shouldn’t, be friends with everyone. You must; however, have a relationship with everyone even if you can only find one connection point with some of your team. If you’re leading larger organizations, you’ll need to start with your management team and encourage them to do the same with their people.
Care breeds success. Care enhances performance. Care drives people to want to work with you.
Start small. Relationships take time. If you’ve been that stereotypical “boss” you may notice people are suspicious of your motives, at first.
Try anyway.
Start somewhere.
Be genuine.
Have patience.
Improve yourself.
Be a leader.