If you’re going to build and maintain profits and capital value in your firm, you’ll need the wholehearted support of a group of human beings. Your people, your staff, your employees.
Yes, whatever your firm does, it has to work for your clients. But ultimately your clients stay, pay and say (how good you are to others) because of the things your team of humans do or don’t do.
Only when you create an environment that builds trust and cooperation with your team will you help your people be at their natural best.
And when your people are at their natural best, they will do everything they can to support your business.
Help people be at their natural best
Create an environment that acknowledges the humanity of the people that choose to work with you every day. Create an environment that reaffirms that they have chosen well the firm they work for.
As a leader or manager challenge yourself every day to provide two things for everyone in your team:
- Empathy – genuine care about your people’s wellbeing
- Perspective – longer term, common sense, bigger picture, what matters most perspective
Like Simon Sinek so eloquently puts it “The real job of a leader is to take care of the people in our charge not to be in charge!”
Empathy and perspective help you do this.
Challenge your leadership habits
Leadership is a skill, or rather a set of skills. Skills that can be learned and improved if we’re serious about our business.
Your current leadership skills and habits are generating the results you are seeing now.
The results you achieve in the coming months and years will be a reflection of the improvement in your leadership skills (or not!).
Your key leadership challenge
It’s stating the blatantly obvious to say that everyone has the capacity to be a parent.
But to be a good parent requires sacrifice – time, money, effort, sleep!
To be a good leader also requires a similar sacrifice.
For example: When something goes wrong, a mistake, a cock-up, you show genuine care for their wellbeing (empathy – they never intended to cock it up, they did their best with the skills and knowledge they have). Next, you bring a long-term perspective to the situation and pull up a chair to work with your employee, help them build skill and invest in their future (and your business future too), even if it makes you late home or less able to complete another task.
This sacrifice results in your team trusting your more and cooperating more.
All because you’re helping your people be at their natural best.
Your next step to leadership with the human touch
Here’s how the Ritz Carlton see their team as the source of the hotel’s success, also check out how Wainwright Industries also committed to their people and turned a failing £2.4m turnover business into a growing £70m business.
Are you up for the challenge?
This blog was inspired by this 15 minute YouTube video from Simon Sinek on Empathy – how do you stack up as a leader as defined by Simon Sinek?