[Strategy] You Are Doing Great Things, I Know It…

Performance evaluations, feedback, criticism and “suggestions for improvement” in people’s performance all serve as ways to separate leaders from followers.

Employees

We had a conversation this week about caring (see here) and we keep coming back to the idea when we think about how leaders should encourage their followers’ hearts. Most of the time, people analyze what we do—as either leaders or followers—and then make judgments about our performance. Often this judgment is then equated with a person’s character, wisdom or ethics.

But organizations and institutions can’t—and don’t—care. Only people do. And in order to encourage people to continue to follow, leaders must care about the people that they are leading, enough to guide them through the necessary risks to execute the mission.

Performance evaluations, feedback, “suggestions for improvement,” criticism, and many other forms of feedback are often used as a cover for the vulnerability that really caring about followers requires.

“But what do you do if people aren’t doing the ‘right’ thing and screwing up the process?”

This question is a corporate variation on “How do you tell the truth in grace to someone?” and it’s an excellent one. Here are three ideas:

  • Know what you care about as a leader and why—Some leaders care about process more than people. If that’s the case, recognize and praise the process, rather than attempting to recognize and praise the person.
  • Be genuine with yourself as a leader—Some leaders struggle with self-awareness. But feedback, criticism and other forms of “improvement” lectures don’t work, and can often be seen as blameing and excuse making. Being genuine with yourself means care about what your role is before caring about your followers’ roles.
  • Seek to understand first—Some leaders are self-absorbed, narcissistic and vainglorious. Harsh sounding words, yes, but in a world where genuine recognition of others is the only way to effectively encourage a heartful followership, a leader must seek to understand their followers’ hearts—and care about them.

In the short run, caring about people and building relationships is the only way to go for a leader. Celebration and rituals, combined with the importance of symbols, done with authenticity and heartfelt pride in ones followers, can do more to cement long term growth than any amount of money, service development or process change.

Encouraging the heart requires caring about people and creating long term, value based relationships.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] It Is Easier…

It is easier to sit and wait for a situation to change because of external circumstances, than it is to do the hard work of failing.

CRaaS In the Workplace

It is easier.

  • Just like it is easier to ignore conflicts in your midst and act like nothing is going wrong inside of your organization, your family, your neighborhood, or even your country.
  • Just like it is easier to shrug your shoulders and let “someone else” do the hard work of confronting, challenging and changing your world (in the social sciences we call this the Bystander Effect).
  • Just like it is easier to put your metaphorical head down, plow forward and only look up when the week is over, the client/customer seems “satisfied” or the “job is done.”

The hard emotionally challenging work of trying and potentially failing is not for the faint of heart. It requires commitment, perseverance, grit, resiliency, accountability and a sense of responsibility to the people, the process, the change and the outcome.

Leaders in organizations that honor this hard, emotional labor flourish. Those in organizations that don’t, falter and eventually quit—quite trying, quit failing, even quit caring.

In our most recent presentation to a corporate group, we encouraged the leaders in the room to lead and to take up the mantle of failure in three ways:

  • Understand yourself first—We keep going back to it, but from understanding conflict, to understanding leadership, to understanding communication: physician heal thyself.
  • Care about the process—People don’t lead who don’t care about people, relationships, or processes. This is a tough realization and a man in the presentation came up to us and said “I realize after you said that people don’t lead who don’t care, that I often tell people that I don’t care and that ‘it takes a lot to offend me, so don’t even try.’ Maybe I should change that.”

Yes.

  • Build relationships—In any organization, whether it’s a family, a neighborhood or a company, we can only successfully lead through building relationships with people, not processes. People change before things.

One last point: Commitment, ethics, integrity and character in challenging the process must be in place before leadership through challenging the process can truly begin. Teach and nurture commitment and leadership will follow.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] This Moment of Clarity

Leadership requires faithfulness to be effective.

Designing_A_System_For_The_21st_Century

It is often to followers that the character of faithfulness is required to be demonstrated:  Faithfulness to the leaders’ vision, mission, values and goals.

But rarely is it asked if the person leading the parade has to be faithful to the participants and followers in the parade, and to larger missions, visions and goals.

In order to develop faithfulness from within, leaders must be emotionally and spiritually clear about what their personal values are, as well as how those values either do—or don’t—fit with larger organizational values.

But how does a leader get such clarity?

  • Engage with self-awareness – Find out about what makes you tick as a leader, and why.
  • Develop a mentality of stewardship – A steward preserves first, maintains second and manages last.  A steward also remembers that people come first, processes come second and money comes third.
  • Be a follower AND a leader – Earning respect is about honoring the accomplishments of others who came before your leadership; and demurring on the drawbacks and mistakes of those same others.

Leaders who aren’t internally and externally clear about where they are going, and about how their values align with the organizations and the groups that they seek to lead, can’t ever hope to be more than managers of the process to get there.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/