Strap in, this is a long one.
Earlier today I was thinking about justice, especially powerful men getting away with crimes in the workplace because the #MeToo movement still hasn't really affected the judicial system. I have a personal interest, my daughter. I felt powerless and was racking my brain trying to think of what I could do to make the working world a better and safer place for her when she eventually enters it.
So, I decided that I would write down what good leaders do, in the hopes that maybe someone would read it. Whether you agree or disagree, the seed would be planted and just maybe you'd be a little bit better as a leader than you would have been otherwise, and if I reach enough people, maybe that could have a positive effect.
So, I'd like to get this community's thoughts on what I wrote. I still want to post it to LinkedIn, since I see a lot of corporate half measures and general toxicity there. Maybe I’m just shouting into the wind, but I don't know what else to do.
Okay, with that preamble out of the way, here you go.
Good Leadership in the workplace
Compassion is the hallmark of good leadership. In other words, you personally care about your people. Concern for their personal and professional wellbeing are the most basic requirements to be successful as a leader. It's remarkable how often people in positions of authority forget this most basic requirement.
Have you ever had a boss, supervisor, or manager that acted like they were never at a lower level, had never been in the trenches and experienced the suck that comes with being on the bottom rung of the ladder?
Have you ever neglected yourself or your family because you just knew your boss wouldn't care and would say you had to work even when your life was falling apart around you?
Maybe you even lost a job because the turmoil in your personal life impacted your professional life in such a way that your work suffered.
I bet it was only made worse by feeling alone and helpless in your workplace.
I know I have. I’ve had two separate bosses tell me that they didn’t care how my work impacted my life. I needed to do as I was told and that was that. I’ve been there, and it sucks.
A leader who cannot see the people they are entrusted with as people, rather than assets and resources to be used is a failed leader by almost any metric. People don't quit jobs. They quit bosses.
There was an ad campaign some years ago for a dairy company whose tagline was something like “Happy cows make happy milk.” In other words, happy workers work harder and produce more. So, that begs the question, how do you make happy workers?
The recipe is simple.
Step 1: Recognize your people as human beings with lives of their own.
Step 2: Treat them like it.
Step 3: Put their wellbeing before the company's.
Step 4: Repeat often
Step 5: Watch in wonder as your happy workers generate higher profits.
The fact is that the people are always more important than the company. Why? Because there would be no company without the people.
To paraphrase Russel Crowe in Robin Hood: “Empower every person, and you yourself will gain strength… …Such a leader would not only have the respect of their people, but their love as well.” (Yes, I changed the quote to fit this context, but the message is the same.)
“Nobody wants to work anymore” has been the cry of the rich and powerful since before the printed word was invented.
The truth is, people want to work. What they don't want is to work for nothing, at a job where they aren't respected as a person, and for managers who treat them like commodities. Step one is the foundation on which all good leadership is built.
But a foundation is just a slab without the walls.
Like it says on the tin, “the proof is in the pudding.” Step one is meaningless without step two. As a society it's become normal that we need to use paid time off for anything during the workday that is not work related.
Need to drop the rent check off, or drop your kid off or pick them up from school? Better put in for some PTO to cover the hours.
Oh, you've used all of your PTO already? Guess you have a choice to make. Take care of you or get paid. No, you can't have both.
Why on Earth have we let this kind of treatment become normal? PTO needs to be for you to be able to take time away from work for yourself without risking your household. To relax, to indulge in a hobby, do something special with your family, the list goes on.
When you start empowering your employees to take care of themselves without holding their paychecks hostage, not only will you see a tangible rise in morale, and by extension productivity, but you’ll see a willingness on their part to endure the occasional hardship or long workday because they know that you, as their manger, have their back.
They know you’ll take care of them, so they will take care of you. They will sacrifice for you. But it must start with you, because you are the manager.
President Truman famously said, “The buck stops here,” and so it is with managers. If employees are under-performing, look at the work environment they're in and I bet you'll find toxic leadership. It begins, and ends, with you.
The step where I lose most people is step three. “How could you not put the company first as a manager and not lose your job? Don’t you care about your own wellbeing?” they ask. Usually with a not so well-hidden tone of incredulity thrown in.
The answer is, yes, I do care about my wellbeing. I care about theirs more.
Each step to making happy workers leads directly into the next one in the list. By putting your people first, and the company a distant however many, the company will benefit and by extension, so will you.
At the end of the day though, no job, promotion, or title is worth your integrity. That’s the decision each of us, as leaders, need to make. What do we care about more, this specific job at this specific company, or our integrity?
For myself, it’s more important that I look in the mirror and like what I see than it is for me to hold my current position. If it came down to me or the wellbeing of one of my people, I could always find another job, but I couldn't live with stepping on someone else just to elevate myself a bit higher.
Could you?
So how do you put their wellbeing before the company’s? It’s simple.
Pay your people competitively and give them annual raises above the expected rate of inflation for the next year. Let them take PTO and vacations when they want them. Let them go to the doctors, or the bank or whatever, whenever they need to, without sacrificing their pay.
Be flexible with your people and compassionate towards their needs. Give them the benefit of the doubt and apply Ockham’s Razor liberally. Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by ignorance.
On the subject of remote work, give people that want to work remotely all the tools they need to succeed and trust them to do their job without you standing over them. Don't give them the bare minimum, setting them up for failure just so you can “prove” that remote work is bad for business.
Most importantly, humble yourself to them when you’re wrong and be fair and objective with criticism.
Always ask yourself, “If I were in their position, how would I want to be treated in this situation?” The word “want” is the key word in that sentence.
It’s not, how would I expect to be treated, or how could I be treated that would be fair for the company? How would you want to be treated?
Would you want to be told that whatever you have going on is unimportant to the company? Would you want to be told to figure it out on your own while doing your job at a high level in the meantime or else be passed up for promotion or fired? Or would you want to be told that it’s okay to go take care of whatever you need to do and to keep your manager appraised?
The thing I tell each of my employees when they have an issue come up is “No worries. Go do what you need to do. We can handle things here. Keep me updated and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
The result is that without prompting, I get a time they expect to leave, a time they expect to be back and when I ask them if they can cover for someone who had an emergency pop up, I almost never get told they can’t.
When you treat someone with compassion, that is what you get back. Even better still, that is what is paid forward when they find themselves in your position.
Something else a lot of managers forget is that HR can be the enemy. HR departments exist for one purpose, and that is to protect the company from losses, usually in the form of workers. HR is there to protect the company’s bottom line and they will screw over whomever they have to if it will protect the company.
As a manager, your next highest priority is to be the buffer between your people and the company, which means you are not on the same side of the line as HR.
If butting heads with HR and going to bat for your people to make sure they're taken care of isn't something you're truly willing to do, up to the point of putting your own job at risk, then you may want to have a serious talk with yourself about whether you're cut out to be where you are or not.
Being a manager means taking on the responsibility for those under you. It means getting yelled at. It means taking the blame. It means putting yourself between your people and those that want to exploit them.
Being a manager means having very uncomfortable conversations with people that have enough rank to end your career then and there, and though it all, having the courage to stand your ground in defense of those entrusted to you.
It means being willing to take a professional bullet for those who might not do the same for you, but because they are entrusted to you, you are duty bound to do it anyway.
If those aren’t things you’re willing to accept with every part of your being, then you might not be suited to being in a position of leadership because all those things are things leaders do without a second thought.
Leadership is sacrifice and you might want to really scrutinize the track record of anyone who says otherwise.
I’m not an expert. I don’t have an alphabet's worth of letters after my name from reputable institutions. What I do have is almost two decades of experience in dealing with both good and bad leadership and over half a decade of being in leadership myself.
In all that time, I've never had a manager I couldn't learn something from. Good bad or otherwise. I've spent the last 5 or 6 years applying the lessons I’ve learned to try and make my people as successful as they can be and everything I’ve said above boils down to this:
Love those entrusted to your care. Make their success or failure personal to you. If you can do that sincerely, they will follow you to the ends of the Earth and back. Do the opposite, and they'll do nothing more than the bare minimum required to keep their job while looking for greener pastures.
Garbage in, garbage out. It doesn't get much simpler than that.