Ok y’all – let’s be clear: we all collectively need a gargantuan Learning&Development effort to get to servant leadership if we want hybrid and the new reality to succeed and we need it YESTERDAY.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t plan to be up in arms for my first article of the year when we should be all goodness-and-light and preoccupied with resolutions and team kickoffs but here we are – something I read last week really got my goat. “The Era of Empathy” was heralded as having arrived for leaders and much self-congratulation and navel-gazing ensued.
Following this FT article entitled “Turbulence ahead new leaders required” there was a myriad of positive reactions towards how leadership needs to change and become more human – all indisputably true. The kicker? All framed as an empathy exercise.
What’s wrong with that?
Firstly the tone.
Yes, Servant Leadership takes empathy but saying we are “welcoming the era of empathy” feels like we are doing our employees a favour when really all we are doing, is course-correct to what the economical imperative is now in the hybrid and Agile reality – which is that command and control is not working and to course-correct, we have to get more serious and do a real gargantuan L&D push not simply advise micro-managers to become a bit more compassionate.
The article is borderline in its framing but the LinkedIn polls around it feel, quite frankly just plain condescending “Do you feel your leader is a bit more empathic? Are they more understanding? More permissive?”
Let me be super clear: the shift towards servant leaders who ARE empathic, vulnerable, courageous, EQed, and all that good stuff is 110% mandatory, but not as a favour to employees, but because nothing else works!
This brings us to the effort needed.
To accomplish it, the transformation will never be just about agreeing that’s the case, seeing the light, reading the articles and seeing the videos and then simply deciding to be a better leader. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It isn’t a question of having our leaders have an epiphany, a long-awaited “a-ha” moment once they read one of these articles.
A change as monumental as this can only come about as a sustained, organised, intelligent push to support people who have led teams for tens of years through command and control to stop doing so and replace those neural pathways with a completely different mindset.
This is not going to be about forwarding the right links, but a complete mindset reset which will involve comprehending emotions, a willingness to make the day job about the people-work -both in doing it and supporting the teams to do it-; a way to see blockers and learn ways to remove them more efficiently be they of an organisation or team resistance nature; and so much more.
HR departments around the globe should be frantically creating large scale re-education programs for all their leaders and figuring out ways to reward them for succeeding at it.
Until we have servant leadership, we won’t have empowered teams and if we don’t have those, then we can’t make them become more psychologically safe and therefore more valuable to the business.
Conversely, if we managed autonomous teams that are supported and enabled with tools and organisational permission we can have them deliver results in what is practically a distributed healing effort to lower the HumanDebt™. It’s the kind of major effort that we will be able to outsource to smart and people-work-enthusiastic teams but we could never do so with disengaged, disenfranchised and powerless teams.
Of course, you should care about people, why does that need to even be said? If nothing else, “the era of empathy”, if indeed it is this new, needs to come with an apology! That is if we have all truly seen the light and agree we ought to have treated our people better because yes, of course, an endemic lack of empathy has gravely contributed to our HumanDebt but we can not be brazen and tone-deaf enough to congratulate ourselves for doing the long-overdue right thing.
So maybe empathy-building is the first step in the effort needed, maybe it isn’t, different leaders will need different steps and different types of interventions to get to servant leadership, but if you haven’t stopped to consider if it is, or worse still, if you haven’t considered it is just a step and a lot more needs to change to arrive at where we have EQed, helping, inspiring leaders smoothening the path of happy teams, then you needy to think again.
No one reading this still thinks things may return to the “old normal” anymore. Not the most obstinate and reluctant of control-obsessed-office-loving-micro-manager can justify the hopes of ever going back to a time when there’s time for centralised commanding or where we will have a physical line of sight to someone’s computer screen to aid with control.
That’s the big gain, that we have all arrived at the realisation things have shaken up irremediably and require a completely new paradigm following the shift to hybrid and the level of the discourse on human topics. So talking about employee experience, engagement, retention, talent or empowerment without doing the change work to arrive at servant leadership, is absurd. Equally, trying to teach our leaders anything else, having any other training objectives (including Agile, yes) is a monumental waste of time when this is so big and so far from “done”.
Here’s a quick tip on how to approach this gargantuan task – use your Superheroes – find them and showcase them. No matter who you are – what company, what size, in what industry, chances are you have a lot of them already – people who have found their way to a change to servant leadership from the heart years ago and have had amazing results without having to dictate or verify, without having to mistrust and mistreat, without having to punish and berate or ridicule, without having to micro-manage anything, without having to impose their will or throw their hierarchical weight around. They did the opposite, they helped their teams get better and better, they trusted them fully and they focused on removing blockers from their path, on giving them the tools, space and support they need, they helped them do the people-work so they keep excelling and then graciously got out of their way. They did so not because they read an article on how they’ll have to be empathic but because they cared enough to have internalised the need to serve.
We have asked you to check your people strategy already last year and we did include this in the list of things to look out for – we need to say it again and with absolute clarity – if your goals for 2022 do not include a major and concerted effort around transforming mindsets to servant leadership and empowered, Psychologically Safe teams then you’re doing it wrong.
Lastly, if you don’t feel like being the bearer of bad news – let me do it for you – here’s my new Keynote Speaker Reel – happy to kick off the keeping it real.
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This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series: “The HumanDebt™ – organisational level and team level” so make sure to subscribe so you have it in your inbox.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
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