Many leaders who are focused on improving the business are often met with resistance from their people to the seemingly necessary changes. This resistance is experienced as a setback, a barrier that needs to be overcome in order to move forward. Such lack of progress can frustrate leaders, often hardening both them and their people in their respective positions. This head-to-head is usually solved ultimately with the use of power, a top-down request for people to comply and follow their leaders. Some of you will have come across such situations and will be aware of how it feels. Some people will follow, others will not, potentially leading to ill feeling & mistrust. There is a danger in such an approach, one that will slowly diminish leadership and its ability to influence, guide and inspire people. Is there a better way? Could there be one in which leaders see resistance to change as an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the situation and turn their people into leaders? I believe so. It would involve including people in thinking about the business, working with others to work out things (instead of leaders working it out alone a priori and asking people to do it), and understanding that this is not a waste of time – this IS the role of the leader. In my opinion, two attitudes would help leaders to head in this direction :
1. Taking others seriously
If you think about it, you probably never tell the people that you take seriously what to do. Why don’t we treat everyone like that? Closely listening to your people and trying to really understand what they are saying is one of the best things a leader can do. This is having real respect for others. Strong leaders regard the views of others as high or higher than their own.
2. Accepting that one may have an inaccurate perception of what needs doing
When leaders accept that there may be better or alternative ideas regarding what the business needs than their own, they tend to focus less on coming up with the solution themselves and more on stimulating their teams and ensuring they are able to deliver the desired business outcomes.
Those holding these two attitudes will have a natural tendency to include others & seek their contribution, while creating the right environment for their team to get better outcomes for the business. Here are four ways that these leadership attitudes materialize in better results:
Team members (leaders included) share a common context
Let’s start with a simple question: How can it be that a leader sees that certain things need to be done and someone good that they’ve hired doesn’t see it?
Usually, this is due to people having different information available to them and having different understandings of how these interrelate with each other, which leads them to seeing things differently. The context that people have will affect greatly how they will perceive things and how to respond to them. Leaders need to be able to get their team to reach a common context. This means ensuring that each person can provide information at their level that may normally not be available to the others. This is not only a top down affair, but a bottom up one as well. Remember, leaders are often removed from the day-to-day business and may have an incomplete picture of what’s going on. Likewise, leaders usually have a better big picture of the business and can help their team by sharing it.
Having a common understanding will help teams to be more aligned and make them more effective and efficient at working out the business issues. The small investment of bringing the team together and aligning really does pay off.
Teams explore and adopt new ways of working
Many leaders often fall into the trap of forcing people to do things a certain way. When this is the case, there is a tendency to provide the group with tools and methodologies, often best practices or ones considered best-in-class, that people are required to use. There are two key problems with this approach. First, these tools and methodologies are not chosen based on people’s current capability and it’s often unclear whether they will be capable of putting them to good use in practice. Second, the focus inadvertently nearly always goes to the tool, instead of to doing the business.
Good leaders avoid this trap and focus their team on a process of exploring together, co-creating and committing to a new way of working that is focused on delivering better results to the business.
Teams focus on improvement
These leaders focus on their team being prepared for future challenges and having the ability to deliver future objectives. A good way to do this is to focus their teams on improvement. As an external, I often ask people in companies what their job consists of, how a regular workday looks like. What I find is that usually, people spend most of their time doing the work. These are the activities that need to be executed for the business to run. People also spend a bit of time in crisis mode. This is when things don’t go as planned and quick and urgent action is required. What I see less of, is people spending time focusing on improvements. This is the time spent to improve the previous two, that is – becoming better at doing the work and minimizing the time spent in crisis mode. Effective leaders focus their people and teams on spending more time on improvements, as this leads to learning and leaves the team better equipped to deal with bigger challenges in the future.
Teams have the support available to them when they need it
These leaders are able to create a platform that provides the right support to people when they need it. This tends to happen in the context of people searching and exploring new ways of working, a process in which they may have questions, doubts or simply have the need for a thought partner. In these moments, leaders need to be available for their people. This is the right moment to give people advice – suggest possible tools and methodologies, that may help them with what they need, or give them examples of how others have done similar things. It’s the right moment because it is not the leader looking for something, but rather the people that want to make improvements happen, that are searching. However, this doesn’t mean that the leaders standby passively waiting for people to approach them. It is critical that leaders regularly put on the table and question, with their direct reports, if the support that is provided is adequate and fit for purpose. Only with such behavior are leaders and teams able to get into a dynamic that develops more effective behaviors and ways of working that lead to better results.
