Three Minute Wisdom Knowledge is not enough. True leadership is informed by wisdom. The ideas presented here are intended to arouse your curiosity, provoke your thinking and encourage insightful action to help you achieve the things that matter.
Care-Full Leadership, Moment by Moment
Leaders want people who care. Why? Because unless people care, the magic cannot happen.
By recent measures, most workers in the United States don’t care. In their 2017 report, State of the American Workplace, Gallup estimates that only a third of employees are engaged in their work. For the unengaged, work is mostly about getting a paycheck and not getting fired. But some companies are able to galvanize their people and achieve significantly better results. At these companies, employee engagement soars to 70%. Engaged employees are involved, enthusiastic and committed; they give time and energy beyond the minimum. They are people who care.
So how do you create a workforce that cares? You must reciprocate – you have to show people that you care about them. Commitment comes from the heart, and so generating commitment means you must work at the heart level by investing in the quality of your relationships. When you create a climate of reciprocal caring in your workplace, relationships deepen and bloom.*
Some leaders feel awkward expressing care to co-workers. They mistakenly think that showing care is not appropriate in the workplace. Or they fear that being too friendly with staff will prevent them from fulfilling their duties as a manager, such as when they have to give corrective feedback.
But the fact is that we are social beings first and worker beings second. As social beings, we want to know that we fit in with the community and are cared for. Work is not an artificial construct that divorces us from our basic human needs, it is a place where are needs can be met and fulfilled. Rather than ignore this basic fact of human nature, wise leaders leverage it by showing care and concern to strengthen relationships. And when the time comes for difficult conversations about corrective feedback, this too can be done with compassion.
The effort to build quality relationships does not have to be time-consuming. It’s true that in one sense, relationships are developed over the course of months and years. But in another sense, relationships are created continuously in brief moments throughout the day. Using these small moments with greater awareness and purpose can help you create connection and build caring relationships with very little time added to your schedule. Small steps, over time, cover a great distance.
Start with this simple step: for one day (or one hour, if a full day seems too great a leap) make every exchange an opportunity to make one small expression of care, concern, respect or appreciation. This can be expressed with words, like a greeting or compliment, or it can be gesture, a nod, or a friendly smile. Even more important than your words or actions is the internal posture you take of openness and sincerity
Give the person your full attention and spend a moment to take them in, to see them as a whole person. In the hectic pace of a normal work day, we are often too distracted to make this brief but meaningful connection with people. When we take a stance of sincere openness and care toward others, people can feel it. We all share a common social ability to read below the surface and sense unstated intentions. If we approach each moment with the aim of extending care and well wishes, our intentions can resonate in others, creating a mutual connection that meets people at the heart level.
As you model this caring behavior, others on your team will see it and want to emulate you. As you recognize others for expressing care to co-workers, their behavior will strengthen and repeat across your team. As the expressions of care and concern multiply, you will slowly, moment by moment, create a workplace of ever-increasing reciprocal care, filling a reservoir of good will that everyone can tap during stressful times.
Some people pull back from committing to this practice because they fear it will exhaust them: “Busy leaders work hard enough,” they think, “without having to generate positive feelings toward each person they talk to.” But this is a false notion too. When the atmosphere of mutual care and connection on your team is strong, it will sustain you, not exhaust you. In the end, you are not creating this positive atmosphere by yourself, you are generating it with others who have come to believe in what you are doing.
Because by then, you have created a team that cares.
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