Are Your Leaders Human?

Silly question right?…read on…

I and my strategic partners have been completely immersed over the past several years helping clients improve their bottom line. We’ve successfully helped the companies we’ve served realize millions of dollars, buried under ineffective leadership.

In the course of our work, I’ve come to a striking realization. Our work has evolved from promoting and fostering traditional management principles and practices to almost exclusively helping leaders become more relational — more “relatable”, to connect to those they lead, motivating their teams toward needed outcomes…and more importantly help them experience a shift in beliefs that these leadership capabilities are no longer an option — considering the make-up of today’s workforce.

We in fact have been helping them become more human — that is helping them recapture and reconnect to their humanity in a business context. Many have been left in the wake of uncaring, to some degree inhumane, command and control, transactional management practices from the past and are now set adrift.

What worked in the past, is no longer working for them now.

In the world of leadership development, much of what we do now falls under helping leaders develop their social-emotional intelligence and practice responsible neuroleadership popularized by Dr. Daniel Goleman, David Rock and others.

Many of our clients are constantly faced with the overwhelming truth that past traditional management practices are just not as effective anymore. Employees want more. Gone are the days when leadership effectiveness was represented by putting on a certain leadership “persona”, exercising power exclusively from a title or position.

Leadership effectiveness today is primarily being sourced from personal and relational power — in essence who you are as a person and how you relate to others vs. the title or position that is held.

And this pretty much describes the evolution of my leadership development work — stripping away the contrived personas and allowing the authentic self and human goodness to emerge. The challenge?…many leaders are not comfortable with this.

Employees today want real people as leaders. They want and are very willing to follow leaders who are vunerable, transparent, honest, authentic, humble, collaborative, empathetic, compassionate, “have a heart” — who lead from their humanity, not from a title or position.

I’ve termed it “human-focused” or human-centered leadership. This is where the leader is able to work from a sufficient knowledge of their own humanity and others successfully applying it to operate and grow a company.

We’ve discovered leaders are experts at what they do, not necessarily who they lead.

That’s where we come in. We help leaders develop their H(Q), — human quotient…beyond IQ or EQ. It’s a holistic view of who they are and who they are leading.

And this fits perfectly with our view and approach of holistic talent management — working with the whole of a person and seeing an organization as an organism or vibrant human eco-system of passion, caring, and talent.

Unfortunately, I believe many leaders are still hanging for dear life their old-school leadership style — leaving their humanity at the front door before they enter the building.

If you take a moment to consider many employee, leadership or management issues, I suspect that some would be related to the absence of that humanity …better known as “in-humane” treatment.

Now, when most people hear this, they think of something very dramatic. But, inhumanity can be demonstrated in the subtlest of actions. And when repeated over time, can mutate into substantial issues, subsequently eating away at an organization’s strength, leadership effectiveness, talent retention and profits.

For example: not showing appreciation, disrespect, bullying, humiliation, shaming, ignoring, not listening, not being available, a lack of caring or support, being non-responsive, little connection or communication …just to name a few. These leadership and management behaviors relay a message — one that, for many, demotivates and undermines successful “human resource” management. They are in fact dehumanizing.

I conduct leadership/peer group coaching as a part of our consulting practice (one of the most popular and satisfying elements of our offerings). In a recent session, I asked these questions, “What does your team need, to feel they are being treated more humanely?”

Thinking of leadership from a “human” perspective is an interesting exercise. Let’s just say, the answers didn’t flow.

I also asked, “What human needs can be met so that your team would be more responsive to your leadership?”

Here’s a list from those 2 questions:
attention
respect
a sense of fairness
appreciation
acknowledgement
caring
understanding
listen to / feeling heard
encouragement
trust
feeling needed
important / relevant / sense of contribution/ “I matter”
feedback
to be able to learn vs. just criticized when a mistake is made

As we contemplated these human needs, we considered — if these needs were meet, how would it impact the quality of team culture, responsiveness to customers /client needs, getting improved results and other operational needs? In fact, would it create a climate where it would be easier to lead? Their answer was an resounding yes!

My observation and conclusion: The more “human” leaders are, the more effective they are. Those who are capable of building respectful, positive relationships, who are comfortable and in touch with their own humanity — who are open, vulnerable and compassionate with firm boundaries, for example, will be the most influential and the most successful at nurturing and leveraging talent, fostering vibrant cultures for better organizational performance resulting in improved, sustained profits.

A lot of our time as of late has been working with clients who want to update their leadership culture and have baby boomer and/or legacy leaders who desperately need to transform their leadership. For them, it’s a journey beyond leadership, but of personal evolution as well (something that, by the way, a traditional style 1 day leadership training workshop or seminar won’t achieve). It’s giving themselves permission to finally let go of the old so that they can confidently embrace the new.

I’ll continue to write about our work as we develop and promote human-focused leadership and what a strong “HQ” (human quotient) looks like in practice.

We really do intend to put the “human” back in human resource-talent management and when we use the term human, it’s literal. For us human resources is not necessarily a department, it is the people — the people who are the headquarters (not be to corny) the “HQ”of a company’s success.