The top qualities of a modern people leader
Is there a new trend to look out for in people leadership?
In the last few years, we have all adapted and changed. Our mindsets, routines, and priorities were reset, and we have continued to adjust to new challenges. These factors have all contributed to a “Human Energy Crisis,” where collectively, people are feeling more stress and burnout, and are pushing their coping mechanisms to the max.
This is a challenge for people leaders who need to consider how their workplace cultures and leadership styles can be adapted to help individuals through challenges, while also promoting wellbeing and balance as priorities for their wider teams.
Our Chief People Officer, Sara Gorjão, explored this theme and what traits modern people leaders should learn to adopt to handle these challenges, on the Modern People Leader podcast. For Sara, the most important traits are flexibility and agility, vulnerability, and creativity.
We revisited these traits in more detail with Sara, to see how they come into play for her, in her day-to-day work.
Exploring Flexibility and agility
Q: How do you define flexibility and agility?
A: Flexibility is the opposite of stagnation; it is the ability to experiment with new approaches that serve a company and its purpose. Agility is the ability to iterate on different approaches, by moving quickly and more efficiently. According to Nassim N. Taleb, agility makes you anti-fragile, which means that systems increase in capability to thrive because of stressors, shocks, volatility and other factors, by learning from failures and exploring roadblocks.
Although I am providing two different definitions for flexibility and agility, the literature on the two concepts shows that agility is the natural evolution of flexibility. The two are interconnected which is why I have grouped them together.
We see this principle at play at tb.lx in software development, where we work closely with stakeholders at Daimler Truck to deliver different solutions to different geographies and groups within the company. This requires our team to be agile to get closer to customers, adapt to unforeseen circumstances and become more flexible to overcome these challenges. This highlights an important distinction; flexibility is more of an operational principle and agility is more strategic.
Q: How do you promote flexibility in your team?
A: Flexibility starts with trust. We empower our employees to manage their working hours flexibly, in alignment with their teams, all relevant stakeholders and responsibilities to ensure any complexities are managed, while benefitting from a 36-hour work week.
Here is an example of this flexibility at play, within the People team. My colleagues are aware of their responsibilities and what is expected of them. We collaborate on big, yearly projects and always adapt to unforeseen circumstances requiring an urgent response. For example, we decided to draft and define our core competencies in a matrix with expectations and responsibilities for each domain according to seniority and scope. To create the matrix and bring it to life (while implementing feedback from diverse teams — engineering, product, and business support, etc.), our People Development Experts decided to break the work down into smaller tasks. Along the way, different priorities arose, and while the team managed those, they kept all relevant stakeholders informed and engaged. Communication and transparency are key to achieving great things and building meaningful work relationships.
We also encourage people to use their critical thinking skills and creativity to search for flaws in the system and propose new approaches to solve problems. This problem-solving mindset we have at tb.lx is encouraged from the top.
How modern people leaders can leverage creativity
Q: How can creativity be used in day-to-day people management?
A: Being creative at work as a leader or an individual, means looking to solve problems with more than just one or two solutions. It means exploring new pathways, learning with similar realities, and transferring this knowledge to our day-to-day work. We live in a BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible) world and navigating the uncertainty and complexity this brings, requires creativity.
I strongly agree with an article in the Harvard Business Review, that finds that a leader’s job is not to be the source of ideas but to encourage and champion ideas within their team and organization. Leaders must tap into the imagination of employees in all areas and ask inspiring questions, to help drive growth and continuous learning (including for themselves). Leaders also need to encourage their organizations to incorporate diverse perspectives, which spur creative insights, and facilitate creative collaboration.
One great example of creativity coming to light was leaders’ response to the pandemic. Quickly adapting to this new reality and re-discovering what leadership and management style would work best to keep employees motivated and safe, dictated the companies that lasted and evolved from the others that disappeared or became stagnant.
Our priority during the pandemic was to help keep our teams connected and motivated, by hosting virtual social events to promote creativity. These included virtual cooking classes, promoting walking meetings, and monthly virtual talks or quizzes on themes our team is passionate about (including mythology). The result was a safe, open space during the uncertainty of the pandemic that kept our working culture alive and allowed our team to take a pause from the stresses surrounding them at home. To this end, using creativity as a platform, allowed us to be more empathetic toward our team.
The benefit of vulnerability in leadership
Q: How do you use vulnerability to drive empathetic leadership?
A: Empathetic leadership means being aware of people’s thoughts and feelings, understanding their needs, providing them appropriate support, and understanding how they handle situations, while trying to improve or respond to them. This requires a certain amount of vulnerability from modern people leaders, so that they can create a culture based on trust, that acknowledges failure as part of the process. Leaders should represent themselves authentically, as human beings, with improvements to be made and the will to always learn. A leader that shows vulnerability will automatically instigate empathy in their team. People feel connected when they understand others’ struggles.
The biggest challenge in leading with empathy is the ability to create a boundary between the team’s feelings and one’s own. When it comes to showing vulnerability, leaders must find the right balance between steering with confidence and being vulnerable.
In my team, and at tb.lx overall, I’m not afraid to express my feelings. We have created a safe environment that encourages this, and one of our founding principles is to make failure part of the process. We also advocate for a ‘challenger mindset’ that allows us to continually evolve and approach challenges from several angles, empowering our team to own their ideas and keep looking for ways to try new things.
Putting it all together — creating a leadership vision
So how can modern people leaders put these traits together to create a more people-centric leadership style? They should start by encouraging and empowering their team to be part of the solution to any problem that arises. As a leader, you must create a safe space for your team members to open up and ask for help and support, while also understanding their limitations and celebrating their success. Flexibility and agility, creativity, and vulnerability then stem from this.
This interview was done by Andrea Leiras, Social Media and Employer Branding Expert @ tb.lx. Based in Lisbon, Portugal 🚛🌿
