One Simple Question that Can Transform Your Leadership Impact

It’s well understood that managing people is difficult. If it was easy, organizations wouldn’t struggle with voluntary turnover, low employee engagement and lost productivity. It’s also well understood that leaders can learn to be good, if not exceptional, people managers. But even the most comprehensive leadership development programs can only accomplish so much. In the end, it’s up to the individual leader to transform the learning experience into sustainable behavior change. Changing one’s behavior requires knowledge, motivation and commitment.

Knowledge, or the acquisition of a new insight or skill, opens up the opportunity to take action. I have a new skill that I can use to improve myself, my team, my organization.

Motivation is measured by one’s willingness to act. I believe that taking action will improve myself, my team, my organization.

Commitment determines the degree to which you will hold yourself accountable for engaging in a new behavior. I will hold myself accountable for incorporating my new skill into the day-to-day management of my team.  

Of the three drivers of behavior change, commitment is often the roadblock. This is true for several reasons. First, changing one’s behavior can be intimidating. Leaders may find themselves thinking, what if I make a mistake or look foolish? The truth is, you won’t always get it right. And that’s okay. Trying, and temporarily falling short, is far better than rationalizing a less impactful path. Second, work gets in the way. Managers are constantly balancing the responsibilities of managing projects and tasks while also managing people. To say they are busy would be a colossal understatement. Adding a new tool or skill to your management approach may seem like additional work rather than a replacement for something you’re already doing. It’s important to keep in mind that the quality of how you do something can be far more powerful than the quantity of what you do.

In our Creating a High Trust Workplace Culture course, we focus on providing practical, easy -to-implement tools that managers can use to transform their leadership impact – and it all starts with one simple question. It’s so simple that you can start using it today. At the end of each day as you’re preparing to transition your focus to the priorities of your personal life, ask yourself the following question: did I develop trust today more often than I diminished it? Think about the question for a minute. When you reflect on the conversations you had, the emails you sent, the meetings you led, the decisions you made, and the feedback you gave, did you engage in these activities in a manner that built trust or did you allow other factors to adversely influence how you showed up in those moments?

We often think, and wrongfully so, that trust is built or broken in the big moments. From the employee perspective, it’s the subtle exchanges—the ones we take for granted—in which trust is ultimately developed or diminished. “When I started asking myself the question,” says Janet, Head of Business Development at a professional services firm, “I realized that I was engaged in behaviors that I felt were benign, yet they had a profound impact on my team.” Janet described her use of email. She often took work home with her and it wasn’t uncommon for her to send a handful of emails to her team late at night or on weekend days. “I never expected my team to respond,” adds Janet. “I just wanted to get the work off my plate, but I can see how my employees might interpret those late-night emails as an unspoken expectation that they, too, needed to be plugged in 24/7.”

Richard, a manager at a biotech company, found the question to play a central role in his leadership development. “I have a demanding role here,” says Richard. “I literally get 100 texts or emails a day from various department leads and everyone wants an immediate response. I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with one of my employees that wasn’t interrupted.” Richard recounted a recent staff meeting in which a new team member was taking initiative and offering a suggestion on the design of the firm’s new product. “I’ve been encouraging my team to lean in more and when it finally happened, I was completely distracted by my impulse to respond to incoming texts from my colleague. When I asked myself whether I built or broke trust that day, I was pretty hard on myself. But I’m glad I was because my employees deserve better.”

Janet and Richard are not alone. More managers are prioritizing the need to build trust. You, too, have the power to transform those smaller moments so that, by default, you’re developing trust rather than diminishing it. It just takes the commitment to ask that one simple question.

About the Author: David Robert, Chief Strategy Officer at Loeb Leadership, has over 20 years of organizational development and workplace culture experience. He has led several large-sized culture transformations in the U.S. and abroad. Previously, he held the position of regional CEO for Great Place to Work - Middle East.

Contact Loeb Leadership today.

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