Check out this article in the Atlantic entitled “Danger: Falling Tyrants.” The article makes a good point: emerging democracies in the Middle East following the Arab Spring may not result in governments that promote freedom. Influence, then, is all the more important, a point my friend Jeremie Kubicek makes in his fine book Leadership is Dead: Why Influence is Reviving It.
We are human beings, not machines. We have emotions, a conscience, hopes and dreams. We need to be respected, to be recognized for our contributions, to feel a sense of belonging, and we need autonomy, personal growth and meaning in our work. When these needs are met, it is life-giving. When they are not met, it drains the life out of us.
When people relate to one another in ways that fail to reflect our shared humanity, it results in dysfunction. Here are links to two recent articles that recognize the importance of emotions and the ability to connect with other human beings. A New York Times magazine article entitled “The Korean Dads’ 12-Step Program” described a “Father School” where emotionally challenged Korean fathers learned to connect with their wives and children. And here’s a Wall Street Journal article entitled “On the Lesson Plan: Feelings” that describes business school efforts to help MBA students learn to connect relationally with others in the workplace.
Here is a video from YouTube of a conversation I had earlier this year about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation with Dr. Homer Erekson, Dean of TCU’s Neeley School of Business. Our conversation occurred as part of the Tandy Executive Speakers Series that featured CEOs of outstanding companies such as Nieman Marcus, Southwest Airlines and The Container Store.
During our conversation we discussed how most leaders don’t understand the importance of emotional connections to the success of the their organization. Learn more about the “Connection Cultures” that great leaders create by reading Fired Up or Burned Out.
Should leaders care about employee happiness or is employee engagement a passing fad? Let me frame this debate in a slightly different way that I believe provides the best answer.
As part of creating value, leaders need to be intentional about achieving both task excellence and relationship excellence because our research found that both are necessary to achieve sustainable superior performance i.e. Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence = Sustainable Superior Performance. Both are also necessary if most employees are to experience a sense of satisfaction for the many hours they spend working. If employees feel unsatisfied, they will not perform tasks at a level that reflects excellence for a sustained period of time. They will likely be able to perform with excellence for a short period of time but eventually their lack of emotional energy will drag them down.
We are human beings, not machines. Emotion matters, even in business.
In Leadership Is Dead: How Influence Is Reviving It, Jeremie Kubicek, CEO of the leader development company GiANT Impact, makes a clear and compelling case that “dominating leaders” who lead by coercion are on the decline and are being replaced by “liberating leaders” who lead through influence.
Kubicek observes that leadership has moved from a noun to a verb. It has become a means or vehicle for appropriate change rather than a goal or end in itself (i.e. to become the leader who exerts power over others). Peggy Noonan, President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, once stated it this way: “Poor leaders want to be great. Great leaders want to do something great.” Kubicek points out that for leaders to successfully make this shift, competence is required to get the job done well and character is required to build strong relationships based on mutual trust. People are much more likely to give their best efforts when following a liberator than a dominator because this type of leader helps the people he or she leads and, in doing so, develops a bond of connection.
I highly recommend this book. In addition to making a valuable contribution to leadership thinking, the stories and examples make it a page-turner.
The New York Times recently had an article entitled “What Makes a Hospital Great” that described new research concluding a hospital’s culture and the quality of relationships were the most important factors determining patient outcomes. This finding is consistent with our research that concluded leaders must be intentional about developing both “task excellence” and “relationship excellence” in order to achieve sustainable superior performance. If leaders focus on task alone the eventual failure of relationships will sabotage excellence.
The New York Times has had a number of great articles related to connection and how it leads to success at work and in life. In an article about what Google discovered from Project Oxygen, a rigorous study of its successful managers, Laszlo Bock, the leader of the study stated:
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you…It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.” (italics mine)
Today is Presidents’ Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington. After reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be? I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth. I went as far as contacting and speaking with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington’s generalship. After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on 20 leaders in Fired Up or Burned Out.
First in Their Hearts
Richard Neustadt, Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, observed the following about George Washington: “It wasn’t his generalship that made him stand out . . . It was the way he attended to and stuck by his men. His soldiers knew that he respected and cared for them, and that he would share their severe hardships.”
Recently I was invited to include my blog content on LeadershipDigital, a topic hub that collects, organizes and finds the best posts and articles that provides an edge to leaders and managers. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and support both manual and social curation of that content.
The goals of the site are:
Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content as defined by the community.
Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.
Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.
Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.
I hope you will check it out by clicking on the LeadershipDigital badge at the top of this post.
