This blog post is the sixth in a series that is a deep dive into
The Principles of Truly Human Leadership, from the revised
and expanded 10th anniversary edition of my book, Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, available now.
In 2019, the Business Roundtable, a group of 181 CEO from some of the biggest corporations in the U.S. came out with a very well-articulated statement that we in business need to care more than just about the shareholders.
We need to care about all stakeholders.
It was an elegant statement in the Wall Street Journal, full page. There were a lot of reasons why this statement was made in 2019 and yet we have not seen any evidence that there has been a shift from shareholder focus to stakeholder focus. In their lives as CEOs, these businessmen –many of whom are very fine people – were never taught to care or rewarded for caring. They were taught to achieve objectives, mainly financial objectives, and they are rewarded for achieving those objectives.
The number of major organizations who have recently announced major layoffs is a clear sign that these organizations have not brought the needed balance between economic value and human value that is the foundation of Truly Human Leadership where we “measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”
From our 22-year journey to move from management to leadership, we have learned that You can’t ask leaders to simply care for those they have the privilege to lead; you have to teach them the skills of caring leadership.
The essential skills of caring leadership include listening empathetically, recognizing and celebrating others, and adopting a service mind-set. This is what we teach our team members in Barry-Wehmiller, through our internal university.
And what has surprised me over the years, when we show the team members in our organization that we care about them by teaching them these skills, they don't tell us that it helped them run a better accounting department (though it does!) They tell us their relationships are better. Their marriage, their relationships with their children or their relationships with friends and loved ones.
The Skill of Empathetic Listening
Teaching the skills of caring leadership starts with the most fundamental skill It’s something that seems so simple and something everyone initially thinks they do well.
Listening.
Listening to understand and validate, not to judge and argue. This is the greatest of all leadership skills in our business, home and communities.
It's pretty well accepted and said fairly often that better listening skills could solve a lot of problems in our society. But if listening is so simple -- across the board in our country and in our world -- why do all the interpersonal problems we have in business and our daily lives still exist?
Because we listen in order to respond. Because we fail to listen to understand. Because we are not listening empathetically.
Think about most educational curriculum. We teach speech and debate, but the most important of all communication skills is listening. This is very rarely taught or even considered. Therefore, we have a society where we debate, argue and judge, not listen.
Listening isn't doing nothing; it's doing something -- something very active and specific -- in service to others. It is a human skill that that is critically needed in all aspects of leadership. And in our experience at Barry-Wehmiller, it is the one skill that has truly changed the lives of the people within our span of care.
It's not about hearing what the other person is saying, but more deeply understanding what they feel, or the message behind their words. When someone feels heard by you, you have let them know that they matter.
Everyone is born with unique attributes and has a personality type that creates a lens through which they experience the world. Two people can see the same situation but view it entirely differently.
True empathetic listening -- where one actually hears the other person's words and feelings -- is the kind of listening that builds empathy as it allows us to see things from others' perspectives. Listening with empathy is the key to all meaningful relationships as it shows that you respect and care for the person you're hearing.
How can we build trust and show respect and understand one another unless we know what the other person is thinking and feeling? Listening skills are the foundation for trust. The way we actualize caring is through empathetic listening.
Learning to listen to each other has been fundamental to transforming managers into leaders at Barry-Wehmiller. People are capable of doing amazing things when we foster an environment in which they have a voice; are granted respect and dignity; and are allowed to discover, develop, share, and be appreciated for their gifts in pursuit of the organization's shared purpose. And that comes through empathetic listening.
The Skill of Recognition and Celebration
When my wife Cynthia and I were raising our blended family and trying to be good parents, one of the most important things we learned was if you don’t compliment your children five times more than you suggest things they could do better, you are creating an oppressive environment for your child.
We have seen the same thing in our workplaces. One expression I have heard frequently is, “I get ten things right and I never hear a word, and I get one thing wrong and I never hear the end of it.” It applies to families, at work, in every environment.
When we talk about “recognition” at Barry-Wehmiller, we usually pair it with “celebration.” What we mean is, we are trying to look for the goodness in our people (recognition) and hold it up for others to see and say, “Thank you for sharing your goodness” (celebration).
We continually try to shine a light into every corner of our organization, searching for people doing good, to find and celebrate those individuals for who they are. When we find them, we teach our leaders in timely, proportionate and thoughtful ways to say, “thank you.” We have learned it is a teachable skill and a key to Truly Human Leadership.
We’re trying to continually build a culture in which everyone, everywhere — not just leaders — are inspired to recognize others and celebrate the behaviors we value and align with our culture.
The more we recognize and celebrate, the more people experience not only how good it feels to be on the receiving end but also how good it feels to be on the giving end. The person who gives a great recognition to someone else gets as much or more by giving than the person who receives it.
At Barry-Wehmiller, recognition and celebration is not about reducing turnover or what the company gets out of it. It isn’t about giving a bonus to someone more productive or awarding them a Lucite plaque so that you don’t have to give them a bonus. It’s about repaying their emotional investment with your own. We give awards to people who achieve something that is important to our culture, not just to our bottom line.
Everybody wants to know that who they are and what they do matters. In the workplace, people need to feel personally valued regardless of their role.
The Skill of Serving Others
Years ago, on a round of golf with my wife Cynthia, she laid her sand wedge down on the fringe of the green before preparing to putt.
As it is easy to forget clubs once we lay them down on the course, I started to thoughtfully remind her to pick it up. Suddenly I changed my mind, simply picking up the club and returning it to her.
This is something I should probably always do on the golf course, but this particular time it made me think a little more deeply. This phrase came to me: I seized the opportunity to serve.
My thoughts went to our customers at Barry-Wehmiller. In alignment with our Guiding Principles of Leadership, where we measure success by the way we touch people’s lives, were we seizing the opportunity to serve? This simple statement—and seemingly inconsequential gesture–was the beginning of new vision to build a Culture of Service throughout Barry-Wehmiller.
Outstanding customer service is crucial in business, but our opportunities to serve transcend our relationships with our external customers and extend to anyone we have an opportunity to serve.
Our Culture of Service Foundations class works to shape new ideas around service – from re-defining a customer from an external person to your co-worker, your family, even someone you’ve never met. It teaches the idea that service is taking action to meet the needs of someone else.
Therefore, a culture of service is a shared purpose where everyone is meeting the needs of others inside and outside the organization. As we say in the class, “Anyone becomes a customer at the moment we have an opportunity to serve.”
In the Culture of Service course, we also – to an extent – redefine accountability. We teach that responsibility is given, but accountability has to be taken. It’s not about holding someone’s feet to the fire, it’s about lighting a fire inside a person – helping to instill an intrinsic sense of ownership of a job or task and then the willingness to face the consequences of its success or failure.
Then, our job, as leaders, is to create environments that give people the space and freedom to take initiative themselves. To create the space for intrinsic motivation. When our people commit to something with their whole hearts, they will do everything in their power to make it happen. Most of them will be successful, but those times when they fail, there’s nothing anyone can say that will mean as much as they already feel.
When it comes to creating a culture of service, my initial thinking was focused on enhancing our relationships with our external customers. But the result was profoundly more powerful to all our customers—internal and external alike.
In striving toward a culture of service, we should aim to seize every opportunity to serve and, in doing so, increase emotional connections that cultivate better relationships thereby offering ultimate service to all. This way of thinking, or serving, allows our team members to look beyond their own careers and begin to embrace how their role in the organization gives their fellow team members a better future.
The Importance of Teaching These Essential Skills
As I’ve often said, when I went to business school, I took management classes, got a management degree and got a job in management. I was taught to “manage.” I was taught that success is money, power and position. I was never taught to inspire. I was never taught to care.
This is something we sorely need to change in business education, before people are put into positions of responsibility where they become “managers” and perpetuate a broken system.
I read once that businesses are spending $15 billion yearly on “managerial and leadership development.” Yet, we are not seeing any improvement in the statistics of job fulfillment or trust in leadership.
Unless the $15 billion spent yearly on “managerial and leadership development,” is for teaching your people how to care, save that money. It is not addressing the need to shift the focus from using people to caring for the people we have the privilege to lead.
You can’t ask leaders to simply care for those they have the privilege to lead; you have to teach them the skills of caring leadership. Those essential skills of caring leadership include listening empathetically, recognizing and celebrating others, and adopting a service mind-set.
That’s how we create caring leaders and, by extension, make business a powerful force for good.