This blog post is the eleventh in a series that is a deep dive into what I call 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.
While working on the 10th anniversary revised and expanded edition of my book, Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, there was one phrase I wanted to make sure was placed on the outer cover:
The way we lead impacts the way people live.
If asked to sum up the entirety of the book’s message, that would
be the phrase I would use. It’s something I carry as a reminder of the
awesome responsibility we as leaders are bestowed. It’s something I was
never taught in my education. It’s also something I didn’t realize in my
early career as an executive. It’s something that came to me much
later.
And the fact that this is not more widely understood shows.
Statistics I often quote is that 65% of people would rather see their
boss fired than receive a pay increase and 58% of people say they trust a
stranger more than their boss.
Leadership is about the stewardship of the lives we have the
privilege to lead. But traditionally, we don't prepare people to accept
the mantle of responsibility to those lives.
We often award people positions of leadership because they are a
good accountant, or a good manager or have a prestigious degree. But
leadership requires more than technical skills.
The way we lead impacts the way people live. When they
feel cared for and energized by their time at work rather than drained
by it, it positively impacts the way they treat those in their spans of
care— their families, their friends, and their communities.
More Important Than Your Family Doctor
In 2016, I heard one of the most affecting and startling things
about the impact of leadership on the lives of the people within our
span of care.
Someone told me about research that showed that the person you report to at work can be more important to your health than your family doctor.
I was floored. How could that even be true?
It turned out that the statement comes from the research of Dr.
Casey Chosewood, retired Director of the Office for Total Worker Health
at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Chosewood said this when interviewed for our Truly Human Leadership Podcast in 2020:
Very few things will make you pick up and move far away from
family or friends, leave behind all your social support systems, and
move to a brand-new community and put yourself down to set up a new
life, but a job will do that. A job is so powerful when it comes to all
of the other choice-making around the trajectory of our life, and for
those reasons, that, along with some of the emerging research about how
the work we do is linked to chronic disease risk… for those reasons, we
really think that the influence of your supervisor, who controls so many
aspects of your work, is a more powerful influence for most people than
their experience at the doctor's office once or twice a year.
As recently as 2023, a Forbes article cited new data that
said for almost 70% of people, their manager has more impact on their
mental health than their therapist or their doctor — and it’s equal to
the impact of their partner.
Dr. Chosewood’s research sums up something we have found to be
true: Most leaders understand their influence on team members’ lives
during work hours, but often enough, they don’t think about how their
leadership affects team members outside of the workplace as well.
“My Wife Talks to Me”
A Harvard Business Review article from a couple of years ago documented a long-running study: “How a Parent’s Experience at Work Impacts Their Kids.”
The study followed more than 370 low-wage, working-class families
over more than ten years, from pregnancy through their first several
years as parents.
One of the participants in the study was a father who worked at a
company that forced him to use a monitor that tracked his every move. He
felt that his company didn’t trust him, and that sent him home spent,
dejected and frustrated to the point that, as a result, it affected his
parenting. He said, “I just don’t have the energy for a needy baby.”
“From a corporate social responsibility standpoint,” the article
went on to say, “it’s clear that if work impacts employees’ children,
employers have a responsibility to ensure that the impact is as positive
as possible. And from a business standpoint, it’s also in companies’
best financial interests to pay attention to the effects of work on
their employees’ families. After all, when workers face challenges with
their partners or kids, this stress inevitably spills over into the
workplace, leading to lower productivity, more sick days and personal
time off, and an unhappier, less motivated workforce.”
Many years ago at our Green Bay, WI company, one of the leaders
suggested that I invite group of our team members into a meeting to give
a report about a project that led to significant performance
improvements.
Steve Barlament was one of those team members.
They reported on all the usual metrics, but when they were
finished, I asked Steve, whom I’d never met before, a simple question
that just popped into my head: “Steve, how did it affect your life?”
This group wasn’t prepared to walk in and speak in front of all
our presidents, but without missing a beat, Steve said: “My wife now
talks to me more.”
It was unrehearsed, it was spontaneous, and it was the truth. He said:
Do you know what it’s like, Bob, to work in a place where you
show up every morning, you punch a card, you go to your station, you’re
told what to do, you’re not given the tools you need to do what you need
to do, you get ten things right and nobody says a word, and you get one
thing wrong and you get chewed out? You ask questions and it takes a
week to get an answer back. They complain about your salary or your
benefits. Do you know what it feels like to go home at night to your
family? You feel pretty empty.
I realize now, in hindsight, that when I wasn’t feeling good
about myself, I wasn’t that nice a person to be around. That was
basically every day. But since we began this program, I’ve been part of
making things better. People ask me what I think; they listen to me, and
I actually have a chance to impact things, including my own job. The
way we set up the new assembly flow really works, and I can go home
feeling that I’ve done a good day’s work, not wasted the day chasing
parts or feeling resentful. When I feel respected and know I’ve done a
good day’s work, I feel pretty good about myself, and I find when I feel
better about myself, I’m nicer to my wife, and you know what’s amazing?
When I’m nicer to my wife, she talks to me.
What a difference it made in Steve’s life when he felt like he
mattered! When he felt respected and fulfilled instead of dismissed.
This is the difference that our leadership can make.
More Than Just a Job
Story after story from our team members reveal that the
environment of care within Barry-Wehmiller improves their marriages,
enhances their parenting, enriches their friendships, makes them better
neighbors, causes them to want to volunteer in their communities more
often, and so on.
Here’s what Denning Saum, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at our BW Packaging company,
said: “I have two young daughters. That’s obviously a huge part of my
life and what drives me every day. And I get excited too that they get
to see me fulfilled at work. I want them to see what it means to have a
fun career. That means more than just a job.
“I mean, you spend the majority of your time at work, so don't you
want it to be enjoyable? You want it to be a place where it's built on
trust, it's built on respect and built on love, where then when you go
home, you feel like you still have energy to give it at home.”
Erica Uribe, an Executive Assistant for BW Packaging,
said: “I've done other corporate jobs where you get home and you're
just tired and you want to do nothing else, but just be quiet and spend
time, and that's not the case. I am able to leave this job where I feel
I've had a successful day. I go home, I volunteer at the church, I take
our kids to sports, and I don't feel drained at the end of the day. I
still have a lot of energy and motivation to still do what I have to do
the other half of the day.”
When our team members feel fulfilled by their time with us, when
they feel like they matter, they go home and leave a positive impact on
the lives of those in their own corner of the universe.
We leaders bear the responsibility for creating the conditions of an environment of care in our organizations.
The way we lead impacts the way people live. When they
feel cared for and energized by their time at work rather than drained
by it, it positively impacts the way they treat those in their spans of
care— their families, their friends, and their communities.