Does your team WANT to work for you?
Does your team WANT to work for you?
Or do they fear you and secretly dislike your leadership?
A recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article suggests that leaders with organizational power can “become overly obsessed with outcomes and control, and, therefore, treat their employees as means to an end.”
Picture the managers described in this HBR article, who actually showed up every week with clipboards and pens in hand, ready to walk their direct reports through a nit-picking list of performance metrics, customer complaints, and mistakes.
How demoralizing! If I were them, I’d rather get a tooth pulled each week.
This kind of management behavior “ramps up people’s fear — fear of not hitting targets, fear of losing bonuses, fear of failing — and as a consequence, people stop feeling positive emotions and their drive to experiment and learn is stifled.”
Obviously, hitting targets, meeting deadlines, and earning bonuses do matter.
But the question is, how are you achieving these results?
A top-down, controlling management style is “counterproductive,” actually “making it more difficult (for leaders) to achieve their own desired outcomes.”
So, how can you vanquish this still-all-too-common management style from your organization?
More importantly, what tweaks can you make to your own leadership behavior to ensure that people want to work for you, rather than secretly fearing you and disliking your leadership?
“The key,” reports HBR, “is to help people feel purposeful, motivated, and energized so they can bring their best selves to work.”
Sounds ideal! But how do we do that, exactly?
“To put it bluntly, servant-leaders…actively seek the ideas and unique contributions of the employees that they serve. This is how servant-leaders create a culture of learning and an atmosphere that encourages followers to become the very best they can.”
When leaders serve their team by helping them problem-solve and troubleshoot their way to success while also holding them accountable for results, engagement goes through the roof. Fear and resentment dissipate over time.
How can you know if your managers are leading this way?
How can you know if you are leading this way?
By taking a simple 360-degree behavioral assessment.
According to HBR, it takes humility for a servant-leader to “admit that they can benefit from the expertise of others who have less power than them.”
The Flippen Profile measures humility using three scales: Deference, the ability to defer to others versus needing things to always go our way; Self-Confidence, the overall level of self-belief (that can overshadow humility); and Aggressiveness, how hard we push to get our own way.
It also takes courage for a servant-leader to “provide a low-risk space for employees to experiment with their ideas.”
The Flippen Profile measures courage with two scales: Self-Criticality, how quickly we blame ourselves; and the Need for Encouragement, how much we rely on the affirmation of others.
The Flippen Profile is a proprietary, scientifically-validated behavioral assessment that measures 13 of the most critical leadership behaviors and compares them to many of the world’s most effective leaders.
Using this behavioral data and expert coaching, we can help you develop a culture of servant-leadership in your organization.
To learn more, contact us!
Or join our webinar: “Solving the 5 Pervasive Team Challenges.” Register HERE.
You’ll discover how to:
- Optimize your high-performing teams by bringing scientific precision to your hiring and selection process and duplicating the behavior of your top-performers.
- Accelerate your high-potential team members by breaking their behavioral constraints and increasing their leadership capacity.
- Navigate change initiatives successfully with your team by quantifying your team members’ change tolerance and leading with behavioral precision.
- Fast-forward newly formed teams by measuring psychological safety and proactively managing behavior.
- Manage contentious teams and take control of your conflict costs by precisely identifying and eliminating toxic, systemic behaviors.
For more than 25 years, the Flippen Group has leveraged neuroscience, psychometrics, and adult-learning technologies to bring out the best in Fortune 500 companies, school districts, government organizations, and professional sports teams. We use analytics and coaching to help your team eliminate counterproductive behaviors, have fun, hit goals, and earn bonuses.
Learn how to overcome the “5 Pervasive Team Challenges” [Free Report]
