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For years I have said that profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people. My son Scott worked on a project with one of our founding partners, Drea Zigarmi, who heads up our research team, to learn the relationship between leadership, employee passion, customer devotion, and what they call “organizational vitality,” which has to do with profit, performance, reputation and other observable and memorable indicators of organizational success.
When Scott and Drea looked at leadership, they looked at two aspects of leadership: Strategic leadership, which is all about vision and direction—where your organization is going. When I talk about servant leadership, I say that strategic leadership is the “leadership” part of servant leadership, because leadership is about going somewhere and if people don’t know where you are going, your leadership doesn’t really matter. The second aspect of leadership is operational leadership, which is when you say, “Okay, now we know where we are going—how do we make it happen?” In talking about servant leadership, I say that’s where you turn the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down and that’s the “servant” part of servant leadership.
Scott and Drea found that strategic leadership—which is really important because it starts the whole process—only had an indirect relationship with organizational vitality and success. The biggest impact came from operational leadership. I think that’s because when operational leadership is done well, the hierarchy is turned upside down, leaders are working for their people and empowering and encouraging them to accomplish the vision and the goals that have been set. What happens when you empower and involve your people? They get passionate about what they’re doing because they know you care about them and you think they are important. And what do passionate employees do? They go out of their way to serve your customers. What happens then? Your customers get blown away by the legendary customer service and become raving fans—devoted customers who start telling stories to their friends about you and your people. Then that comes back and remotivates your people.
Scott and Drea’s research found that this interaction between passionate employees and devoted customers impacts organizational vitality more than anything else. That relationship really drives the bottom line—and that part is driven mainly by operational leadership. I don’t want to diminish the importance of strategic leadership, because that’s what starts the process. But as a leader, once you set that vision and those goals, don’t turn your back and run away. Stay around as a servant leader and support, encourage, and build your people up. Because they’ll be passionate, they’ll blow away your customers with their service, and—I’ll use a phrase we used back in the day—your cash register will go “Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!”
No matter who you are, people can come at you daily with their egos blasting. Some egos come from false pride—where they think more of themselves than they should and want more credit for things. Others come from self-doubt and fear—where they think less of themselves than they should and are protecting themselves. How do you deal with these people?
Try to keep focused on leading with a servant’s heart. It can be part of your daily habits, such as how you enter your day by reminding yourself of the difference you can make in the world. It’s a matter of making a habit of practicing a helpful attitude when you are interacting with people. The question you want to keep top of mind is, “How can I help?”
For instance, if someone comes to you and says, “I’m sick and tired that nobody seems to notice my contributions around here,” you could say to that person, “What I am hearing from you is that you don’t think your work is appreciated. I think you are doing a wonderful job on …” and then be very specific as to what that person is doing right. After that, ask, “What can I do to help you get over this feeling of not being important enough? How can I help you through this?”
Or, if someone is coming from fear and saying, “I can’t believe it, I just got another project dumped on me and I don’t have time in my day to work on it,” let that person know you understand by saying something such as, “Wow, I can hear that you’re really overwhelmed right now. Is there a way I can help you with this? Is there anyone I can talk to that might be able to partner with you?”
A phrase I like is lead with your ears. Really listen to the person you are interacting with and see if you can respond in a caring and heartfelt way. When you ask the question “How can I help?” you’ll be amazed at how quickly it can diffuse the frustration another person is feeling. It can make an immediate difference to upset or fearful people just to know their concerns are being heard. By leading with your servant’s heart, you will set an example others can use to get away from their egos, move forward, and make a positive difference in someone else’s day.
With the challenging economy these days, where companies are losing money and people are being downsized, a very important question I get asked is, “How can I, as a leader, motivate my people in these tough times?” I think there are three things you can do.
The first thing you need to do is to be a bearer of hope. That doesn’t mean you don’t talk about the truth of the present reality, but hope is so important. When our company was facing its toughest year, our CEO, Tom McKee, got out in front of all of the employees and told them the reality of the situation and how much we were down from the year before. But then he said, “I think we can come out of this. We’re going to do it.” He was a bearer of hope.
The second thing you need to do is to involve your people as your business partners. After Tom spoke, the next day we had a massive brainstorming session that involved all 300 of our employees in small groups, coming up with ideas of how to cut costs and increase revenues. Your people have knowledge—make them your business partners and tap into that resource.
The final thing you need to do is to always remember to be a servant leader. I so believe in that. This is not the time as a leader to be self-centered and worried about yourself or your own job. It’s a time to reach out to your people and encourage them, serve them, and be with them. So be bearers of hope, involve your people as your business partners, and be ready to serve—not to be served—as a leader.
This is a tough question that especially haunts younger leaders…
If you think you’re a leader and you turn around and nobody’s following, you know what? There’s probably some feedback there that you can learn from. Why aren’t they following? Because your leadership might be all about you. People want to follow someone who appreciates and cares about them, who thinks they are important. Are you involving your people? That’s what they want. They want to work with somebody who wants to work with them. If nobody’s following you, stop looking in the mirror and thinking that leadership is all about you. No—it’s out there. It’s with them. It’s encouraging them and supporting them and helping them and involving them. People love to follow leaders who share the responsibility of accomplishing goals. So look out there at your people. That’s where the action is. And if you take care of them, you know what? Next time you turn around, there might be a crowd.
At The Ken Blanchard Companies, most of our work in the past focused on leader behavior and how to improve leadership style and methods. We attempted to change leaders from the outside. But through the years we have become convinced that effective leadership starts with self perception—it’s an inside job. It is a question of the heart. It’s all about leadership character and intention. Why are you leading? Is it to serve or be served? Answering this question in a truthful way is so important, because you can’t fake being a servant leader. We believe that if leaders don’t get the heart part right, they simply won’t ever become servant leaders.
The most persistent barrier to being a servant leader is a heart motivated by self interest that looks at the world as a “give a little, take a lot” proposition. Leaders with hearts motivated by self interest put their own agenda, safety, status, and gratification ahead of others who are affected by their thoughts and actions.
In a sense, developing a “servant’s heart” is a lifelong journey. It is my belief that you finally become an adult when you realize that life is about what you give rather than what you get. The shift from self-serving leadership to leadership that serves others is motivated by a change in heart. Servant leadership is not just another management technique. It is a way of life for those with servant’s hearts.
When some people hear the phrase servant leadership, they associate it with “soft management”—they think you can’t lead and serve at the same time. Yet you can, if you understand that there are two kinds of leadership involved in servant leadership: strategic leadership and operational leadership.
Strategic leadership has to do with vision and direction. This is the leadership aspect of servant leadership. The responsibility for this visionary role falls to the hierarchical leadership. Kids look to their parents, players look to their coaches, and people look to their organizational leaders for direction.
Once people are clear on where they are going, the leader’s role shifts to a service mindset for the operational leadership task, which is all about implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership. How do you make your vision happen? In a traditional organization, all the energy in the organization moves up the hierarchical pyramid as people try to be responsive to their bosses instead of focusing their energy on meeting the needs of their customers. Bureaucracy rules, and policies and procedures carry the day. This creates unprepared and uncommitted customer contact people who are trying to protect themselves and it leaves customers uncared for at the bottom of the hierarchy. This scenario doesn’t do much to move the organization in the desired direction toward accomplishing a clear vision. Servant leaders, on the other hand, feel their role is to help people achieve their goals. To do that, the traditional hierarchical pyramid is theoretically turned upside down so that the frontline people, who are closest to the customers, are at the top. Now the frontline people are responsible—able to respond—to the needs of the customers. In this scenario, leaders serve and are responsive to their people’s needs, training and developing them to accomplish established goals and live according to the vision.
Servant leadership is not soft management; it is management that not only gets great results but also generates great human satisfaction.
If you are interested in learning more about Servant Leadership, I will be speaking at the Servant Leadership Institute Winter Conference on February 1st-3rd in San Diego. For more information, or to buy tickets, please visit their website at http://sli2011winterconference.eventbrite.com/. See you there!
The holiday season presents some different challenges for leaders. Here is some advice I’ve found can help you to get the most out of this special time.
Get in the holiday spirit. It’s important for leaders to get into the holiday spirit. It’s a wonderful time of the year when people want to feel good and connected to each other. It is a time to capitalize on team building and allow workers to get to know each other better. Yet often managers end up acting like Scrooge by being too busy or demanding of themselves and of their people. Bosses can really ruin the holidays by being grumpy, under stress and too demanding. Try to be a little more lenient, supportive and willing to “go with the flow” in appreciating the time you have and the people you have to work with.
Focus on what has to be done. It’s important during the holidays to be clear with everybody on their key goals. What are the significant things that really have to get done during the holiday season to keep business running as usual? It’s good to write down these goals so that people are better able to work harder earlier in the season if they are going to be less focused later on. This is especially true if, for your business, the holiday season is one of the busiest time of the year.
Be flexible with employees. Be more flexible in terms of the hours your people work, depending on their needs. Is there a way they can have a couple of hours off so they can get some of their shopping done and make the time up later? A lot of people have family and friends fly in and would love to have flexible work hours to accommodate them. How could the company help employees save time? For example, at our company, we have people fill out a form that allows them to mail their packages from our company.
Avoid negative news. Don’t use the holiday season to give employees negative news. It is not a time of the year to catch people doing things wrong, nor it is a time to accent the negative. Instead, do your best to redirect employees without being punitive. Save more substantive performance issues for after the new year. And don’t turn what should be good news into bad news by poor timing. For example, if you are planning to give employees extra days off between Christmas and New Year’s Day, tell them far enough in advance so that they can make plans for that time. Otherwise, they might end up at home watching television and griping about you.
Be sensitive to different religions. Be sensitive to those who don’t celebrate Christmas. You might set aside some time when people could share information about their religious or cultural celebrations. For example, one of our Jewish employees had people who wanted to find out more about the meaning of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights celebration, meet him for lunch.
Be creative about celebrating the season. Your celebration doesn’t have to be lavish for it to be effective. You might want to do an activity rather than hosting a party where everyone just sits around and drinks. It might even allow for more bonding to do something like caroling that allows for a shared experience away from the office. Another fun group activity that we’ve done is to take the time for our work group to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol together, giving each employee a role to read. Activities such as these can help you avoid getting into the position where you have to worry about serving alcohol to people and having them drive home.
Whenever possible, include families in holiday activities. We had an artist come to our company one year during the holidays to teach everybody how to paint landscapes. There were four sessions and everyone could bring their spouses, kids, and parents. The artist dressed everybody up in French berets and artist aprons. At the end of the activity she touched up the pictures and then we had them framed. It was really a lot of fun.
Have fun with celebrations. Think of fun ways to celebrate the season. I love those parties where everyone buys a three-to-five dollar gift, numbers the gift, and then people pick numbers and open the gifts one at a time. The person opening the gift has the option of keeping what they open or trading it for one of the already opened gifts. That can turn into a pretty lively time! You can also have people exchange funny cards that they have either bought or made. You could even set somebody up to be a “Secret Santa,” leaving anonymous gifts for random employees.
Make the spirit last all year long. A few years ago, after the holiday season had ended, several of our employees at The Ken Blanchard Companies asked, “Why does the spirit have to end at the end of the year?” From that question sprang an employee-run program called “Blanchard for Others” which sponsors local charities and hosts all kinds of fundraising events through the year. Each year they raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity. We now have the holiday spirit year round.
So get in the holiday spirit this year! Go with the flow, lighten up, and enjoy this special time with your employees and with your families.
I was talking recently with one of my old friends who is not a man of traditional religious faith. I asked him, “What is your comfort? What is a philosophy you live by?” And he said, “I have always tried throughout my life to do the right thing. I think of the Golden Rule as my faith. I only try to do to other people as I would like to have done to me and I always try to take that into consideration. If all the faiths around the world would practice the Golden Rule, the world would be a different place. I believe our role in life is to treat other people as if they were important individuals and treat them as we would want to be treated.” And I thought that was really powerful.
A large part of being a servant leader and being there for other people is realizing that every human being is important. Even if another person mistreats us, it doesn’t do us any good to lower ourselves to their methods. The concept of turning the other cheek is kind of hard sometimes, but it’s all about not getting hooked into somebody else’s poor behavior. Perhaps it’s easier to just think of it as living by the Golden Rule. I found out from Colleen Barrett that at Southwest Airlines, the Golden Rule is a major part of their company culture and leadership philosophy. Colleen learned that early in her life from her mother, who was a great believer in the Golden Rule.
So this week, as we go out and greet each other and greet customers and family members, just remember: Treat them as if it were you – how would you like to be treated? That’s a pretty great way to live life. I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving week.
Here is a small sampling I really enjoyed from my book with Don Shula, Everyone’s A Coach.
The way managers treat people is powerfully influenced by what they expect of people. If a manager’s expectations are high, productivity is likely to be excellent. If expectations are low, productivity is likely to be poor. It is as though there were a natural law that caused a person’s performance to rise or fall to meet his or her manager’s expectations. My wife Margie has often said that one of the reasons she didn’t get into trouble when she was a young person was that she knew her parents expected the best of her and knew she would be a good role model for her younger sisters. She never wanted to let her parents down. Read the rest of this entry »
