“You’re not a very strong leader.”
I still remember that feedback from one of my first bosses soon after I was “rewarded” with supervisory responsibilities. I was promoted because I was a hard-working, strong individual performer. But I was 23 years old and didn’t know what I didn’t know.
My immediate thought and gut reaction: “What the hell do you mean that I’m not a very good leader?!”
It was several years – and many more life experiences – later that I finally began to understand the gift my boss had given me. Leadership was something I needed to work on.
“Leadership is a process of self-development,” Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor and leadership guru commented in a recent HBR article. “You need to be willing and able to learn how to lead. Mostly we learn from our experiences and facing adversity,” she continued. “Stepping outside the spaces where we feel safe is a powerful teacher.”
Professor Hill suggests that leadership is multi-dimensional and requires eight essential qualities:
- Authenticity
- Curiosity
- Analytical prowess
- Adaptability
- Creativity
- Comfort with ambiguity
- Resilience
- Empathy
What strikes me about her list is there are generally two groups of leadership skills. One emphasizes our interactions and leadership of people (authenticity, creativity, resilience, and empathy). The other group focuses on our deftness in analysis and leading strategic initiatives (curiosity, analytical prowess, adaptability, and comfort with ambiguity). Just because you think strategically and are adept at charting new paths for growth doesn’t mean you are a competent leader of people.
What employees need to be successful and where they sit in the organization are huge determinants of how they view and assess the quality of their leaders. That’s why there can be such divergent opinions on why an individual is or isn’t a strong leader, even in the same organization.
In today’s challenging and evolving healthcare employment market, people-centric leaders offer a major competitive advantage for organizations. Following are four recommendations that can help make the people side of leadership stronger, both for individuals and for the organization.
Model the communication practices you want your culture to reflect
In Stamp & Chase’s leadership workshops, one of the first principles we emphasize is that leaders at all levels have to “walk the talk.” That means that Dr. Hill’s leadership qualities of authenticity, empathy, and resilience are especially important. Great people leaders are not just personally innovative and creative. In addition, they possess the ability to nurture creativity in others by giving them voice and involvement in decision-making.
Be ready to take employee engagement survey results very personally
Gallup research tells us that approximately 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement is explained by one factor: the boss an employee reports to. So, when staff engagement scores in a unit or department are low, it almost always means that the boss needs to reflect on and change key leadership practices. For senior executives, holding managers accountable for making changes and supporting their efforts to become stronger people-centric leaders must be organizational priorities.
Find the right seat on your bus
Donald Clifton, former chairmen of Gallup and the father of strengths-based psychology, spent an entire career advocating the wisdom in understanding and then leaning into each individual’s strengths rather than trying to fix their weaknesses. The diversity of Dr. Hill’s list of leadership qualities means that not every leader is going to be equally adept at both people-centric and strategy-centric leadership. Simply, if an individual does not naturally possess strengths that help them connect with other people, they will likely be most successful in a leadership role that emphasizes analytical prowess, adaptability, curiosity, and/or comfort with ambiguity.
Practice and reward transparency in communication with staff
Authenticity encompasses a broad array of leadership practices. Chief among those are transparency and humility. Effective leaders encourage their team members to provide feedback to them consistently, not just on annual engagement surveys.
“Am I a strong leader?” is the most insightful, transformative question that truly gifted leaders ask themselves every day. This introspection aligns with Dr. Hill’s wise observation that leadership is a process of self-development. Great leaders recognize that they are always a work-in-progress.