4-Profit Denver Conference- Becoming a 5 Star Leader
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The document discusses leadership and employee engagement. It notes that companies with engaged workforces experience increased productivity, decreased absenteeism, lower retention risk, and 3x higher operating margins. However, only 35% of employees are actively engaged. Leadership explains 30-40% of engagement. The ultimate leadership question is what difference a leader will make. Leadership involves observable practices and behaviors but developing capacity takes work and commitment. Leaders are encouraged to start with warmth and combine warmth with strength for effective leadership. Participants complete a self-assessment and action planning exercise to identify areas for improvement.
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4-Profit Denver Conference- Becoming a 5 Star Leader
- 2. Today’s Session • Why leadership matters • The traits of effective leaders • Self-reflection • Designing an action
- 3. Your Guides • Ronni Hendel- Giller • JoAnne Myers
- 4. Companies with an engaged workforce experience: Increased productivity Decreased absenteeism Lower retention risk 3X higher operating margins According to the Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study,
- 5. But, only 35% of employees are actively engaged
- 6. 30-40% of engagement is explained by leadership
- 7. Leaders Make a Difference Leader’s Behavior Employee Engagement Competitive Advantage Business Results
- 8. The ultimate leadership question is not, “will I make a difference?”, the question is, “what difference will I make?”
- 9. The Good News Leadership is an observable set of practices and behaviors
- 10. The Challenge Developing one’s leadership capacity takes work, time and commitment
- 11. The Opportunity To radically impact your company’s engagement levels and performance* * And improve your quality of life!
- 12. Warmth Strength
- 13. Accounts for 90% of first impression
- 14. What are this person’s intentions toward me? Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?
- 15. Is it Better to be Loved or Feared?
- 16. Most Leaders Think Strength Comes First
- 18. The Benefits of Starting With Warmth
- 19. Warmth + Strength=Effective Leadership
- 20. Strength Warmthhigh high low low Looks like: Competent/clear and Cold/distant People Feel : Envy/resentment Distant respect Looks like: Cold/distant and vague/unclear People Feel : Distrust, confusion Looks like: Vague/unclear and connected People Feel : Dismissive, disrespect, unsupported Looks like: Competent, clear and connected People Feel: Admiration, inspiration
- 21. Activity • Complete self-assessment • Find your default quadrant • In team, complete worksheet • Be prepared to report back
- 22. In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are. Max DePree (Leadership is an Art)
- 23. Action Planning • Identify one action that you’ll focus on over the next week • State it in as an “if-then” If I notice myself doing x, then I will… If I am in situation x, then I will… • Write it down • Share it with your table
Editor's Notes
- Ask: Take a moment and think about yourself over the last year—if these images are two ends of a continuum, where would you put yourself?
- Chances are pretty good that wherever you placed yourself on this continuum—there’s a lot about leading that feels hard. And chances are that you don’t always feel that effective. That’s because leadership is hard…and because it demands a lot of us.We’re going to start by looking at the relationship between what leaders do and how an organization performs—and, through some powerful data—see exactly why leadership does matter and why some of the most important work you can do is to develop yourself so that you can increase the amount of time when you feel closer to the image of the conductor. We’ll then look at two particular traits that you can pay attention to in order to increase your effectiveness as a leader. We’ll guide you in applying some powerful research about these two traits and using it to help you on your leadership journey—including a specific action or two that you can begin to take when you leave here today. And we’ll give you some hints for how to set actions or goals that don’t just stay on the paper.
- Your guides for this session are myself and Joanne. Note: “in thirty seconds or less who you are, what you do, who you work with and how you help people (benefit)”Ronni: I am a leadership coach and facilitator, focused on helping leaders develop themselves. My background is both in the training and development arena and, more importantly perhaps, I spent 20 years leading organizations and figuring out what it meant to be an effective leader. JoAnne:
- Let’s start by talking about the people we lead. You may have seen figures like these before, emphasizing the power of engaged employees…these are pretty serious numbers. “When employees are super-engaged, they exhibit a willingness to put in a great deal of extra effort, increased loyalty, a greater willingness to recommend their business as an employer of choice, efforts to inspire others in the businessthrough concrete comments and actions.”From study: Only 18% of highly engaged global respondents said they were likely to leave their employer in compared with 40% of the disengaged. Similarly, 72% of the highly engaged said they would prefer to remain with their employer even if they had a comparable opportunity elsewhere, compared with 58% of the unsupported and 28%of the disengaged.
- The problem—employee engagement is, across the board, very low.
- In fact, research studies tell us that leadership accounts for between 30 and 40% of employee engagement in an organization!Of the 5 core drivers of retention that were identified in that same Towers Watson report, 2 of them were specifically associated with leadership and management. In another study, young, employed people were interviewed at a job fair where they were looking for new positions. The primary driver that explained why they were on the market again was not pay, but leadership. In fact, many indicated that they would take less pay if they knew they’d work for someone who was an effective leader.
- To put all of what we’ve talked about together—we can see direct linkages between what a leader does, day in, day out…how engaged people are, and how the business performs. So, to put it simply. Leadership matters.
- To help you ensure that the difference you make is meaningful and increases the engagement of your organization/teams, we’re going to shift our focus from the general to the specific and explore one particularaspect of leadership. The intention for the rest of today’s session is to give you a new way to think about the way leaders behave and help you see yourself in a new way. Then, we’ll use that to craft a specific action that you can take with you and apply immediately.
- Here’s the good news. This is information that we can do something about. Leadership isn’t a black box…it’s not magical or mystical, something you have or you don’t have. It can be defined in things that we can see and observe, and it can be learned.
- That doesn’t mean it’s easy. We have a lot of ingrained habits that take work to shift—we have to see them, acknowledge them, and work on shifting them. And, similarly, adopting a new habit or practice requires serious commitment.
- We hope we’ve made the case that it’s worth it. An investment in yourself and your growth as a leader can have a direct impact on your organization and help your enjoy your job a whole lot more on top of that!
- Social psychologist do a lot of research to better understand what makes people tick and about how relationships are formed. A body of research that has now made its way into the Harvard Business Review due to the direct implications for leaders, is about the traits that matter when we make assessments of other people.This research has shown that there are 2 traits that matter much, much more than any others. These are “warmth” and “strength.” Think of warmth as likability and trustworthiness—and the ability to be empathetic. And by strength we mean things like how able someone is, how much backbone they have, how strongly they can articulate and stand firm in their positions.
- These studies conclude that these two dimensions account for more that 90% of the way we form either positive or negative first impressions of people. Before I tell you what the researchers said, any ideas about why this might be true?
- Now let’s talk about how the psychologists explain this. First, people want to know whether someone is a friend or a foe... what their intentions are. You’ll learn a lot more about this tomorrow. For today, let’s just say that we’re tapping into a rather old part of our brains that’s on the lookout for things that could threaten our very survival. That’s why these assessments are not even conscious…they happen very quickly and automatically.Next, we try to figure out how much this person is capable of--Will they deliver on what they promise? Do they have the competency to do so? Should I be afraid of this person?--again that old part of brain is at work here—and it’s not highly conscious.So, we put people on the “warm” or “cold” continuum or the “strong” or “weak” continuum long before we have any idea that we’ve done this. As leaders, this is important to know. People are making assessments of us quickly and constantly—on these two dimensions. So, one question we can ask is…
- Which brings us to a question that Machiavelli, the politician and philosopher pondered some 500 years ago—and likely not for the first time in history. Machiavelli’s opinion, without the benefit of social psychology, said:“It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”While it may seem a little extreme to use the language of “love” and “fear”, the reality is that
- We do find that most leaders today tend to believe that they need to start with demonstrating strength…their credentials, that they are able to do whatever is required. Backbone is considered an essential—leadership quality. Leaders needs to demonstrate that they a strong. And, many leaders do, consciously or unconsciously, use fear as a way to get things done.Here are a couple of interesting and related findings that the folks who researched this topic found:When asked to tell a story about themselves, leaders will tell a story about their strengths….When given the choice of “hard” training programs or “soft” ones, they’ll choose the hard ones…thinking that will help them be stronger.Think for a moment…does that ring true from your experience?
- The things is, research increasingly shows that leaders who start with strength and minimize warmth are making a mistake. The problem is that putting strength first and focusing on strength alone can create fear, resistance and disengagement in the people we lead. Despite Machiavelli, being feared is not better than being loved in leaders—especially not in organizations where engagement, commitment, and collaboration matter.Preferencing strength or backbone can create fear which undermines problem-solving skills, creativity, and ultimately engagement.
- Now here’s the interesting part—what we’re finding is that, perhaps counterintuitively, The way to gain influence and to increase our leadership effectiveness is to begin with warmth. While this may not be intuitive, it’s warmth, not strength, that facilitates influence. Warmth is directly connected to trust, and trust is a key to increased information sharing, openness, and cooperation.Those same leaders, when asked to choose classes for others, wanted other people to develop their softer skills—to learn to be more supportive. And when they told stories about other people and their impact on them, they told stories that emphasized qualities more associated with warmth. So, even those leaders who started with strength for themselves, sought more balance in others.
- If it sounds like we’re making strength sound like a bad thing, let be clear—The ideal in leadership is a balance between warmth and strength. Working towards that balance is a way to radically increase your own leadership effectiveness.For the rest of today’s session we’re going to spend time working together to increase our awareness of how we operate as leaders and identify ways to improve the way that we balance warmth and strength.Before we launch into this section, I also want to strongly emphasize that warmth and strength are not hard-wired personality characteristics. Even if our personalities tend one way or the other, we can adopt behaviors and practices that are warm or strong. And, we can learn to regain balance when we lose it by remembering those behaviors.Our first exercise will give usa list of behaviors that reflect warmth and strength that you’ll be able to draw from later, when you look at your own style and think about how you might increase your effectiveness.
- Do worksheet page and then split, physically into one of three groups representing “out of balance” defaults. Work with team to answer questions, share with group.
- We’re not quite done. Before you leave, I’d like to ask you to use what you learned, what you gleaned from the presentations and the discussions, and think about one particular thing you can pay attention to when you leave here…and work to shift, even if only a bit. Something that will help you move towards greater balance.
- We’re going to do that in a pretty structured way. Introduce “if” “then” change technique and ask each person to write their action in this language. Explain that if-then statements are a well-researched method to increase the likelihood that you’ll turn the actions you design into habits. They are called “implementation intentions” and designed to help you quickly adopt new habits. Ask each person to share their if/then statement with one other person (at least.)Explain that what they just did—if/then, writing it down and saying it out loud are 3 of the strongest actions that people can take when setting a goal or intention…and can make a huge difference in doing something, or not doing it. (They can use these techniques on the job as leaders.)