Sometimes in life and in leadership, we navigate the present challenges with a map. Other days, there is no map. Instead, we have to follow our gut. We have to trust the lessons we have learned from when we naviaged the path to this point.
Recently, when helping people and companies to navigate these complex and complicated times, I am reminded of Packard’s Law: No company can consistently grow revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth with excellence. For me, the key words are: “to get enough of the right people.” As we continue to witness, this is a challenge.
Still, I believe we know how to deal with this problem. We have to keep the employees we have. Retention is the key to solving the problem.
Kevin Cashman in his book, Leadership From The Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life (Berrett-Koehler, 2008), shared the findings of the Saratoga Institute research on poor interpersonal skills. They interviewed 19,700 exiting employees and their bosses and discovered the following:
- 85% of bosses said that former employees left for more compensation and opportunity
- 80% of the exiting employees said they left because of poor relationship, poor development and poor coaching from the boss.
I recognize that this research was published fourteen years ago, but I believe it is still applicable. People are leaving for many reasons, but I strongly suspect they are leaving because of poor relationships with their supervisor and their teams. And for us as leaders, we can do something about this. As the late Stephen Covey pointed out, this all falls within our circle of influence.
The first place to start is to remember the Law of Growth, namely what you feed, grows. When this phrase first entered my life, I focused on the word “grows.” It seemed to be the right choice at the time. But after many decades of living with this phrase, I now believe we need to focus on the word “feed.” In particular, we need to focus more on feeding people clarity, meaning and purpose.
Given current events, we need to return to Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall’s writing. As they wrote in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), “people need attention,” and when you give it to them “in a safe and nonjudgemental environment, we will come and stay and play and work.” As they continue, “Positive attention… is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team…. If you want your people to learn more, pay attention to what’s working for them right now, and then build on that…. get into the conscious habit of looking for what’s going well for each of your team members.”
For me, this validates the idea of starting meetings with a discussion of what is going right. For me, this also connects to the book, The One Minute Manager by Ken Blandchard and Spencer Johnson from 1982, where they write about one minute goals, one minute praising, and one minute re-directs.
As Buckingham and Goodall note, “… tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attention, your instantaneous reaction to what worked. By getting him to think about specific things that are going right, you are deliberately altering his brain chemistry so that he can be open to new solutions and new ways of thinking and acting.”
With this perspective, the challenge here is to have the language to tell others what I experienced at their moment of excellence. I do not think we have this language. As Brene’ Brown, wrote in her book,, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House, 2021), “Fifteen years ago, when we first introduced a curriculum based on my shame resilience research, we asked participants in the training workshops to list all of the emotions that they could recognize and name as they were experiencing them. Over the course of five years, we collected these surveys from more than seven thousand people. The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The emotions were happy, sad, and angry.”
I was stunned when I read this the first time. I also was embarrassed, and blown away by the implications to the world of leadership and excellence. As she continued, “Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning and self-awareness…. Language show us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.” For me, I have come to realize that our language as leaders gives us the capacity to make connections. And we need more emotional literacy as leaders, not just intellectual literacy.
This week, ponder the above insights, and invest the time to expand your emotional literacy and to deepen your connections with your people. The portal to meaning-making and connections is right before us. Now is the time to walk through and do the work.
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