Leading Happy People
Don’t let the title mislead you. This is not an instruction manual for how to lead happy people. This is instead a guide to help you to make certain that the people you lead are happy. It is much simpler than you can imagine, and also much more difficult. The largest challenge to leading happy people is suspending judgement. Leading happy people is a goal oriented leadership approach, in which you and your employees set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely or Time-bound) goals together, and then performance discussions center on the progress towards these goals, and how you as a leader can facilitate success.
For many, the first step is in truly understanding the objectives of your organization, and then identifying how you and your employees contribute to the organization achieving these objectives.
For most humans a sense of purpose is critical. When you have objectives like:
- Increase sales by 15%
- Improve customer satisfaction by 10%
- Reduces costs by 5%
How does that inspire a sense of purpose?
So the challenge is figuring out how your employees support the organizational goals, and how to translate that support into inspiring objectives.
Fortunately for me, my career was in Environment, Safety & Health (EH&S). It is easy to be inspirational when you are helping to protect people and the planet. Not all career paths lend themselves to the easy sense of purpose. But all can.
Most of my musings on leadership are the culmination of reading management and leadership texts over the years, with a strong foundation in adult learning theory.
The first step in creating inspiring objectives is to look beyond the mundane. Let's say you work in Accounting or Finance or IT. For a short time in my career, I worked in EH&S software application support. I would regularly say in meetings, "Making the world a better place, one application at a time." It always got a good laugh, but it also motivated my team. Inspirational Objective - Improving the usability of the software my clients need to use so that it is intuitive and easy for them. Making people's lives less stressful is an inspirational objective. Every function can make it better. You as the leader just need to imagine how.
Fond memories of "Making the world a better place, one application at a time" :)
ReplyDeleteAs a leadee, it is tough to see how we can help reach organizational goals when most of the time the organizational goals might not apply. Like EHS goals . . . when I started working, I started in EHS and there weren't sustainability goals like there are now. So, it was hard to see where we (the function) were helping the company. Back then, we were very 'document' focused and doing only minimal and very limited EHS safety reporting. We just put our heads down and worked and weren't really 'aligning' with company goals as much as we were aligned with getting things done. Now, there is a bigger emphasis on EHS sustainability goals and it's easier to 'see' where we could be making a difference in the company goals.
Good stuff. sorry, it's taken so long for me to find these, but I now find myself with more time to research things, and think more.
ReplyDeleteBecause I was one of those IT/application guys you worked with, I can certainly relate to happy and healthy. In the current world, we (IT) tend to be too busy and life gets too complicated to stop and "smell the coffee", but one thing that I've found is that as a team leader of any kind, in an environment like that, you certainly need to handle your team with a steady, but gentle hand. Throwing in praise, humor, and an occasional "Thank you for all you do", goes a long way.
Thanks for the blog.
Great to hear from you, Paul! I love that my blog allows me to keep in touch with all my Dow friends.
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