Leadership - A discussion of traits, characteristics, and current news of leaders.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared some simple (but not simplistic) principles every manager needs to know. As a review, here are numbers one and two:

1. Quit focusing on the outward appearance and concentrate on what’s on the inside.

2. Be a good listener. 

Hopefully you’ve started using these principles, or at the very least begun some self-reflection on how you’re doing currently with them.

Principle #3 is one of the most basic acts we can do but leads to incredible success: putting ourselves in our employees’ shoes.

Stephen Covey alludes to this in his 7 Habits in the principle “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” He’s absolutely right. Did you know that each of your employees are completely different? They all have different experiences, values, attitudes, wants, needs, desires, and goals. Each day these influence their work life and they can’t help but be affected by them. As a manager, you have absolutely no control on how these folks feel on the inside. Your only hope is to reverse roles with them and see things from their perspective and current state of mind.

Think about how you feel when someone invalidates your opinion, experience, or feelings. You probably get a sense of hurt followed by apathy or anger. If you continually manage without ever taking time to see a different perspective, this probably explains why your employees withdraw from you or at the very least don’t trust you.

This is a learned skill that takes a great amount of practice. It involves active listening and careful reflective communication. You might be tempted when developing this skill to say something like this to a distraught employee:

I know how you feel

Resist this. Do you really know how they feel? Why not try this instead:

That’s a real difficult situation you’re in. It sounds as though you’re very frustrated (or angry, sad, scared etc). Is that correct?