If you believe—as I do—that the fundamental purpose of leadership is to deliver the best results possible (for all stakeholders) from the people you lead, then the question leaders should be asking themselves is: “What does Dave (or Mary, Carl or Nancy, etc.) need in order to get better results?” It’s much easier to answer than: “How can I be a better leader?”
Jack Welch was a controversial figure in American business. You might disagree with the direction in which he led GE, but the fact that he knew how to lead— that is get the results he wanted through other people—is beyond question. Welch is responsible for one of my favorite quotations on leadership: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
Growing others. It’s got a nice ring to it and sounds appropriately supportive, but it is actually steely-eyed, strategic opportunism masquerading as altruism—and I’m all for it. That’s hardly a controversial stance, you might be thinking. After all, David, growing others is the reason we have talent management and HR departments. It’s the reason people like you have a job. And I’d answer you: That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Too often we think in terms of growing people by role: an accountant should be able to . . . a project manager needs to . . . . but we are not our roles. I’ll let you in on a secret: Sending your employee to a seminar on interpersonal communication or approving trip expenses to the next trade expo is not “growing” them. It’s making them more valuable, improving their skills, keeping them current on best practices—all important and noble things, but it’s not what Welch was talking about. If more training fixed people, then I’d be out a job pretty quick.
My wife has a green thumb. I don’t. If I plop a tomato plant into a nice sunny spot, we might get a few tomatoes out of it. If my wife plants it in the same spot, the neighbors even get some. Same plant. Same dirt. Same rain. Same sun. Different gardener. She’d say she doesn’t grow anything—the plant does all the work—it’s just following its nature. I’m not sure about that. Her plants get the best results, mine only adequate.
Everything she touches flourishes because she knows how, when and why to nurture. She’s invested the time to know which plants grow best in which conditions, when and how to feed them, how to notice the slight changes that indicate a plant is headed for trouble. She’s outside watering before she has coffee in the morning. Put another way, she knows what her plants need to thrive, and she gives it to them.
You’ve heard the gardening metaphor many times before, and it has some problems as an analogy for humans and our tremendous complexity. As a leader, you might think it’s not your responsibility to make sure that Dave flowers as a person—and of course you’d be right. However, you are responsible for the results I produce as your employee.
Growing others is a function of actively learning and proactively meeting their needs (not wants—wants are entirely different) so they can get the results you need and your leaders demand.
Here’s where it gets complicated: Each individual has his or her own personal basket of needs, some of which they are not even aware of—maybe many. That’s why when we try to “do unto others as we’d have done unto us” we often cause unintended stress or upset to the person we are trying to help. Even if we can never fully know all of the items in any person’s basket of needs, and probably not even our own, we can be darn sure they have a basket—a context in which those needs happen, and it’s the same no matter who carries it.
Think about another well-known idea that comes to us from the same source as the Golden Rule: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. How we love ourselves has much less to do with what we do for ourselves than how we value ourselves—our own sense of our significance. I matter to myself and I want to matter to the people around me.
You might remember Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow suggested there were five levels of needs (not wants): the first two cover physical needs, and the next three psychological. Here is Covey’s spin in Maslow: “Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival – to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.” (emphasis mine).
At work, our need to feel significant is probably the most commonly unmet need I see and hear about—and one that is rarely addressed or even considered by most leaders. At the same time, it’s a heck of a leverage point when it comes to morale, engagement, productivity, decreasing turnover—all the things we want from our people. Recognizing someone’s significance is more complicated than recognizing a job well done—I hope we all do that regularly—or even occasionally telling your employee how important she is to the team. There is no one size fits all checklist, but if you start the day with the mindset that the people around you need to feel valued, you’re already ahead of the game.
No matter our exterior, communication style, mannerisms, age, or any other characteristic, we all want to feel understood, affirmed, validated and appreciated. Do that for me and I’ll follow you gladly.