It would be a mistake to interpret this as 'soft.' By Marcel Schwantes Founder and Chief Human Officer at Leadership from the core Do you have a good boss story? Mine takes me back to my corporate days over 15 years ago. I reported to an executive that, to this day, is still my favorite boss. Here's why:
Not to confuse this philosophy with doormat-leadership, meeting others' needs (and having clear goals and measures of accountability in place for good performance) has always been good for business. Having said that, there are certain traits most of us would never consider attaching to strong leaders in the harsh, transactional world of business. But if the traits below are exhibited on a human-to-human level, the people dynamics at work between managers and their workers would shift in a dramatic way. This, too, would be good for business. Here are three rare traits to look for in such leaders. 1. They are patient. When we react to an event with explosive anger or passive-aggressiveness, we are being impulsive, shortsighted, and usually not giving much thought to what we are doing.It usually happens when we don't get something we want, or react to an unresolved issue without taking in all varied views from different angles. We see this in our daily interactions with bosses who have not mastered the powerful leadership virtue of patience. The best leaders respond rather than react to a situation by using patience to their advantage to assess a situation, process, and get perspective. Such leaders leverage patience to consider the situation and decide the best approach to handle things. 2. They admit they don't have all the answers. This takes humility, a leadership powerhouse often misinterpreted as weak or soft. Nothing could be further from the truth. Groundbreaking research concluded that a humble leader doesn't believe success is inevitable. Acknowledging that they don't have all the answers, humble leaders solicit feedback and encourage their people to take initiative. They are also more apt to celebrate others' accomplishments before their own. As the research findings assert, humility in action doesn't weaken a leader's authority. Rather, it offers her more flexibility in how she exercises and delegates her power and authority. 3. They remove obstacles from their people's path. What I've studied and witnessed in every great leader is that they do everything in their power to remove the pain and alleviate the suffering of employees. The rarefied trait is found ingrained in leaders with compassion. Before dismissing it as too touchy-feely, know that compassion has been extensively documented and verified as a leadership force of nature in the new Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, the first evidence-based literature on compassion, altruism, and empathy, as documented by experts in positive psychology. Compassion is a more objective form of empathy and is defined as "walking a mile in another person's shoes." In other words, a compassionate reaction in a leader is to put himself in the suffering employee's shoes and do everything in his power to alleviate the employee's suffering. Put another way, this idea of seeing things clearly through your employee's perspective can be invaluable when it comes to meeting their needs, coaching for performance, and working through challenging emotional situations. President Obama Just Shared His Simple 3-Part Framework for Making Even the Toughest Decisions8/3/2019 No one has to make harder decisions than the president. Here's how Obama dealt with his toughest calls. You think you have to make stressful, high-stakes decisions for your work? Just imagine what it's like to have to make the call to send young soldiers into harm's way or weigh bailing out bankers who deserve a jail sentence more than a rescue boat against tanking the economy? How on earth could any mere mortal make such impossibly tough decisions? There are only five Americans in the world who can speak to that, and one of them just opened up. Speaking at a gathering of tech workers, former President Barack Obama spoke in detail about how he handled the crushing pressure of presidential decision-making. Every call was horrible -- "If it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it," he recalled -- but he figured out a constructive approach to thinking through some of the world's most intractable problems. 1. Swap certainty for probabilities. Psychologist David Dunning, of Dunning-Kruger effect fame, is known for studying stupidity, but through the power of contrast his work also illuminates how smart people think. Dumb people, he recently opined, see the world in black-and-white. Smart people think in probabilities. "Not, 'Will X or Y occur?' but, 'What is the chance of X or Y occurring -- 10, 50, 80 percent?'" he said. Obama agrees with him. The first step to making a truly tough decision, he told the gathering is "being comfortable with the fact that you're not going to get [a] 100 percent solution, and understanding that you're dealing with probabilities, so that you don't get paralyzed trying to think that you're going to actually solve this perfectly," Quartz reports. 2. Get the smartest people in the room. "I'm old fashioned. I believe in these enlightenment values like facts and reason and logic," Obama went on, offering a not-so-subtle dig at his fact-challenged successor. "If I had set up a good process in which I could get all the information, all the data, all perspectives, if I knew that I had around the table all the angles...then I could feel confident that even if I didn't get a perfect answer, that I was making the best decision that anybody in my situation could make," he continued. How do you get the best information? From the best people, of course, and that means putting your ego aside and not insisting you know everything or have the biggest brain. Obama insisted "having the confidence to have people around you who were smarter than you, or disagreed with you" was "critical." 3. Ask dumb questions. Just humbling yourself to seek out expert advice and actually listen to it isn't enough, however. You also have to understand it. That often means going a step further and asking a lot of seemingly-dumb questions. "I always would say to somebody, if they're talking about a really complicated issue, 'I don't understand what you're saying. Explain it to me in English,'" Obama relates. "I think one of the problems with people who are in big jobs is they start feeling as if they have to project that 'I have every answer' when, in fact, most of the time, you may not." Looking for more information on how this process played out in regards to some of the most high-profile decisions of his presidency, such as the Bin Laden raid and the Deep Water Horizon oil spill disaster? Check out the complete Quartz article for lots more detail. Mike Guerriero of Gelotti won the gelato master competition with his Blueberry Basil gelato. He will represent North America in 2021 at the Gelato Festival World Masters in Italy. Click HERE to visit website. |
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