Employees want their leaders to understand who they are. They also want personalized work models that reflect their unique preferences, values, and goals.
In the aftermath of the great reshuffle, workers are looking beyond their paycheck and benefits and diving deep into what an organization stands for, including diversity across leadership teams, participation in actionable ESG initiatives, and other value-driven programs. The market is shifting from product-driven to experience-driven, and in tandem, the workplace is shifting from organization-first to human-forward. Before leaders can truly know their team on an individual basis, they must first know themselves.
The hierarchy of leading workplace change
A leadership model that I apply to advocate workplace change is a three-tiered approach: “Lead yourself, lead the team, and lead the organization.”
The world’s most influential leaders allocate time every day to invest in self-reflection, and personal development practices, and take on challenges for continuous growth. You must be capable of managing a team of one before you can successfully lead a team of many.
Recent research by Tasha Eurich, organizational psychologist, executive coach, and author, included 5,000 participants to measure levels of self-awareness. Most of the participants perceived themselves to be self-aware, and yet, only 10-15% of the sample fit the criteria, meaning many leaders lack this essential skill.
Organizational transformation depends on self-awareness to promote a workplace culture of continuous change and development where the team can feel seen and connected to a meaningful work experience.
Lead yourself
To lead oneself you must first know oneself. Sources show that those with a clearer self-image exhibit greater levels of confidence, creativity, stronger relationships, and more effective communication.
The same study finds that a leader’s degree of self-awareness impacts a company’s bottom line and correlates positively with financial profitability. This self-knowledge can only be achieved after flexing your self-observation and self-awareness muscles repetitively.
Your ongoing journey as a leader starts with self-inquiry—asking and answering questions about how you show up as an individual in the workplace.
- What is my leadership style?
- What are my strengths?
- What are my weaknesses?
- How do I behave when I’m under stress and what are the impacts of that?
- How can I combat my unconscious biases?
If you don’t know who you are, your skill set, where your blind spots are, or how you lead, your ability to impact the organization around you will be limited.
The second significant aspect of learning to lead oneself is gaining clarity around what you stand for as a leader. Company culture is driven by a unifying mission statement, but people are the ones who collectively bring original ideas to the table to carry out their values through actionable outcomes.
Before crafting a company mission statement, you should take every opportunity to practice understanding and demonstrating your personal values. After completing this exercise, you will be able to confidently stand by your choices when it comes time to make decisions as a group.
In a similar vein, you must acknowledge how your personally crafted leadership style invites collaborators. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a great distance to go given that 55% of employees claim their organizations promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs but still a whopping 78% of employees see no diversity in leadership roles.
Too often organizations view “hiring diversity” as checking a list of necessary boxes to meet new employee and industry demands. Diversity both includes and goes beyond gender, race, religion, and age. Recruiting employees must also involve welcoming people with different experiences and perspectives who challenge your preexisting views as a leader.
Sustained workplace change depends on embracing all forms of diversity and collaborating in harmony to promote creativity, innovation, and belonging.
Lead your team
In a working world with increasingly common hybrid environments, adapting to change and demonstrating resilience through constant change, has become a leader’s biggest test yet.
Finding the right talent is a rigorous process, so accommodating for a new, redefined era of the workplace is essential. Addressing employees’ individual needs not only shows candidates their potential future with a company, but also affirms existing employees they will be heard when they speak about how they want to work. We used to talk about this in terms of work-life balance, but today it’s really about flexibility.
Younger generations have come to expect flexibility; 92% of working millennials say flexibility is a top priority while job hunting. However, it’s relevant for all ages; most workers 50-years-of-age and older report that they want to reduce hours and increase flexibility as they near retirement. Flexible work looks different for everyone. For example, just one year ago balance may have looked like a hybrid work environment where every employee returns to the office two to three times per week. Now, flexibility may look like Employee A working fully remote from across the world, Employee B working in the office Monday through Thursday, and Employee C logging off at 3 p.m. to pick up their kids from school and logging back on at 7 p.m. to finish the day. Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to the human work experience, flexibility gives employees choices that match their distinct lifestyles, preferences, and needs.
When it comes to employee engagement, the term Quiet Quitting was recently taking social media by storm. This buzzword is not a new phenomenon in the workplace, but rather, a misaligned explanation for those who are disengaged from their work. People are either engaged or disengaged and guiding your team and ensuring team members feel valued can motivate employees in their growth. National statistics show that approximately 70% of employees say they feel disengaged, or not fully committed to their organizations, and this is a major problem for leaders.
Quiet quitting is not a strategy to be employed, but instead an opportunity for real and authentic conversations with employees to understand why they are disengaged and what path might bring them back. Guidance from a manager who knows them will uncover tailored solutions that work well for the individual and their current situation. Change is not always well-received, so offering support as a way of building resilience can not only strengthen the person, but also strengthen the work they do.
Lead your organization
Leading an organization requires leaders to walk the talk. Once a leader outlines their personal values, understands what their teams value, and links those things to the organization’s overarching mission, values, and vision, they must then connect the dots between the company and the individual employee’s purpose.
A recent study found that 70% of employees believe their sense of purpose is largely defined by their work. As a result, more employees are looking to occupy roles within companies that align with that purpose. Nearly 80% of employees say that they want to work for an organization that commits to DEI efforts. Additionally, job seekers want to work for sustainable companies. Gen Z is leading the charge on sustainable change; 31% would turn down roles at companies with poor ESG scores, and 54% would take a pay cut to work for an organization that aligns with their ethics.
Employees aren’t just looking for a company that states their values; they’re looking for a company that puts them into practice, shaping the very culture of the organization. If a company publicly states they support and promote diversity, yet a quick trip to their website shows no diversity in the leadership ranks, it will be very difficult to attract and retain the talented employees that the company needs to survive. A company’s culture is defined by the worst behavior that is tolerated within it, so as a leader you must do more than talk a good game—you have to embody it.
How do you connect your employees core values with your company mission? In 1962, President John F. Kennedy paid a visit to the NASA space center during a critical time of history and noticed a janitor sweeping the hallways. He walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” “Well, Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
This man didn’t define his role by the day-to-day tasks, but instead by the organizational mission that promised to change the world. It doesn’t matter if you lead a space station, a bank, or a lemonade stand; inspiring and connecting your team to a higher purpose must start with a collective mission. If you can demonstrate to your team that you know who you are and what you stand for, then you’re one step closer to changing the future of work.
Kim Curley, VP of Workforce Readiness Consulting at NTT DATA.
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