Leading as if they were people: How to beat the biggest, hairiest leadership challenges
Wow, what a concept! Leading with conscious consideration that we are leading people -- fellow human beings. What if you're just not that nice of a person? Why should you care?
Straight up -- you should care, you morally ought to care because you're a person. I won't give on that, but it can't hurt your motivation to know that leading as if they were people works to your advantage as well as for the good of those you lead.
Some of the absolute toughest circumstances for leaders can be overcome by the kind of leadership which counts others as people -- first, second and third -- and as resources maybe tenth down the line of the way you look at your team.
* As a leader, have you ever found yourself resource-poor but have to produce measurable, value-added results? That's like asking if the laws of economics ever applied to you.
* As a leader, with the simplistic truism that it takes money to make money ringing in your ears, have you ever had to grow outputs before you even got to touch inputs?
The good news is that we're working with people who are not defined by an input-output equation. People aren't a zero-sum game, at least not when it comes to material stuff.
A story, then five quick ways this makes a bottom line difference in practice.
Once I took the leadership reins of a school in trouble. Operating deficit thought to be about a current accumulated 10% of operating, adding 5% more per year to the hole. Down-trending enrollment and decline in morale. The macro picture was fast-deteriorating with expectations that external credit would be cut off within a year. A challenge, no doubt, but a turnaround I could sink my teeth into.
After six months onboard, we had quantified the real annual deficit increase at 20% and the macro picture was late 2007 with a country and the region heading into real estate and liquidity crises. Over the next five years, two similar area schools closed each year for a total of 10, out of an original 13 similar schools in the 1MM population metro. We were blessed to survive and thrive, after riding the wave down even lower for two of those years.
The turnaround was about people. People of substance and conviction, people to be cared about and respected. People to motivate and serve well. People to inspire with vision and reassure with principled decision-making. People were the only resource, but quintessentially not a resource, or human capital, or anything other than real human beings who were so much more than the sum of their material parts.
Practical leadership with people in mind:
1. Vision and principled decision-making have infinite ROI because they cost nothing and yield without limit.
2. Encouragement is not a soft input, but instead the hardest of hard assets and hard to make real and sustainable and measurably productive.
3. Trust is so much deeper than goodwill, but accounting for it finds goodwill assets multiplying geometrically.
4. Training is an input cost to be sure, but a culture of collegiality and mentorship is where any training must begin and end if it's people you're leading and not AI programmables.
5. Attention to people and their real humanity is anything but a touchy-feely preoccupation with sharing coffee and neediness. It has everything to do with erasing all doubt that you're all people, real people, on the same team.
Good leadership includes all sorts of good theory, research, best practice, systems design, communication strategy, and organizational development. If it doesn't start with leading 'as if' they were people, though, then it really hasn't started at all.