These days, creating a community and giving people more autonomy in their lives are the keys to improving company performance in the long term.  

In a recent blog, I told you of the leader who had effected a turnaround in his business by creating a culture that is now attracting and retaining the best people in the sector in addition to achieving much better margins. You can read it here.

In a nutshell, he asked his employees what they wanted and listened deeply.

To make sense of other leaders’ journeys I try to understand them through the prism of my own life experiences. Once I do that, it gives me a deeper understanding of the experiences that led that person to achieve their breakthrough.

And so, in this case, I looked back at my historic skill of focusing on KPIs, and the subsequent struggles and lack of satisfaction I got from over-focusing on the rational and logical. Doing that gave me short-term success but it was also the reason I missed an opportunity to build a more successful and robust culture that would have yielded much better long-term results. The gift of hindsight.

An overused approach

By focusing on KPIs I realise I treated employees more like machines than real human beings with needs, emotions and innate intelligence. At that time, I saw that aspect of my leadership role as a waste of time. Like most other managers and business owners back then I believed that once employees got a competitive wage and the company had met their physical needs by providing a reasonably warm and inviting workplace plus a decent canteen, it was enough. After that, I exercised control by having a contract of employment, a rule book, plenty of metrics and good communication to keep the ship sailing. Like the employees I mentioned in my last article doing just enough to get by, I also did just about as much as I thought was necessary to acknowledge the people who worked for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe I was an ogre, quite the contrary; I was quite friendly and easygoing and was considered a ‘nice’ person to work for. So, what came up from the feedback from our forum leader that has made me realise I was missing a vital ingredient?

A change of mindset

We had asked the forum participant who featured in that blog if there was one incident that helped change his perspective on how his leadership needed to change. He said it was several things but that as coach of his local football team, he had the opportunity to try some leadership approaches out on the pitch and in the dressing room. Some of you might say the stakes are higher in this environment than in the board room! Nevertheless, he began his experiment by involving the squad members in making decisions on how to improve their game plans as well as other commitments they wanted to make to each other. He reported that he was blown away by how they came up with their own strategies for how to evolve their game plan and how they could make the training more enjoyable. He also noticed that they were much more innovative and fluid in how they solved problems even during the game – they didn’t need to wait for the half-time break to make adjustments. He also noticed a greater level of motivation and camaraderie amongst the players in training. And yes, they got better results. In short, he concluded, it was all about how you connected with and related to people.

Taking the approach back into the work-place

Our leader had already learned from the peer-to-peer leadership coaching forum that no one person has the full answer. Each person contributes a piece of wisdom from their own lived experiences that ultimately helps the group solve each challenge. He also realised that when people feel seen and heard by their peers it opens them up to being more innovative and creative in solving long-term cultural problems.

Buoyed by his success with the football team, our leader began introducing and practising the peer-to-peer coaching process at company management meetings. The management team would share their issues and concerns and use the peer coaching approach to come up with new solutions to issues they previously found difficult to solve.

The team members concluded that the old hierarchical approach of management doing the thinking and employees further down doing the execution would no longer cut it with the young people who wanted more from work than just a living wage.

The transformation didn’t occur overnight – it would take lots of patience for them to adjust to a new way of leading and for employees to adjust to making decisions that they would previously have delegated up to management.

Re-defining leadership

Over about two years, this company redefined leadership from the management team doing the leading to enabling others to lead themselves. They realised that the purpose of the business wasn’t only to serve customers and make a profit, it was also about creating a community more in control of their own lives which also gave bothe employees and management more satisfaction. This was the piece that I was missing from my approach back in my management days. Paradoxically, our leader observed that the more the management team focuses on the emotional well-being of their employees the better the results they achieve. He acknowledges that this is just the start of the journey but that so far, the results are very encouraging.  Just look at the league table.

How do you feel about sharing responsibility for creating a culture that enhances the well being of all employees by engaging with them on the kind of company they would enjoy coming to work in?