Three Effective Functions of a True Leader

According to Parker Follet: "The power of integration is the power of leadership. The leader brings out the best in us, bringing together and concentrating what we only feel gropingly and shatteringly. He is a person who gives shape to every man's uncoarctate vitality. The person who has the greatest influence on me is not the one who performs great deeds, but the one who makes me believe that I can perform great deeds."

There are many sources such as podcasts and books available suggesting the effective characteristic of a great leader. However, leaders are made and not born. With proper mentoring and hands-on experience with an added daily dose of leadership knowledge, you can become an effective leader for any organization.

True leaders work side by side with the people they lead to get to know and care about the people they lead. Leaders may lift and encourage their teams by working alongside them. Teaching people involves people management. Team members follow a leader with his instructions and as a role model, and his management style should include the following:

ENGAGE PEOPLE

A true leader can bring people together. They do not want division. Thecommunicate and coach subordinates for optimum performance of a variety of tasks assigned. The mother of contemporary management, Mary Parker Follet, felt that management was the art of getting things done via people. A true leader should engage people in a team. These involve listening to employees' feedback, responding to show empathy, using positive communication between the group, and finding the right solution to a given problem with team effort. Managers and supervisors are leaders where the success of the business is in their hands.

Understand that people you lead want to be valued and challenged.

ENABLE PEOPLE

Companies should have leadership that will enable the full potential of others. Helping people to develop to their full potential is ideal for the success of a business. Leadership is about allowing others to reach their best potential; this is a crucial characteristic of a strong leader; they understand how to get the most out of others. Great leaders become one as great top leaders have mentored them.

ENERGIZE PEOPLE

People may get tired in the daily routine of their job. It is essential to tap on what inspires them, reward their achievement by appreciation, show respect, listen to them and lead by example. Make their daily work energizing. Help people leap from what is impossible to possible. As a leader, be enthusiastic and encouraging with your people. Before implementing some company plan or changes, let the people think out of the box. The people's suggestions and ideas can spark their flame of passion for work. People will get great enthusiasm with the compelling vision from an enthusiastic leader.

HUMAN CAPITAL TRENDS: DESIGN THINKING ON CRAFTING EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE (Copy)

With the high technology innovations, employees are now equipped with the constant flood of information. According to Deloitte data, people constantly check their phones more than 8 billion times per day, but productivity is scarcely increasing. HR must use design thinking, which puts the employee experience at the center, to relieve the overburdened employee and develop HR tools to help manage complexity. Design thinking shifts HR's attention away from programs and processes and toward a new goal: creating a productive and meaningful employee experience through compelling, pleasurable, and simple solutions.

The Role of Design Thinking on Employee Experience

Customers' perceptions of your company are shaped by how employees perceive it. Design thinking aids in the creation of an engaging workplace that delights employees in "moments that matter."

Design thinking allows you to focus on the employee's individual experience and build tailored processes. As a result, new tools and solutions have been developed to benefit employee satisfaction, productivity, and enjoyment. HR departments should improve their abilities to include essential design principles like digital design, mobile app design, user experience design, and behavioral economics into their work. Design thinking is valuable and practical. According to this year's poll, respondents at organizations where HR provides the most value are nearly five times more likely than their peers to use design thinking in their initiatives.

What Exactly Does "Employee Experience" Imply?

Employee experience is the total of everything that happens during a career. It begins when an employee applies for a job and ends on their last workday. 

Employee experience involves four crucial stages:

1. Recruitment: This is your first opportunity to showcase your company's culture and build trust with a prospective hire. The total experience is determined by how smooth the application procedure is.

2. Employee Onboarding: Integrating a new employee into a company. While on the job, they acquire a sense of how things will be. The smoother the onboarding process, the better their experience will be.

3. Employee Retention and Development: The candidate contributes to the company's growth and development. They've assimilated into the culture. The experience is influenced by their daily routine, work connections, growth possibilities, learning, etc.

4. Employee Exit: Employees who leave the company until their exit interview are included in this category.

Why Is Employee Engagement So Important Now?

• Engagement of Employees - In the United States, 36 percent of employees are involved in their work and workplace, the same as Gallup's composite proportion of engaged employees in 2020. Around the world, 20% of employees are engaged at work.

• Retention of Employees - In 2021, 74% of actively disengaged workers are actively looking for new work or keeping an eye out for openings. In comparison, 55 percent of disengaged employees and 30 percent of engaged employees are not involved.

• To Attract High-Performing Employees - Companies like Zappos create candidate experiences to attract high-performing employees and make it simple to find and apply for the perfect position.

Companies Design Employee Experience to Attract and Retain High-Performing People

The employee experience is more significant in the employee life cycle. At each point of the life cycle is the journey people take with your organization and their interactions with managers and associates. 

What Can Business Leaders Do?

1. Provide design thinking training and seminars to Human Resources managers.

2. Learn and apply design thinking as used in customer service.

3. Create a prototype, test it, and learn from it.

HR Leaders as Designers

HR leaders can be designers by focusing on people, resulting in a more engaging and effective HR solution. When used appropriately, design thinking is a way of problem-solving that is rigorous and disciplined. It's an opportunity for HR to rethink how it collaborates with the company and its processes while leveraging technology to promote significant employee interactions. 

When done correctly, design thinking creates a virtuous loop that increases employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity for the organization. Talent leaders should ask themselves, given their new role as designers, how can HR build and influence the employee experience? How can HR create holistic experiences that engage employees at every stage of their careers, from prospects to alumni? How can HR assist in developing and reinforcing design talents across the organization?

The Importance of Psychological Safety in Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging

A diverse workplace is one in which all employees feel included and valued regardless of rank and status. Diversity in the workplace refers to people's differences in color, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation being recognized, respected, and valued. A diversified team can help the company to achieve more success in the business. To achieve this, the team must work in a welcoming setting that promotes psychological well-being.

A diverse workplace has advantages, but the task is not as simple as putting together a diverse group. To achieve a successful diverse workplace, people with various abilities and backgrounds must work well together. Psychological safety is a critical component of achieving it. It is a strategy for building diversity, inclusion, and belonging in an organization, whether private or public.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, questions, worries, and mistakes. It is believed that no one will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with their ideas, questions, concerns, or errors; this is critical for maximizing the benefits of diversity because it can help make inclusion a reality.

In a nutshell, psychological safety is about allowing people to be honest with one another. Further, psychological safety refers to members of a group's shared view that the group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety is achieved in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust of the people.

How to Cultivate Psychological Safety?

There are ways to cultivate and foster psychological safety in the workplace. Psychological safety in the workplace is the shared belief that it's safe to take interpersonal risks as a group. As a leader, you can check if your employees feel psychologically safe. Input from people from various groups is used to measure diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

As a leader, you have to help people feel comfortable and build the shared belief that the team is safe for risk-taking. The first step is to demonstrate your commitment to your team. Make it clear to employees that you are paying attention when they speak. Let them know you've taken the time to listen, comprehend, and consider their viewpoint. Be open to feedback and, most importantly, show your team that you care about their personal and professional development by supporting them.

Psychological Safety Pays Off

Business organizations that promote psychological safety can reap benefits. Among these benefits are better employee engagement and well-being, greater team collaboration, lower employee turnover, more flexibility to change, high performance of employees, and a more substantial workplace. Further, employees will feel more secure, avoid work burnout, and be more engaged at work as a result. They will have a lower likelihood of quitting their employment. Talented people will want to work for outstanding companies with leaders who understand their employees and value diversity.

Another thing is that the greater the ambiguity and need for learning in a given set of tasks, the more psychological safety is required to complete those tasks successfully. This is where psychological safety comes into play in the workplace as a critical element in predicting team success in various domains involving cognitive, emotional, and complex tasks.

It pays off to invest in psychological safety in the workplace. Overall, an organization will benefit from happier, healthier, and more engaged workers by nurturing a positive work culture through promoting psychological safety.

How Can Design Thinking Help Advance DEI Challenges in 5 Stages?

Today's DEI pieces of training and programs are frequently developed with a one-size-fits-all strategy that focuses on changing the attitudes of others. However, by being more strategic and human-centric, thinking like a designer may help us alter and enhance diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) activities.

Design thinking principles can help us holistically handle today's more complex and interrelated DEI concerns using a five-step road map.

The 5 Stages of the design thinking method as mapped out by Stanford University are the following:

1. Empathize

This is the first stage of design thinking. Typically through user research, you should get a sympathetic grasp of the problem you're trying to solve. This involves research and analysis of the gathered data to understand the company's current DEI state.

Empathy is the starting point for design thinking. People are at the heart of DEI's activities. We must have a thorough awareness of our people's wants and feelings to produce value through DEI efforts. It is essential in a human-centered design approach like design thinking. It helps you put your worldview aside and acquire meaningful insight into consumers and their needs.

2. Define

This is the stage of DEI where the problem is defined. To generate the most authentic and emotionally resonant solutions, we must put our associates at the center of the problem-solving issues. We must have to state and define the critical roadblocks that hinder sustainable progress.

The information acquired while in the Empathize stage is compiled. We then have to analyze the fundamental issues that the company and the team have identified. Problem statements are what they're termed. The proper measures to perform are asking the correct questions, selecting the right indicators, spotting the suitable patterns, and coming up with the correct answer.

3. Ideate

This stage is the time to bring in various viewpoints to identify the root of problems and potential solutions. Because we have a strong foundation of information from the last two phases, we can now begin to "think outside of the box," look for new perspectives on the problem, and develop creative solutions to the problem statement constructed. Brainstorming is especially effective in this situation.

4. Prototype

This stage is to start to create and develop solutions. The goal of this stage, which can be an experimental phase, is to find the best potential answer for each problem encountered. We can deliver a program prototype to test the solution's efficacy and relevancy by knowing which elements work and which don't.

5. Test

We pilot the solution to test results and evaluate the next iterative that expands on the existing components during the test stage.

Always pilot a solution with controllable groups before rolling it out on a big scale to test the results and learn from the experience. We have the opportunity to modify early prototypes into solutions with more promising potential based on the collected feedback and observation.

Four Ways to Avoid Burnout and Improve Work Productivity

As a leader of a company, you need to acknowledge the existence of burnout. Unfortunately, managing employees' burnout in the workplace is often forgotten if not neglected by a company. According to a recent survey, even though the organization supplied appropriate resources, only 20% of employees rated high engagement and significant burnout.

Burnout Meaning

Excessive and sustained stress can lead to burnout, a state of emotional, bodily, and mental weariness. When you're stressed, emotionally tired, and unable to meet constant demands, it's called burnout. As the tension mounts, you begin to lose interest in and motivation for the role of your work which you took on in the first place.

The Impact of Burnout in the Workplace

Employee burnout can result in job discontent, a loss of interest, and a lack of happiness at work. Employees that are burnt out may experience physical tiredness after their workday. They may be unsure of how to advance and better their careers. Job burnout is caused by several factors, including poor work culture, lack of work recognition or appreciation, and a lack of work-life balance. Employee burnout is an organizational issue that can affect your business if not dealt with at an early stage.

As an employer, you need to know that burnout is avoidable if you provide your company with the proper working conditions, company culture, and employee support. It would be best if you understood that burnout of employees doesn't happen overnight; it can develop gradually. It is best to implement in your company these four burnout prevention strategies that can at the same time improve the work productivity of your employees:

1. Wellness Activities

Employee wellness programs and activities can help your organization attract high-performing employees and keep them happy and productive while simultaneously reducing employee turnover. Every employer should provide wellness programs that promote mindfulness, exercise, and healthy eating. Through some wellness programs, employees can break and avoid the work burnout that just started to creep on them. There are available comprehensive resources you can implement as wellbeing support for your employees. These can build your employees' mental resilience and reduce their stress levels. In addition, employees can learn the strategies you can provide to manage the different areas of their mental and physical health.

2. Open Door Policy Company Culture

Open door policy company culture will allow the employees to come to the company's managers or upper-level management to speak about their work frustrations; this can help alleviate their stress. An open-door policy is a great way to help employees speak whatever is on their minds. You may never know they are struggling with their work assignments. Often employees may feel hesitant to approach the upper management. But, with open-door policy culture, employees may feel a strong connection that will make them happier and improve their work performance. Advisable is the one-on-one feedback meetings to make them aware that you care and value them.

3. Promote Professional and Continuous Development

As a company leader, you need to address continuous professional improvement through seminars and workshops for your employees. This is a responsibility to address any issue for the betterment of your employees. They can participate in the seminars and workshops you provide. It will make them better employees. They can perform their best in the job with the gained skills and knowledge.

4. Ignite Employees!

Let your employees shine. This will ignite their spirit and make them feel appreciated and inspired. Keep them excited about their work. Give them an appreciation for their accomplishments. Some existing companies provide their employees' recognition as a top employee of the month or employee of the year. This will work for your company too.

Dealing with employee burnout is manageable in your organization if the top leadership of the business organization at first hand provides some strategies. Burnout can be avoided by investing in the systems and standards that keep people healthy and surrounded by helpful coworkers and leaders. As a business owner or manager, it all starts with your plans and strategy.

The Changing Leader

The shifts in technology, migration, and globalization have resulted in a new kind of leader. Like the rest of the world, the average leader has become better informed, better connected, and empowered through digital and social channels. This change is accelerating globally, as power, information, and influence are democratized through technology. 

What is Leadership, then?

A simple question, and yet it remains to trouble famous consultants and laypeople alike. I've now written articles s on Leadership for employee engagement, and finally, it occurred to me that I never actually reflected on establishing Leadership.

Let's start with what Leadership is not…

Leadership has nothing to do with ranking or one's position in the hierarchy of a company. 

Too many talks about a company's Leadership, referring to the senior-most executives in the organization. They are merely that, senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically follow when you reach a particular pay category. Hopefully, you discover it there, although there are no guarantees.

Leadership has naught to do with titles.

Comparable to the point above, just because you have a C-level title doesn't automatically make you a "leader." In all of my talks, I stress that you don't need a title to lead. You can lead in your workplace, your community, and your family, all without possessing a title.

Leadership has naught to do with individual characteristics.

Say the word "leader," and most people imagine an authoritative, charismatic take-charge individual. We often imagine icons from history like Donald Trump. But Leadership isn't an adjunct. We don't need extroverted charismatic traits to exercise Leadership. And those with charisma don't automatically lead.

Leadership isn't management. 

This is the big one. Leadership and management are not identical. Do you have 20 people in your downline and P&L accountability? Great for you; hopefully, you are a good manager. Good management is demanded. Managers need to coordinate, plan, measure, monitor, hire, fire, solve, and so many other things. Typically, managers grow the numbers, whereas, Leaders lead and help the people around them rise.

Each spring, I have a vision for my garden, and with loads of work, cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes become a reality. But does that make me a leader? No, it makes me a horticulturist.

So what is Leadership?

DEFINITION: Leadership is a method of social impact, which maximizes others' efforts towards achieving a goal.

Notice critical components of this definition:

• Leadership originates from social influence, not power or authority

• Leadership requires others, and that suggests they don't need to be "direct reports."

• No specifying of personality traits, attributes, or even a title; there are various styles, various paths, to effective Leadership

• It incorporates a goal, not influence with no planned outcome

A lot of my work is in the area of employee engagement and leadership development. 

Technically, a leader could use social impact to organize others' efforts, but I think Leadership is about maximizing effort. It's not, "Hey everyone, let's line up and get to the top of that hill instantly."Yet instead, "Hey, see that hill? Let's see how we can get to the top together as a team.  

Do those key elements work for you?