What would happen if for one day at work, you couldn’t do anything with your hands and instead could only use your five senses? You would learn more about your organization and what it needed, said Angie Herbers, founder and CEO of FourPointe Consulting.
Leadership is vital in the workplace, yet it’s often lacking. What’s in its place is management and projection. When this happens, there can be problems with overstaffing as micromanagers tend to hire more staff as a way to fix problems instead of listening and learning and then creating strategies. “Ninety percent of advisory firms and service-based businesses are way overstaffed,” Herbers said.
“Stop managing and start leading,” Herbers said in her workshop at the 2018 MDRT EDGE. “It will change your whole culture.”
Make sure, though, you understand what leadership is. Leadership isn’t directing, doing and telling. That’s management. Leadership is influencing, guiding and asking questions. A lack of leadership is bad for teams, yet it can happen when leaders feel stretched too thin and start hiring. What they should be doing is listening, thinking and being mindful of how they talk to others, Herbers said.
Are you informing or are you projecting?
If you can’t talk to people, you can’t influence and guide them. So the way you talk to others — and listen to them — is crucial. Most people have not learned how to speak to another person without projecting. What most people talk about is actually themselves. “Until you learn to stop talking about yourself, you can’t truly lead,” Herbers said.
Great leaders don’t talk about themselves. They give their teams knowledge that’s truly about the organization. They draw information and ideas out of other people. If you convert your firm’s culture to one of leadership instead of management, you’ll change almost all the drama you deal with when you work with people.
What are you hearing?
One way to draw out staff is to not solve all of their problems for them. Instead, ask questions that get to the bottom of the issue and then guide and encourage them to find solutions.
When employees talk to you, they tell you a lot about themselves. So when you listen to what other people are saying — and listening is the true essence of leadership — you realize they’re revealing how they feel. For example, an employee who asks for more money may really be saying, “I don’t feel valued.”
If you’re leading instead of managing, you should have the time you need to think instead of always doing, Herbers said. “Leaders are paid to think. They aren’t paid to do.”
From the EDGE presentation “Building an organizational culture.”
Learn more about leadership
- Read “10 tips to lift your leadership”
- Watch “Let go and lead”
- Read “Mindful leadership: Navigating chaos to calm” (MDRT members only)
Great leadership ideas you have there