THE CORONA VIRUS: 5 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO AVOID AN OUTBREAK OF BIAS, INTOLERANCE, AND VIOLENCE AT WORK
This was originally posted on SAFIOO’s medium page on March 12th
Despite what little we know about COVID-19, stock markets continue to tumble, schools and universities are on hiatus, entire countries are on lockdown and companies are feverishly trying to manage the fallout from the growing hysteria that is happening in the workplace. The pandemonium has caused CEO’s from some of the world’s most powerful companies and institutions to make hard decisions in an attempt to minimize their downside and assuage the growing fears of their workers, customers and shareholders. There are also signs of a rise in employee anxiety and workplace panic which is provoking insensitivity and cross-cultural misunderstanding at work. In recent conversations with several leaders and entrepreneurs I coach, some are asking what more can they do as leaders to avert an outbreak of bias, discrimination, intolerance and even violence in the workplace.
F.E.A.R. which is also the acronym for “False, Evidence, Appearing, Real” is the root cause of every mass panic known to humanity. Any kind of threat has the potential to provoke unbridled fear, and when that threat is linked to human characteristics like nationality, age, gender, ethnicity, the fear factor can quickly spiral out of control. While many organizations have become much more open and accepting of human differences, moments like the one we are currently experiencing can quickly create an unsafe workplace for co-workers and a poor customer service experience for consumers.
So, I want to share with you five leadership traits that my coaching clients are cultivating as they lead their organizations, institutions, and social movements through difficult times to achieve their mission and goals. I call them the Five Characteristics of Beautiful Leaders.
A Beautiful Leader is a transformational leader who has committed oneself to developing the capacity and resolve that enables them to build and maintain harmonious order, equity and progress in their organization and stakeholder communities. Global forces like COVID-19 pose a real risk of disrupting the harmony, equity and order leaders seek to maintain.
I adopted the reference to beauty after learning how scientist and biologist identify the achievement of “mutualism” between distinct living organisms. Mutualism refers to a symbiotic relationship between different organisms in nature that is beneficial to all of the organisms, thus creating a condition that is referred to as “beautiful.”
I distilled the leadership traits that I am going to share with you after researching and interviewing high performing, high social-impact leaders who have had to lead their organizations and people through social, political, religious, or economic chaos, danger or transition. I work with my clients to incorporate the five recurring character traits of Beautiful Leaders into their current ways of leading and creating a high performing, inclusive, and resilient organization where everyone can thrive.
Leadership Trait # 1: Uncommon Effort
In times of threat and rising fear, leaders must be willing to step-up and step-out of their comfort zones. When making an uncommon effort it is important to use your “soft skills” or people skills. In moments of chaos or urgency, turning soft skills into your “superpowers” demonstrates to everyone who is relying upon your leadership that “I am here, I see you and I care.”
Try This:
Host a Listening Session With Your Employees
One of the easiest ways to make an uncommon effort is to create an opportunity for your team to express how they are feeling. A listening session is not intended to disseminate polices or field complaints, it is simply an opportunity for you to demonstrate that you are concerned about what your employees are experiencing. Listening sessions are better when they are done in person, but if you lead a remote or distributed workforce, try hosting a listening session on Zoom or another conference feature.
One more thing, during the listening session, your only role is to gain a deeper understanding, not to problem solve or reinforce company rules and regulations. Those activities can happen later with the help of your human resources team.
Leadership Trait #2: Steadfast Focus
Everybody knows that great leaders produce great results. The consequence of “results-only” leadership is a lack of personal and organizational accountability for the reach, nature, scope, and unintended impact of the goals and outcomes you achieve. For a leader who is committed to leading more beautifully, a “results-only” focus is only have of the equation. Whenever possible, Beautiful Leaders cultivate and sustain a deeper and more comprehensive focus on their desired results. They look at the short-term and longer-term reach, nature, scope and impact of their desired results. By looking beyond the task or goal of achieving your business results (i.e. hitting your numbers), a beautiful leader focuses on the best path to achieving your desired results that also maximizes the possibility of generating a favorable impact or outcome for the people, profit goal, and community you serve. When working with my clients to help them develop a Steadfast Focus, I ask them to answer the following questions:
Try This:
Shift Your Focus From “Results-Only” To “Desired Results and Impact”
1. What desired business result, target or outcome are you accountable for producing?
2. What might happen more or less often to members of one group of employees than others because of the strategy, actions, or decisions you (or your team) will make to achieve your desired business result?
3. What hurdles might your strategy, actions, or decisions create that could be more difficult for members of one group of employees to overcome than others?
4. What differential impact (favorable or unfavorable) might your strategy, actions, or decisions cause for members of one group of employees that it would not cause for others?
Remember, to lead more beautifully, you and your team’s focus, strategy, actions, and decisions should always take into consideration any barrier to creating a more harmonious, orderly, equitable, and balanced workplace for everyone.
Leadership Trait # 3: Compassion
In times of threat and rising organizational fear, a leader’s ability to be compassionate matters greatly to all who rely upon her. The best boss I ever had taught me one critical lesson about being a compassionate leader that I have never forgotten, “One of the most important things you can do as a leader is find ways to make sure that the people you are relying upon to achieve your business goals, feel that you genuinely care about who they are, what they desire, and what they are experiencing.” Being an uncompassionate leader by failing to recognize and acknowledge the feelings of your team and staff during times of organizational chaos is not only unprofessional it is inhumane. An example of compassionate leadership is offering vacation days or leave time when an employee’s parent dies. It can also be something as simple as offering to treat a subordinate or team member who is extremely stressed to lunch or simply asking if there is anything you can do to be supportive. What is typically thought of as a “soft skill” can truly be your “superpower” during moments like this in the workplace.
Try This:
Embrace Being Compassionate As Your Leadership Superpower
Identify Three Compassionate Acts You Can Do and Put Yourself on a Schedule To Do One Of Them Each Week. For example, I had a former client who sent a handwritten thank you note each week to anyone who did something exceptional to help him. His thank you cards became so coveted among his employee that they framed his thank you cards and displayed them on their desks.
Leadership Trait # 4: Humility
Jim Collins wrote about the organizational side of hubris in his book, How the Mighty Fall. He mentioned that Stage 1 of organizational failure is “hubris born of success.” Sometimes as leaders we have access to more information which enables us to develop a different point of view about what constitutes a legitimate risk and gives us a level of confidence that others may not possess. While confidence is an attribute that every leader needs to embrace and to foster in others, too much of it will turn a confident leader into a leader who is blinded by his own hubris. A recent example of this is Elon Musk ,CEO of Tesla. He recently provoked a huge online response after tweeting that the panic surrounding the Covid-19 coronavirus is “dumb”. If I was Mr. Musk’s business coach, I would encourage him to adapt “More Humility, Less Hubris” as his leadership mantra. Below I share some great suggestions for you to consider from Jim Collins book, How The Mighty Fall.
Try This:
More Humility, Less Hubris
So how can you know when your own confidence is verging on hubris? Jim Collins offers the following suggestions:
You make many decisions independently. No, dithering isn’t good. But bosses who make all of their own decisions without speaking to others are asking for trouble. How much do you ask for others’ input?
You can’t remember the last time you spoke to a customer. Failure to discover what people think about what you offer is not only foolhardy, it’s a recipe for failure in the future. If you think you’re “too busy” to connect with customers, that’s a warning sign.
You always have lunch with the same people. Socializing only with select peers cuts you off from people who might offer alternate views.
Your team always seems to agree with you. If no one has contradicted you in a while, you may have inadvertently created a no-bad-news culture. Surrounding yourself with people who can only do one thing — nod — is an invitation to disaster.
When something goes wrong, the first thing you ask is, “Who’s responsible?” This may be a sign that you overemphasize accountability at the expense of problem-solving — which your team may see as finger-pointing.
Finally, I would like to add that your top performers are the most likely employees to fall victim to hubris, so make sure you’re paying attention to their actions.
Leadership Trait # 5: Optimism
The Debbie Downer Principle Of Leadership is my most trusted guide for leadership excellence during tough times, said no one ever. When an organization is going through difficult times, a healthy dose of optimism from the top can unleash the curiosity, creativity and innovation you need to turn lemons into lemonade. Evidence of your optimism should not just reside in your words, it should be evident in your listening, strategies, and behaviors.
Now just to be clear, I was initially more of a realist who converted to an optimist after seeing the power of positive thoughts, ideas, and attitude in the lives of my friends, mentors, and clients. It is virtually impossible to focus on identifying a best-case scenario in difficult situations without a healthy dose of optimism.
If leadership is one-part vision, two-parts strategy, and one-part execution, then beautiful leaders roll it all together and cook it in a delicious batter of optimism. Without optimism it is difficult to create a workplace culture that is curious and innovative. So why do I meet so many leaders who are tackling great challenges in business and society, but lack the ability to distinguish the sunshine peeking through their clouds from the lightening in their thunderstorm?
Here are ways my some of my clients embraced and encouraged optimism in their organizations to achieve their desired results:
Try This:
Refresh Your View
Ask yourself and your team to take a fresh look at your current situation in a way that enables you to generate a new possibility that doesn’t currently exist.
Reframe Your Story
It doesn’t matter whether you are the kind of leader and person who sees the glass as half empty or half full. No matter how you see that glass, as a beautiful leader it is your responsibility to extract the maximum value out of every challenging moment. Challenging and even tragic times are very valuable teaching moments. However, a pessimistic versus an optimistic outlook can misguide us to thinking that we have run out of options, even when new possibilities are standing right in front of us. As the recent founder of my own tech startup, I have had to learn to quickly pivot when a business decision or a member of my team under-delivers on a desired result. I always start by reframing my story and when I do, I am better positioned to see the best way forward.
Revisit Your WHY
During challenging times in an organization, it is often a good idea to rally the team around your company mission, vision, and values because that is where the optimism for why you exist lives. One way to do this is to explore the following questions,
1. Why do we exist?
2. Who problem doesn’t get solved if we give up now?
3. How can we find another way to stay true to our mission?
4. What can I let go of, to change the path that we appear to be headed down?
Holding space for an exploration of these kinds of questions with your team, staff and other stakeholders conveys that you still believe in them.
There are so many more things that leaders can do when they are attempting to move their people and organizations through challenges like the threat of a global pandemic, but everyone has their own unique challenge. So, for the next month, I will offer 5 free 20- minute mini-coaching sessions to the first CEOs or entrepreneurs who sign up and are interested in exploring how to be a more beautiful leader. Simply reach out to me at Toby@SAFIOO.com and we will schedule a time to talk.
Toby Thompkins is the Founder and CEO of SAFIOO Inc. (www.SAFIOO.COM). He is based in New York City and Lisbon, Portugal