Most organizations value the client/customer relationship, or at least they profess. They know the importance of a good experience, especially with the advent of social media and the all-powerful five-star review. But, what about our employees? They are the bridge to your customers.
Do we value the employee or team member relationship as much as the customer relationship? Further, if we only provide lip service to the value of customer relationships, how are we treating our team members? From my many years spent in the corporate world, I would state the case that we do not value the employee or team member relationship.
Its really unfortunate that we don’t place even more value on them. Certainly, there has been enough written about it through employee empowerment (Nordstrom), making your employees customers (Virgin Airlines), the no-Ass Hole rule (Sutton), and Love em or loose em (Kaye & Jordan-Evans), to name a few. Yet, we still have not mastered the art of being in a relationship with our team members. It begs the question: why?
History
Our modern organizations were birthed during the industrial era. Modern machinery at the time received God-like status – the humans simply being the operator. It wasn’t until the 1920’s after a series of the first psychological studies examining the impacts of humans in the workplace, did we realize the human factor The results of those studies demonstrated that humans did indeed have some influence over production. Additional studies followed into the 1930s and 40s, which ultimately led to the understanding that humans hold most of if not all of the control around how work occurs.
Its hard to break away from history. Here a few reasons why:
Its been proven that we model behavior we’ve been exposed to, especially if we see that behavior being rewarded (Goleman & Boyatzis, 1996),
History is viewed through the mental model of the beholder, not everyone who hears about or experiences something sees it as bad or good. Our perspectives are unique,
Given that we’ve been working collectively since the medieval era when we worked together to sustain the manor, this body of knowledge about the human influence, is relatively new,
Collectively, we have a short attention span, not to be out-done by a believe that if its not broken, don’t fix it…even if the research tells us differently.
Employee Engagement – your voice matters
Or does it? For 30 years this has been the mantra of the annual employee engagement survey. Sitting around the executive table, however, I heard a very different story, especially as it relates to the employee experience through their comments. Every year, the comments from employees about needing to feel valued, wanting to be treated like an adult, and hoping to feel respected after this survey, frequently fell on the deaf ears of the executive teams, who were convinced that the employees really just needed a nice lunch.
Managers vs. leaders
We’ve not done a good job educating anyone about the differences between managing and leading. We continue to apply the term leadership to anyone holding a specific title, not about their behavior. This still shows up on Linked In and other SM platforms where people share their “autocratic” leadership style as a must have.
Worse, we continue to promote those who perform rather than those who behave. This was outlined in the 1989 study conducted by Fred Luthans, PhD “Effective vs. Successful Mangers.” Those doing the work of leadership, i.e., development, effective team dynamics, etc., were frequently passed over for those who made their one-up or two-up supervisor look good.
EAP programs
Employee Assistance Programs have become quite common in our organizations. Don’t misunderstand, I believe these programs provide a very valuable service to team members who need it. It has become a cultural security blanket, however. In a recent study, 90% of corporate executives believed that they were doing everything they could to promote psychological safety. Yet, employee engagement is at an all-time low. Approximately only 30% of our team members are indicating some degree of engagement , https://www.bing.com/search?q=imposter%20syndrome%20definition&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=3053207.
Imposter syndrome
In my humble opinion, we have a huge imposter syndrome within our organizations. People pretending to be leaders without truly understanding what it means to really lead. Imposter syndrome is defined as:
“also called perceived fraudulence, involves feelings of self-doubt and personal incompetence that persist despite your education, experience, and accomplishments.”
Retrieved 9/13/2024 from https://www.bing.com/search?q=imposter%20syndrome%20definition&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=30532071
I recall coaching a newly inaugurated Kiwana’s president. She was being severely criticized by a past president for not being Presidential enough – whatever that meant. It was a fascinating conversation, observation, and coaching as we talked through what it meant to lead. According to the past president who was giving her so much grief, she needed to be more like him: fierce, determined, ridged. This was not her style. She was operating much more from the Servant leader perspective, and this other individual was not having it. We coached through the idea that authenticity in leadership is key: simply be yourself.
In my experience of working in the corporate sector, I see this a lot: emulating someone else’s style because that is perceived to the right way to manage or lead. Much of all of these challenges is the direct lack of basic authenticity or the imposter syndrome. It’s generally not an accepted idea that we show any vulnerability about our role in the corporate setting. Even as an individual contributor this is likely to get you labeled as a bad hire or someone who needs to move along. So the idea of imposter syndrome in our organizations extends deep into all levels. I believe that this is also supported by the prevailing need to have all the answers among much of corporate leadership.
If imposter syndrome or lack of authenticity is really a challenge for our current leadership IQ, then the simplest answer is that our leaders do not really know themselves. So how does this all relate back to relationships? If we don’t know ourselves, how can we know others? And if we don’t know others, can we be in a relationship with our team members?
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