Excerpted from The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © McKinsey & Company, 2024.
It’s an age-old truth that most people like to be recognized and appreciated for their effort. In business this is especially important for employee morale. A Gallup poll released in 2022 found that in companies with strong recognition programs, employees were less likely to leave, 73% were less likely to “always” or “very often” feel burned out, and four times as likely to be actively engaged in their work. Yet in organizations—especially ones with large numbers of employees—giving your employee individual attention is not an easy act to pull off.
How can leaders recognize so many people in an authentic way when the weight of the top job is bringing constant demands for their time and attention? In addition to that, every individual has different personal needs. So leaders need to learn to treat different people differently. As much as possible, they have to learn to read them psychologically. They need to know that Sally might respond well to tough love, but George has to be handled with kid gloves because if you say a harsh word he’s going to be upset and clam up.
As Rob Painter, the CEO of software company Trimble, puts it, “We’ve got about 13,000 people who work here and there are 13,000 different life stories and 13,000 different personalities. This individuality has been something that’s been, let’s say, underappreciated.”
During the pandemic, Painter started checking in more with his employees over Zoom calls. He says that the pandemic opened his eyes to the different challenges and experiences some of his employees were going through.
“I saw,” he says, “that their life experience could be wildly different than mine.” He started to better appreciate individual differences and began to think about how to integrate that quality into his leadership style.
As he began to think about it, he realized that his 13 direct reports all have different needs and desires for personal connection. From some 360-degree evaluations, Painter learned that some of his executives longed for more personal connection from him. This was somewhat of a surprise for him because his own need for personal connection was easily met. When talking with someone, he liked to dive straight into work. For others, he learned that wasn’t the case. They wanted to take the time to talk about their weekend or their kids before getting to the task at hand. “I wasn’t seeing it,” says Painter, “because there’s this human tendency where we all have a filter of how we experience life and we tend to think that everybody has the same filter we do, but they don’t. I now spend more time trying to see people as individuals.”
To find out what makes them tick, Painter literally asks them what they need in terms of personal connection. Some of his team members felt very comfortable with very little personal connection, and then there were two who wanted more, and Painter obliged. “I think if you’re authentic,” he says, “you can pull this off. But if you ask, ‘How was your weekend?’ and you don’t really care, that will do more harm than good.”
Leaders, of course, are busy, and often don’t have time to engage in personal conversations. In those instances, Painter says to those who desire more personal connection, “I’ve only got a few minutes,” or “I’ve got a quick question for you.” That way the person knows you’re strapped for time and is less likely to feel neglected.
Learning to be more aware of the individuals who work for you isn’t easy. It takes excess mental capacity to understand everybody’s story beyond the friendly exchange of “How’s it going?” at the start of meetings. To listen to personal stories in an authentic way and then refer to some of those stories when you meet an individual again requires great mental capacity. If you, say, listen to the life story of a new hire and then bump into them a year later, they will expect you to remember who they are. If you don’t, they will certainly be disappointed, if not demoralized. Sometimes you just have to be authentic and say, “What’s your name again and what are you working on?” Painter says in those situations he tries to make light of it by saying, “I’m having a senior moment.”
Your odds of remembering employees’ names and their kids’ names and what they’re working on increases, says Painter, if you work at being present in the moment. “I’m at my best when I’m mindful and engaged, which is to say I’m not multitasking or multitasking in my head. I go to business reviews with no computer or phone, just a notebook and a pen. The challenge is to limit the distractions as much as possible. I got rid of social media, and I even took LinkedIn off my phone. The fallacy of multitasking is, it ends up taking longer than if you would have just focused on one thing, because when you are present, you’re in an active intellectual and emotional processing mode.”
As we’ve seen, CEOs have so much power that the words they use and the level of care they show can impact employee morale dramatically. The challenge is to use that power mindfully.
Photo courtesy of Ground Picture/Shutterstock
