Today, we’re looking at democratic leadership and showing kindness through management. In 2014, Joe Biden wrote this memo to his staff:
To My Wonderful Staff,
I would like to take a moment and make something clear to everyone. I do not expect nor do I want any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include but are not limited to family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies, such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations and times of need, such as an illness or a loss in the family. This is very important to me. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if i find out that you are working with me while missing important family responsibilities, it will disappoint me greatly. This has been an unwritten rule since my days in the Senate.
Thank you for all your hard work.
At that time, Joe Biden was the Vice President of the United States. You’d have thought he’d have more important things. More urgent things, that he needed to do before writing a similar note to his staff. But writing this was top of his list of priorities, because it was in line with his beliefs and way of working. It still is. Biden wanted to explicitly authorize personal choices made by his team. This is the man that was sworn in as a senator from a hospital room where his 2 and 3 year old children were recovering from a road accident that had already killed his wife and third child. Our souls can be so powerful, and they can influence so much through democratic leadership.
The world of work is talking more and more about democratic leadership and the importance of managing emotions. It’s happening even more so since the lines blurred between work and home. The complexity of our lives is increasingly visible. We’ve learned that kindness and care pay off in professional relationships too. It’s particularly evident when our bosses lead the way. Compassionate companies find their employees feel more collaborative and trusting. Compassionate companies are also perceived as bringing more value to their employees too.
But according to a recent Gallup survey in the US, only 45% of employees feel that their companies care about how they feel. Not only that: a “toxic” boss is the main reason that 60% of people hand in their notice. So how can we care for and be attentive to our employees, without minimizing efficiency and determination?
Many people hesitate to talk about their feelings at work for fear of others not knowing how to manage those emotions. In the article “Awakening Compassion in Managers“, a team of Finnish researchers found that it’s easy to confuse affective empathy (feeling what others feel, which can cause stress) with an empathetic nature (caring about how others feel). The latter means the individual knows how to keep their distance while understanding how others are feeling, without personal repercussions. But the researchers also say that in competitive working environments, people can risk being careless or exploitative, causing them to worry that compassionate behaviors may encourage others to either take advantage or offload their concerns onto them.
So can we train ourselves in the art of caring, even though our working culture tells us the opposite?
Harvard Business School thinks so. Perhaps mixing our work and private lives, as we have been doing in recent months, provides the perfect opportunity to do so. In “Good leadership is an act of kindness“, professors Groysberg and Seligson quote their colleague Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin. He compares democratic leadership and practising kindness to weight training:
Compassion, like physical and academic skills, appears to be something that is not fixed, but rather can be enhanced with training and practice. People can build up their compassion ‘muscle’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and a desire to help.
In the past, many of us saw caregiving, being attentive to others’ needs and the courage to look out for others as skills that were needed in our private spheres. But now we find ourselves “social distancing”, these essential skills are plugging increasingly visible gaps at work too. The only way to acquire and practise these skills at work is to be aware of how you’re exercising them. We have these skills already, we just need to identify them and put them into practise when interacting with our colleagues, bosses and clients. It might seem strange or tiring to begin with. Thankfully, the University of Helsinki has put together a checklist of everyday behaviors that we can look our for:
listening,
being present,
empathy,
courage,
authenticity,
appreciating others
and being aware.
Just like Biden did, we suggest adding one more item to the list: being explicit about the things we believe and the things we are.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza for the Alley Oop blog. You can see the original article here.
What should we do with our emotions at work? If we’re not used to showing them, or recognizing them in others, it’s because we’re used to seeing them as something that’s an “aside” from our ability to think. So thanks to their complexity and unpredictability, they become something reserved for the private sphere, by default. Even when the boundaries between our private and professional lives blurred, it seemed more to make sense to keep them private: if a feeling managed to escape, it caused embarrassment, so needed to be hidden.
Lots of people think that we are thinking beings that feel, but biologically speaking we are emotional creatures that think.
It’s what Jill Bolte Taylor outlined in her book “In the garden of the mind”. It means that our ability to think and our ability to feel are intrinsically linked, and our ability to act is a consequence of that.
If we were to ask our human resource teams “where” emotions meet corporate roles, you’d see two areas emerge: “soft” areas and caring for employee wellbeing. The first category has been gaining ground in recent years. It’s about understanding the value behind a company, but also the soft skills, or human skills, that enhance a person’s performance. When we use the term “soft”, we tend to think that of something that’s less essential than a “hard” skill. But it triggers the feelings dilemma again. They are difficult to identify and measure, above all in areas where it’s important to simplify complex situations, where we feel we can’t give ground to things we can’t control. It’s much harder to debate the value of hard numbers, but what about when we talk about attitudes or behaviors?
They increase the complexity. They are already there and over the past year we haven’t been able to ignore them. But we still need to agree on a shared glossary and define processes that can make sense of them.
It’s easier to consider them when we talk about employee wellbeing: activities dedicated to helping people feel better at work. They can help people be professionally mobile, connecting work to personal aspirations, linking career challenges to work-life balance. It’s all about observing how people “feel” – something that’s on the rise at a time when there’s a tsunami of new behaviors, where nothing has stayed the same. When companies do this, they allow people to go beyond their professional boundaries, supporting where needed and protecting energy that fuels thinking and productivity.
It’s a social responsibility that companies are expressing more often. It’s a win-win situation. Nobody loses out, in fact some needs that are traditionally met in the public sector are now being met by private initiatives. However, once feelings have been identified, it’s more challenging to create a system that contains them. Researchers call this the “spill over”. It brings us back to our initial question: what can we do with all these feelings at work?
The reason we have so many neurones dedicated to reflecting on others’ feelings (mirror neurones) is that emotions are at the centre of our relationships and sense of self. Neuroscience is proving that they are intrinsically connected to our ability to reason, understand and think. They are very low on the Maslow pyramid: when we ignore them and neglect them, they can compromise everything else. But isn’t that how we’ve done things for decades? The modern workplace has flourished without making space for feelings at all. Yes, but how much has it cost us? The emotions that we’ve left behind are the same ones we’ve then been going back to when we need to be creative, innovative, diverse. They’re the feelings we need to take a step forward when the status quo changes. And when we try to face change while using just one half of our brain, we fail.
Feelings are always there. They’re at the heart of our intellect. When we get familiar with what that really means, we can break down the stereotypes that we’ve used until now. Everything that we squeeze into these low-traffic areas suffer when we over-simplify things through incomplete stereotypes. When we welcome emotions, they can enrich our narrative at work and reduce stigmas that hide behind words such as fear, tiredness, happiness, sadness and guilt. Perhaps Covid has accelerated the process for us, which could result in double to resources available to us. Let’s welcome those feelings.
This post was originally by our CEO Riccarda Zezza for the Alley Oop blog on Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original blog in Italian, please click here.
What would your team do if they felt more energized? Would they feel creative and come up with new, innovative solutions? Would they happily tackle that big project that they’ve been putting off for the past few weeks? The future of work requires us to be agile. Learning and development opportunities that help people boost their productivity and adapt to change.
It’s a shift that’s only been accelerated through the pandemic, with many people experiencing lockdown fatigue. Automation and artificial intelligence have started to optimize our business processes and save human effort. 73% of employees believe that systems and technology can help them to produce higher-quality work.
But there is one clear advantage that humans have over machines. They can bring soft skills to the table. However, 38% of enterprises recognize that the past year has highlighted skills gaps amongst their people. Closing those gaps is a priority for their businesses.
That’s because when people hone their soft skills, it has a marked impact on key business results:
Continuous learning and development offers an alternative path to formal training, using life experiences to hone soft skills that can increase professional efficacy and boost employee engagement. In fact, organizations that make strategic investments in employee development report 11% greater profitability and twice as likely to retain their employees (Gallup, 2020). What’s more, our own research shows that when people learn to maximize their resources across the board, they can achieve more without increasing their effort, reducing stress level by up to 90% and enhancing the corporate climate (Lifeed, 2020). So how can we really unlock our teams’ learning potential?
So how can we really tap into the learning and development potential that’s already there, right in front of us? Download our continuous learning infographic to see how it could really make the difference for your business.
In the “new normal”, high employee engagement contributes towards raising wellbeing levels, improving health and reducing the risk of burnout.
Employees that are highly engaged increase profitability by +21%, raise productivity by +20%, and boost client loyalty up to +10% (source: Gallup).
Discover how you can improve employee development and engagement in just 3 steps.
Lockdown restrictions are easing and the government is encouraging people to go back to the workplace. It’s highlighted the need for a “now normal”. We now know that we can’t go back to how things were. Instead, we need to move with this evolving situation to reach the next normal. It’s a transition in itself, but this version of normality holds some similarity to our lives pre-Covid.
Being attentive to people and standing beside them is now more important than ever. It helps them to reposition themselves. Essentially, they will play a key role in determining the company’s survival. Adopting employee engagement practices has the advantage of increasing productivity levels, lowering stress levels and boosting wellbeing across the company.
According to William Kahn, employees need to recognise these three psychological conditions before feeling fully involved:
In one of Gallup’s recent studies, they confirmed that teams with the highest engagement levels get better results. That’s a 21% increase in profitability, 20% more productivity and 10% increase in customer loyalty. The benefits go beyond the company accounts. Highly engaged employees are also proven to be healthier and less at risk of burnout.
According to Gallup, focusing on employee engagement must be prioritised by companies as they change the way they approach employee development. Companies that shift the focus to a culture of internal growth often see engagement leaping from 20% to 70%.
But there’s more. The relationship between the two elements seems to intensify when external conditions surrounding the organization are particularly difficult. In times of crisis, a positive corporate culture can impact the company’s results even more than it would under “normal conditions”. Over the past through years of economic recession, we’ve seen a closer relationship between employee engagement and rise in company profitability. The same goes for productivity and consumer perceptions.
But that doesn’t mean that engagement grows by itself when a crisis hits. Social distancing and new ways of working through the pandemic have tested companies when trying to keep their employees engaged. It’s because employee engagement only increases when companies adopt positive organisational practices. They need to develop clear strategies to overcome the physical distance and strengthen individual participation within the company.
So how can we listen to people and help them feel accepted within the company? How can we improve employee engagement? Here are 3 steps that we can use as we navigate this period of uncertainty.
Our first suggestion is to see people for all that they are. A Deloitte study revealed that 61% of employees hide parts of their identity at work for fear of discrimination. Some feel conscious of appearing to be less focused on their work. For many, Covid has made it impossible for people to hide different aspects of their lives.
When remote working became the norm, people found themselves suddenly sharing unseen parts of their lives with their bosses and colleagues. When they were seen on screen, they weren’t just seen as professionals, but also as parents, partners and caregivers. Allowing people to bring their whole selves to work also means creating a “culture of care”, where everyone feels free to open up. It’s something that helps to reduce tension and increase shared understanding. As well as bringing all available talent to the workplace, of course.
Learning takes place in many forms, not just in formal contexts. We can learn throughout the different aspects of our lives, and the crisis has also created employee development opportunities for people and organizations. We can see the crisis as a catalyst for change and decide on the type of transformation that we want to see.
Post-traumatic literature highlights five areas of potential growth:
When people realize that they have gone through a difficult period and come out the other side having learnt important lessons, it makes them more aware of their abilities and better equipped for the future. When we consider continuous learning, working through past experiences allows them to create a new narrative surrounding change: in a constantly evolving world, reacting to unexpected events means learning to start again.
The pandemic also offers a great opportunity for companies to find answers tailored to their people’s needs. By opening listening channels, they can avoid isolation. They can also better understand the different challenges that employees are facing, identifying the best ways to support them.
Adopting a personalised approach means promoting a shared culture of change within the organization. That’s why employee development requires continuous conversations between employees and the company. It means considering the specific needs of the individual, allowing everyone to create their own journey. What’s more, they can share learnings with one another, so that they can create something new together. sense of purpose.
In transitions such as the one triggered by Covid-19, growth only happens when people walk together: companies and employees, seen and recognized in both their personal and professional capacities. Over 80 companies currently use Lifeed, such as Manpower, MSD, Reale Mutua and UniCredit. Each company has decided to transform life transitions into training grounds for soft skills that boost professional efficacy. It’s also a great tool for engaging people, improving their wellbeing and increasing productivity in the workplace.
53% of Lifeed users feel that they can reveal and use more of themselves at work. 57% feel proud of their company. The results are clear. 90% feel better and have more energy. The same percentage of people feel more involved and motivated in their daily tasks.
Want to learn how Lifeed could benefit your business? Contact us to see our live demo or try it for yourself.
As a manager, you’re key to the organization’s ecosystem. Your role goes far beyond overseeing projects and passing information between leadership and your team. In fact, the qualities of a good manager are one of the business’ key drivers of employee engagement and motivation. Employees often rely on their managers for daily guidance, development opportunities and to set the tone for the team. It’s about “unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them“. And when management fosters good company culture in this way, revenue sets to increase by up to 4 times.
But according to Workhuman.com, 93% of managers need training in coaching their employees. In fact, 48% of new managers didn’t receive any training at all when assuming this new role. So how can we practically be the best managers we can be: motivating our teams, create a welcoming work environment and achieving better results? We’ve rounded up 4 ways you can try out with your colleagues to hone your coaching skills.
When you actively listen and question your team, without judging them in any way, you’re practicing non-directive coaching. It’s one of the keys to being a good manager: an opportunity to highlight the person’s wisdom, insight and creativity, with the aim of giving them the tools to cope with challenging situations and resolve problems on their own. It’s an especially important element at the moment, where we have all gone through the collective transition of the pandemic. In fact, our recent research shows that 36% of employees have something they want to say to their managers and colleagues (Lifeed, 2020).
Active listening allows you to see the greater context and viewpoints of individuals within the team. It’s also a great way to aid problem solving, as it allows you to consider all the options thoroughly. 77% of Lifeed users found that listening in this way often improves the situation that they find themselves in (Lifeed, 2020). Not only does it offer a fresh perspective on your team’s work and challenges that they face, but it also strengthens the bond and boosts trust between you and your employees.
Just like you’re learning how to coach, your team are learning how to excel in their jobs. So it’s important to adopt a growth mindset. In their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, researchers Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton claim that people who don’t believe that intelligence can grow will tend to see performance as a measure of ability. The opposite is also true: managers that adopt a growth mindset will see poor performance as an opportunity to apply more effort or learning to that area.
Take this as an opportunity to stand alongside your team. In your 1:1 meetings with them, ask them reflective growth-directed questions, such as: “What could you do differently next time?” or “How can we build on this approach to your work?”. Then assist them in setting goals to put those findings into action. This approach encourages individuals to actively think about their opportunities for development, which in turn will motivate them into action. It’s the same approach that runs throughout Lifeed training programs, and the results are clear: 90% of Lifeed users feel more motivated as a result of it (Lifeed, 2020).
Once you’ve listened, it’s time to digest and reflect on that new information together. Scientific studies have shown that self-reflection helps transform experience into knowledge (Gilbert & Trudel, 2001).
Of course, for the manager, a bit part of this reflective journey lies in exercising empathy muscles. In a recent survey, 51% of Lifeed users said that empathy is best shown through putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (Lifeed, 2020). Perhaps it’s a case of recognizing and acknowledging the multiple roles that a person holds, or how their experiences may change their perspective on a situation.
You can also encourage such reflective practice with your team through informal chats about project progress and performance. 89% of HR leaders agree that on-going feedback and check-ins are key to successful outcomes (Forbes, 2019).
Self-improvement is not only about recognising where you can improve, it’s about modelling continuous learning and development to your team too. It’s something that’s at the heart of our Lifeed programs. Our studies show that it boosts involvement with the organization by 73% (Lifeed, 2020). When it comes to self-development, it’s important to be intentional. Perhaps it’s a case of extending your reflective time to identify behavioral choices oriented around the skills you want to develop, and then intentionally working those behaviors and opportunities into the rest of your week. It’s natural for us to behave in ways that feel good and familiar. But true learning happens when we embrace the unknown.
We’re now at the lowest point on the crisis curve – the part where we’ve got over the initial fatigue and “honeymoon” period. Now we’re in a time of change. Our analysis and plans will determine how we start again.
Will we go back to pre-covid times? Will it be worse? Or will we evolve and find a higher point that allows us all to live better?
We’re already analyzing how things went. We’re searching for the formula that will allow us to live and work. We want to put these two worlds together. Think the serendipity of a coffee break with the efficiency of digital meetings. The flexibility of working from home with the need to set boundaries and safety nets. We know that over the past few months, people have worked more (48.5 extra minutes per day, on average), and that meetings are around 20% shorter. But we also have 12.9% more meetings, with 13.5% extra attendees. We also know that we’re sending 5% more emails – maybe it doesn’t seem much, if we didn’t already know in 2020, we sent 306.4 billlion emails each day.
Some people feel that the optimum number of days working remotely is two rather than three, and that we must exercise our “right to unplug”. But nobody has really understood if the benefits of working from home outweigh the drawback of not having boundaries between different life dimensions.
Having worked in innovation for years, I’ve seen how difficult it is to change the way that we do things. But at the moment, I see the same dangers that occur every time when things change too quickly. The change is so big, we can only roll with it, instead of managing it.
Our “emergency” response to new needs becomes the foundation for future decisions.
They are short term solutions, solving part of the puzzle without making space for true innovation. It already seems as though the elements most relevant to the debate are bytes, miles and minutes. But we have the opportunity to really change how we work and live. We can change things to make them more tailored to people’s complex situations: the same people that have built a world that’s constantly changing and are responsible for making it more sustainable in future. Change isn’t about repackaging what we already have, like technology has done. Instead, we need to spend time working on our human capital, and the packaging can come later.
The weakest link in all this is that you can’t base it on data, because true innovation touches things that we haven’t tried, seen or done. Changing perspective and planning for something new requires us to work together for the common good. It’s not about relying solely on data, but also about sharing objectives and taking responsibility together. Everything that we’ll decide to do after the pandemic, how we’ll decide and the effects those decisions will have will never have a short-term impact.
Everything we believe to be unsustainable was already that way before the pandemic. So we need to have the courage to truly innovate, because there are always different and more innovative ways of doing things. But if we keep asking old questions, it will be impossible to make space for a new beginning. That’s ultimately how we’ll survive.
This article was originally written by our CEO, Riccarda Zezza, for Alley Oop, Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original article in Italian, click here.
Balancing work and family responsibilities was a challenge before the pandemic hit. But now many working parents have been hit with a full-on crisis. Whether it’s childcare plans that constantly change, concerns over protecting family health or the fatigue of longer working days, the uncertainty of the situation has challenged parents all over the world.
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, about two-fifths of all families in the US have at least one child under the age of 18. 64% of those had both parents employed. This equates to around 30 million families. On top of this, there are 10 million single working mothers and 5 million single working fathers today who rely on schools to care for and educate their children in the US alone.
What’s more, when it comes to parenting responsibilities, women are continuing to bear more of the load than their counterparts. On average, full-time working mothers in two parent households are doing 22 hours of childcare on average per week during the pandemic. And that’s in addition to their everyday paid work. The shift towards working from home has meant parents’ responsibilities are accumulating – with different duties requiring their attention at the same time. The result? They feel overwhelmed, out of control and exhausted by it all.
As we move into the second phase of the pandemic, it’s important to ensure that parents feel confident, connected and in control of their lives. It’s a chance to shape what parenthood will look like once the pandemic subsides.
For managers, this includes tangible ways to personally support parent employees to make that happen. Here are three ways you can lead with empathy as a caring leader:
Only 52% of employers actually track data on their employees’ caregiving responsibilities. But it actually affects 75% of the working population. Moreover, there are groups within your organisation that aren’t actively included in the working-parent dialogue, such as dads, millennials, LGBTQIA+ or parents of older children. This exclusion can make them feel even more isolated and misunderstood.
So, don’t assume you know who the caregivers are in your workforce – take the time to do your homework.
Make space for people to share about their responsibilities outside of work. Show empathy towards everyone’s unique and individual situations. 1 in 5 parents have said that either they or their partner are considering leaving the workforce to care for their children. Keep in contact with your employees. Encourage them to open up about any doubts they may be having so you can work through these with them.
It might sound simple, but listening is key to providing employees with the support they need. In fact, 7 in 10 people expect their companies to be actively listening to them right now.
In practice, unfortunately it’s not always the case though. A recent report by Harvard Business School pointed out there is a “gross misalignment” between what caregiving employees want and what they are actually given. But around 30% of people have something that they want to say to their employers in this season, so the data to make a difference is there (Lifeed, 2020).
So, how can make listening commonplace in your team? Arrange to have weekly check-ins and meetings with your team where you can discuss any issues that they are experiencing, and how you can help accommodate their needs. Let your team members do the talking and show empathy towards their situation. This will help you to truly understand their perspective. It’s a chance to help them break down bigger issues into a manageable action plan. It’s about empowering them by giving them the tools they need to succeed.
Living with uncertainty is tiring – in fact 43% of people are truly feeling the mental fatigue this year (Lifeed, 2020). Caregivers especially will be feeling a certain weight of responsibility and heightened anxiety. Maintaining a work-life balance is very difficult for many, particularly those who have never worked from home before.
This is a vital time for support and not a time to be shy regarding mental health. Don’t be afraid to address it head on and encourage open conversations about it. Giving your employees this opportunity will build both trust and understanding amongst the team. It’s also important to recognise the signs of burnout amongst your colleagues, taking steps providing tangible support when needed.
A study by Compass found that new working patterns have placed a greater burden on caregivers which has particularly affected women. In June, more than half of workers whose working week had increased beyond a standard 37.5-40 hours a week. Those who also engaged in active childcare responsibilities were experiencing mental distress. Try having an open conversation with your team about presenteeism. Focus on productivity and clear outputs during the day so they feel able to truly “switch off” from work once the day is done and avoid the always-on culture.
“Be strong and kind”. That’s what Jacinta Ardern, New Zealand Prime Minister, asked of her people. And just like that, our concept of leadership has been revolutionized. How can we be strong and show kindness at the same time? We’ve always been taught that strength is something brutal and “physical”. And above all, how can we be kind when we’re in the middle of an emergency? Where first of all we need to resolve problems, go quickly and guide others?
Who has time to be kind? Who really has the time to also be “kind”?
But there’s more than just being kind. Kindness is also a form of caring for others. So what the Prime Minister is really asking for is caring leadership. Why do we need that type of leadership right now, when it seems to slow things down and increase complexity when managing new situations? To be kind, we need to make space for others: for their fears and hesitations. Maybe we can do it with our partner or children, but can we do it with our colleagues, fellow citizens, or anybody who is “depending” on the leader.
In 2001, during those turbulent times following the fall of the Twin Towers, one of the head firefighters climbed onto a fire engine, removed his helmet and asked his colleagues to do the same: “We lost a lot of people today. They deserve a moment of silence”, he said. A simple and unexpected gesture that helped everyone feel closer and understood in their suffering. It was a gesture that helped them to return to work with more energy than they had before.
Actually, recently studies have been saying that the complexity and speed of change today – even pre-covid – shows us that we need diffused leadership. We need a shared responsibility that allows us to act independently. That’s why lots of experts don’t really like the word “leadership”, as it continues to represent an unsustainable scenario where one person guides and the others follow. In times of crisis, it becomes even clearer that no single person has the answers for everyone else. Leaders have the opportunity to win over others with a deeper impact: the only way that will really make a difference. With kindness. Kindness that’s an expression, through concrete actions, of at least three key skills.
It’s about consciously deciding to not ignore any signs of mental strain. Instead, it’s about looking for them, training our empathy muscles. It’s not a coincidence that all humans have the ability to be empathetic. After all, our species uses empathy to survive, as nobody can go it alone. So it’s a decision to slow down where necessary to wait for those who were left behind. It’s about deciding to be patient.
Managers don’t need to solve problems, but rather give people the tools they need to resolve things themselves. The same goes for managing negative emotions. Often leaders hesitate to allow their teams to open up about how they’re feeling because they think they need to provide a resolution.
Instead we need to create territories where people feel safe enough to express themselves and regain possession of their emotional energy and heal themselves: it’s the energy that isolation crushes. When you unleash this energy, you unleash power!
It’s about giving yourself the same attention and care that allows other people to heal themselves:
because in times of crisis, leaders feel vulnerable too.
Think about all the things they taught us not to show at school. Think about all the things that would weaken our positions as leaders. It’s the idea that vulnerability and strength are at opposite ends of the scale, that they can’t co-exist. But vulnerabilities actually make us stronger as leaders. At the same time “one of us” (we’re all in the same boat!) is the most courageous one, because they dare to show who they really are. When they step closer to the group and reveal themselves, fatigue and suffering are no longer signs of defeat, but rather inevitable companions in this journey.
So it’s better to look them in the eyes. It’s difficult for leaders to look inside and care for yourself, because they are are usually the harshest with themselves. But it’s really difficult to ask other people to believe in what you suggest if you’re not the first to put that advice into action.
So this is the (long) story behind the short phrase “strong and kind” leaders. The most revolutionary definitions only need a few words, especially if you’re showing people what it means with your actions.
What links Siniša Mihajlović’s new book to the death of a six month old child migrant as they were trying to cross the Mediterranean with their mother? All of our stories are connected. The coach’s book “The match of my life” is a great example of honest communication. He talks about how a near-death experience showed him the value in things he previously took for granted. When he risked losing it, he finally saw how precious and fragile it was. While this happens, in other parts of the world, other people are dying in the hope of becoming visible, perhaps they die because they are invisible.
You don’t feel alone when you are alone, you feel alone when you feel invisible. In fact, you can feel alone even when you’re living with someone else. It happens when you become invisible to each other and stop all forms of honest communication. Love, even love that lasts a lifetime, is a look. It’s about accepting what we see, forcing ourselves to welcome even the things we find tiring – because our brains save energy when we don’t see anything new. We tend to lean towards the things we know. We resist change when it presents itself.
Keeping your eyes open is tiring. So when others look at us, when they see us, we feel reassured. If we feel seen, it’s a confirmation that we exist, and this enriches our perceptions of ourselves.
The child that died in the Mediterranean ended up that way, while the mother somehow managed to miraculously stay afloat for hours awaiting help. They must have been invisible, otherwise we would have all been distraught and never allow such a thing to happen again. The child was called Joseph and came from Guinea.
Mihajlović ended up that way too, battling his feelings of invisibility. When he could no longer ignore the richness of his fragility. When he felt on the sidelines, he found that’s where life could truly be found.
Lots of people end up that way when they stop looking at themselves in the mirror. They are afraid that they have “reached their limits”. But the world reminds us each day that “life has just one lens: the inevitable sunset, where we live our needs, rather than dreams, wants and the desire to change“.
We need to see and feel seen. Today we alternate between feeling semi-invisible with our masks and feeling too visible through our 2D screens. This territory hosts life and death, making us feel less alone in both scenarios. Because when we use honest communication and allow ourselves to truly see the grey areas in life, we are free to see the symphony of colours that they really have to offer.
This article was originally written by our CEO, Riccarda Zezza, for Alley Oop, Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original article in Italian, click here.
I’ve never worked so much. It’s never been so hard to protect my calendar from an incredible amount of meetings. I’ve never seen so many conferences, webinars or workshops. And with so many people taking part with just a few days notice! Digital working should free up our time and make us more flexible. But it’s actually boxed our days off as we try to make the most of our time.
We are surprised if not everyone is able to join in the exact minute that a meeting starts. We get frustrated is we have to wait a few minutes to receive a link. It’s now normal for people to leave a meeting because they have “back to back” calendar invites.
Human time is analogue, but remote workers’ time is digital. It’s a “finite” amount of time that pulls us along by our ears to make sure we respect all of our commitments. It’s the new presenteeism, the idea of being always on that started when we got email on our phones.
Matt Martin, CEO of Clockwise, talked to Forbes about a 17% increase in what he calls “fragmented time”, or rather gaps in the diary that are less than two hours. His organization sells software that “optimizes calendars to free up blocks of uninterrupted time”, helping people to protect themselves from “other people’s commitments“.
That’s always been the problem in digital, starting with electronic mail. It’s one of the most advanced tools when it comes to abusing time. Over the past 20 years its overridden people’s agendas at a time that’s convenient to the sender. It moves the cost of communication on the shoulders of the person that receives it.
In an interview in 2004, management guru Tom Peters suggested that managers should be seen as 12 year olds with attention deficit disorder, constantly running to the next thing, bombarded with information and constantly looking for the next best thing. That’s why he’s a fan of “time management”. But if we apply time management to our lives, we can run the risk of feeling we have to optimize our diaries to do as much as possible. It’s exactly what we’re doing in the digital world. But nobody said that time management was the same as time saturation.
I’m missing my time on the train. When I can’t get a good connection, it’s my time to read research, books and articles. I always came out of that time with new ideas. In the same interview mentioned previously, Peters talks about one of the top ten finance people in the world saying “the biggest problem for CEOs of big companies is that they don’t read enough“. Nearly 20 years and a pandemic later, things haven’t got better for anyone.
Time in the digital world doesn’t have clock hands, it doesn’t allow us to feel approximate about timings. But being “on time” really means arriving at the “right time”. It’s more about the things we are able to bring to the table rather than the number of minutes on our display.
This article was originally written by our CEO, Riccarda Zezza, for Alley Oop, Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original article in Italian, click here.
