Choices made by leaders

Leader’s choices can be difficult to interpret at times, but the correct ones prove to be very beneficial for the company over time. Businesses mainly struggle to balance the needs of the employees for support with the company’s drive for high performance. Here the real leadership comprises both compassion and accountability, which is difficult to derive from the employees.

Businesses receive high demands for compassion at those times where there is no room for compromising on outcome and results. Therefore, many leaders are forced to make tough choices between compassion or performance. Both attributes are essential, but it is very difficult to achieve maximum performance in a way that maximizes support for the employees also. This difficult choice has made it tough for the leaders especially since covid times to achieve both 100% compassion and performance in a sustainable way.

To achieve a balance between both, leaders require data, prioritizing, setup, and teamwork.

Find out what matters

Leaders need to find out what is most important to the key stakeholders, which is not very easy. Leaders need to first collect data on what employees really care about rather than having their own assumptions. Ask employees concrete questions and find out what they prefer. It can be either to choose between their work from home experience or physical office experience. Ask them their struggles that they faced during covid or what change at work would bring a very positive impact on their lives.

Different data collection methods generate different types of information, so leaders need to choose it wisely based on the type of data that is being collected. Surveys are good for knowing recent trends, but they won’t give a clear understanding of the employee experience or true compassion.

Ideally, one on one conversations are very fruitful in understanding the complexities faced by the employees and showing true compassion. Sitting down with your teammate and asking what has been bothering them is the best form of showing compassion. It won’t make a difference if you just sit once, in fact it requires continuous efforts to show true compassion. The best approach is using a combination of methods keeping in mind the employees and combining the two methods to get the best possible results.

Having priorities sorted

The fact that having compassionate conversations takes time to show its results itself tells the importance and capacity of it. If the leaders of any organization need to show compassion towards their employees, their organization needs to take away some work from them which is not important now. Compassion shouldn’t compromise productivity results as they should be the main motive for any leader. Prioritizing work is essential as there is a real difficulty in finding out what work can be let go of with respect to short term performance. Leaders can ask questions from their employees about the reporting if it is time consuming and stressful without having any real value. Or what is that information that they receive but don’t act on or read about which can be excluded from daily work. In this case, line managers are in the best position to decide priorities. They know which person is responsible for what work. Leaders can assist the line managers to decide the work which an employee can let go of to free up some time and focus on what creates the most value.

Senior leaders should be accepting that their line managers have a better understanding in terms of data, and they should trust and support their prioritization efforts and give them full assistance in executing this.

Transparency of work

It is essential for the leader to create an environment that normalizes the conversations about the support that their employees need. It is important to instill the fact in employees minds that trading off compassion with performance is false and it will impact the organization negatively. However, compassion and performance should be balanced equally.

Well-being is supported and enhanced by managers and leaders and, in return it enhances all sorts of performance in the long run.

Employees should feel safe when they discuss what type of support they need from their leaders. Leaders should communicate what they are expected to do and provide solutions to their problems.

Create collaborative solutions

As the word suggests, find solutions that create a win-win situation for both the employees and the organization. Firstly, ownership of the problem is important. It’s a collective challenge that the organizations must own and solve the puzzle together. At times, you can’t expect the leader to step in the employees’ shoes and suggest a solution. There are some problems to which the employees only can suggest better solutions. Burden to provide all solutions should be reduced from the leaders.

The focus should be mainly on creating an environment which is supportive and provides communication channels to openly discuss problems and suggest solutions for them.

Resources and tools should be provided to the employees so that they understand their problems better and solve them efficiently.

Reminding everyone that what they are accountable for is very important. Secondly, owning the problem and challenges takes time for acceptance. But once acceptance is there, solutions are implemented in a more productive way which benefits the organization in the long run.

Compassionate leaders don’t just simply take away the work from people and give them whatever they want to do. Instead, they put in time and effort to ensure that the employees are achieving sustainable high performance with organizations being compassionate towards their problems.