As you develop as a leader, you become very aware of what resonates both with you from your leader and with your team as you lead. It’s often painfully obvious – both your preferences and dislikes. With a little attention, the same is true for those around you – their likes and dislikes are usually easy to see. Depending on your predisposition, this can throw you for a loop. For example, I am 100% not a “people person” – I am happy going days without speaking to anyone in my personal life. But quickly both as an employee and as a leader, I realized I must be a strong advocate for the people around me if I was going to succeed.
Once the light bulb came on it, it actually became very instinctual for me to focus people first. “People Come First” doesn’t mean that I am super emotive and we spend hours upon hours discussing your innermost feelings. “People come first” means that I spend considerable time and effort forging a strong working relationship with the folks in my sphere. I’m fairly sure I am not their BFF and up on every action in their personal life, but I am someone that they can work closely with day after day, collaborate with, argue with, and trust.
There are 3 major reasons that I evolved to this style.
First, once you’ve built a reasonable working relationship founded on trust both parties are far more open to critique the other and grow from the relationship. Without that basic level of trust, progress will be hard to achieve and when it comes it will be fleeting. Critiques will feel personal and uninformed if not just mean. Feedback may seem insincere. Motives will be questioned. Basically, being effective day to day as a leader all but MANDATES that you build healthy and strong working relationships to survive and thrive.
Second, strong working relationships allow for the kind of brainstorming, innovation, and decision making that can move a team forward faster than any other tool. When we can all feel comfortable that others have our best interests in mind and truly want us to succeed, we are much more open to sharing ideas and/or commenting on other’s ideas without the fear of any unforeseen impacts. With healthy relationships based on trust and respect, a leader can get a true read from his team on an idea along with thoughts on how to improve that idea much more readily than when those relationships are lacking.
Third, (and not the message many companies like to have written) all of us employees are expendable to our companies in the long run. There will be someone smarter, better qualified, cheaper, and a better fit than each of us one day. So knowing that the company will act in it’s best interest as an entity with or without me, I feel that it’s my responsibility to put people first whenever I can to best prepare them for the next step in their career – whether that’s with me or with someone else. Building that personal relationship can be the difference between engagement and disengagement depending on the direction of the organization.
Is any of this thinking unique? No! Hopefully you have a list of managers that are just like this (and maybe even are your BFF today) as you read through your resume and think back. If you don’t, Id encourage you to look for leaders who view their role in a similar fashion as you’ll enjoy your role even more.
And when you lead, I implore you to make sure you don’t get so caught up in the organizational inertia and/or ladder climbing that you forget to put your people first. Build those strong professional relationships. Get to know people at whatever level you are both comfortable. Don’t be the the leader who is willing to sacrifice others to benefit himself/herself. Companies are already designed to operate at maximum efficiency by sacrificing whatever isn’t expedient for them; as leaders we don’t need to amplify the organization’s core nature but instead to balance it out by putting people first.
Your team will thank you…and you’ll sleep better at night.
View from the Middle 