Leadership cannot be decreed, as crucial as it is. Five skills allow a manager to mobilize the members of his teams to serve ever more demanding customers.
The job of managers these days is to solve a tricky equation. The issues are acute and new. For example, the level of quality of service requested by the customer continues to increase in an intense competitive environment where technological transformations are accelerating. In addition, managers must take into account the fact that employees lack sufficient motivation to respond fully: most surveys show, and particularly in France, low levels of participation, trust, satisfaction and willingness to engage).
This is what leads many companies to ask managers to ensure that their employees cooperate better. However, as Barnard showed in 1938, the manager leadership plays a key role in motivating employees to cooperate. What new leadership skills do managers need in this context? How can they acquire them?
We have highlighted five essential skills so that managers make employees want to give the best of themselves and act in the service of common goals. Each is based on a specific stream of research and managerial practice.
Positive psychology for leadership
Two skills come from research in positive psychology applied to leadership. They help create the context in which employees will act. The first is to lay the foundations for cooperation. It is broken down into several practices, firstly the establishment of a relationship of trust which meets the essential needs of belonging of employees. This is done, for example, by taking care of the reception and inclusion of new recruits so that they feel like full members of a work collective. Another determining practice consists of regularly sharing common goals and clarifying their adequacy with everyone’s goals, what is also called “the vision”, which has been shown to be the most effective way to unite a group of human beings.
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On these bases, a second leadership skill leads to building an environment favorable to action, in particular by developing people’s optimism through the use of mechanisms discovered in the experiments on potency and learned helplessness. This involves highlighting as systematically as possible the cause and effect links between an employee’s action and its consequences. After a success, it is not only about celebrating it, but also sharing in-depth feedback with the entire team on all the behaviors that enabled success, so that they can be reproduced.
The art of silence
The following two skills are inspired by work in social psychology on “empowerment” and collective decision-making as well as coaching practices for individuals and teams. A third fundamental leadership skill consists of supporting an employee so that they make a decision and develop an action plan autonomously and responsibly in their area of delegation when faced with new difficulties for which there is no standard answer. This involves the manager using methods such as GROW model and to call on practices whose importance is still greatly underestimated in leadership: the art of silence or powerful questions which do not aim to understand what the other is doing but to put it into action, as when we ask “how are you going to go about it?” » rather than “can you explain to me why you did that?” »
The fourth skill allows you to organize and lead the team decision making by giving a voice to all stakeholders, which has the great advantage of limiting the conformity effect called “group think” (better known as “groupthink”). This requires the ability to properly integrate into the decision-making process a solid phase of divergence which draws on numerous opinions, even and especially minority ones, before converging towards a common decision and applying it.
The desire to cooperate even in adversity
The last skill has its source in research in organizational behavior, communication and negotiation. Thanks to it, we make employees want to continue to cooperate even in the face of adversity. It comes in several practices. For example, it is important to know deliver bad news empathetically and fairly. Receiving information sincerely, on time, with support is often at least as important as its content. The practice of give negative feedback assertively and constructively is also useful in that it can, when the return is justified, transform resistance into acceptance. Finally, we bring our colleagues to know negotiate integratively when they disagree by teaching them to focus on each other’s compatible, underlying interests rather than inflexible surface positions.
These five skills and all of their associated practices allow managers to activate their employees’ power to act by embodying open, delegative, empowering leadership, and a factor of efficiency and fulfillment in carrying out missions. These skills and practices have been the subject of support and training for several thousand managers in various continuing education and managerial transformation programs as well as in master’s and Executive MBA courses by the authors over the last ten years. . Impact measures, which were presented in another bookshowed that when managers integrated these skills and implemented the practices associated with them, the consequences for themselves as well as for their employees and their companies were favorable in terms of effectiveness of action and satisfaction of employees. people.
An experience to live
The question of “how” must also be addressed. According to Goldsmith, formerly a leadership researcher and now a celebrated executive coach and essayist, the greatest leadership challenge for managers is not understanding their practice but practice their understanding.
Leadership is first and foremost an art, an experience to be had. It can only be acquired through supported implementation which is done step by step, with constant back and forth between understanding, field trials, errors, emotions, sharing with peers, reflection, writing of experience and return to practice. This is the reason why are presented in the book “Leadership experience”in addition to the theories that underpin each practice, instructions for use, concrete advice and testimonials to test it with the aim of learning and constant progress.
