By Jeff Bell
When we take on the leadership of a business, we are fully focused and overflowing with fervour.
It may be a one-person operation, starting from the ground up. Over time, we will expand our revenue and margin, our staff, our branches and maybe our territories.
If we come into an established business, our intellectual, emotional and physical energies will be poured into deeply understanding it and establishing appropriate control, then leadership.
This leadership, by definition, will have a strong element of subject matter knowledge—we will have, or soon command a level of credibility, if not authority.
Such will be our sense of immersion and personal commitment we may develop an aura of unapproachability. Those who we have recruited to the business may feel that we are a bit over the top. They may not know or understand the journey we have been on and they may not get the fervour with which we often act. This is common and understandable because:
Business ownership is not just a role, it’s an other dimension.
So how do we, as the owner and leader, inspire people to choose this great cause with the same fervour that we have?
Much will depend on our own behaviours.
Previously, I have written here about Engaging the Staff as one of the 5 Priorities of the Leader. I have no doubt that the single most important factor in people feeling that they belong in a business is the connectedness that they feel with the leader. We can set up this relationship by:
- Writing and constantly reinforcing the values and behaviours. It is not enough to have a mere list of organisational values. This must come from deep within us: we must transmit our [secular] values into the organisation’s context and illustrate each value with 10 indicative behaviours. This is the blueprint for our organisational culture. We live by and relentlessly promote these values.
- Saying what we will do. Doing what we say. It may take 10 occasions of us doing what we say we will do before people truly trust us. It may take only 1 occasion when we don’t follow through—and we have lost that trust. Maybe forever. We cannot be an effective leader without integrity—the outcome of which is trust.
- Knowing everyone and greeting them by name. Recognition and acknowledgement from the leader is a powerful morale booster—people will be willing to give their loyalty to such a leader. If there is not already a universally accessible pictorial staff directory, we need to make one. Then we match faces with names and use them constantly—until we have internalised them.
Then there is the Story of Us.
How do we encourage a sense of belonging between the newcomer and everyone else who works in the organisation—that is, beyond our induction processes, into a deeply emotional connection?
I draw here on the work done by international performance coach Owen Eastwood and detailed in his book Belonging.
As humans, we often rely on the them versus us story. This can be useful in a short-term tactical sense, such as a competitive game. But in the real world, when we pit us against them, we create division, suspicion, conflict and ultimately, destruction.
When trying to create a sense of belonging and a synergistic energy, we can choose the us narrative.
We will find that people are highly attuned to us stories—they create connections, influence deeply and energise a group. This comes from and is curated by the leader seeking to widen the scope of influence and heighten the inclusivity to the extent that there is room for all.
The leader reaches into the origins of the ideas and aspirations of the business and crafts the past, present and inspirational narrative. This is a story of adventure, failures, successes, tolerance, hard work and generosity. It’s a reflection of the best aspects of the human condition as well as acknowledgement of our shortcomings and recovery from those failures.
Above all, there is a clear road to an inspiring future. In literary terms, there is a strong plot, somewhere special and heroic characters…
…so, where is our Story of Us?