Does Your Leadership Follow Any Of These 3 Less-Than-Healthy Styles?
In my book, Always Growing, I talk about how leaders need to create the environment that gives people the best chance to grow, just like a gardener wants to give their seeds or plants the best chance to grow. I’m currently reading, Radical Candor, by Kim Scott and she gives two key actions every leader needs to take in order to create that environment. They need to care personally and challenge directly.
Caring personally means genuinely connecting with and understanding your team members on an individual level. It involves showing empathy, taking an interest in their well-being, and building trust. Equally important, is challenging directly. Challenging directly provides honest feedback and addressing issues or concerns head-on. It requires being straightforward, respectful, and focused on helping people grow and improve.
Scott also talks in the book about three other ways that we create a less-than-healthy environment for people to grow.
Take a look at this graphic from the book.
The first less-than-healthy way Scott talks about is obnoxious aggression. Obnoxious aggression refers to a behavior where one challenges others directly with very little care or consideration. Examples of obnoxious aggression include:
Interrupting and dismissing someone's ideas without giving them a fair chance to express themselves.
Criticizing and belittling others openly, without showing empathy or understanding.
Engaging in confrontations or conflicts without taking into account the other person's emotions or well-being.
As a leader, it is crucial to recognize the impact our actions have on the individuals who bring their hearts and minds to work. It is important to strive for a compassionate and respectful approach, fostering a positive and supportive work environment.
The second way leaders can create an unhealthy environment, is through manipulative insincerity. Manipulative insincerity refers to the act of pretending to care about someone's well-being solely to achieve personal gains, without genuinely valuing that individual as a person or acknowledging their uniqueness. This behavior can manifest in various ways within the workplace, such as:
Offering empty compliments just to manipulate someone into doing what you want.
Feigning interest in a colleague's project solely to gain their favor or support.
Pretending to listen and empathize with a team member's concerns but disregarding them when making important decisions.
Putting on a false facade of collaboration while secretly undermining others to advance your own career.
It is important to recognize and address manipulative insincerity to foster a more authentic and supportive work environment.
The third way to create an unhealthy environment, and one that I am more prone toward doing, is ruinous empathy. This is the tendency of withholding necessary feedback in fear of hurting someone's feelings. This results in a environment where only positive remarks are shared, impeding personal growth.
In the workplace, ruinous empathy may manifest when a manager avoids addressing areas of improvement with their team members, focusing solely on praising their accomplishments without providing constructive criticism. It is crucial to strike a balance between empathy and honesty to foster a supportive and development-oriented work culture.
As a leader, do you see opportunity for improvement within your team, or even within yourself? Is it to care personally more? Maybe to challenge more directly effectively? Radical Candor, is packed with examples and case studies that you can easily use to get better in both ways. Kim Scott teaches us that as leaders, it is crucial to find the balance between caring personally and challenging directly in order to create a thriving and healthy work environment. However, we also need to be aware of the three other ways we can unintentionally create a toxic workplace - obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity, and ruinous empathy. It is our responsibility as leaders to take positive action and cultivate radical candor in our teams.
