Soften Your Leadership to Strengthen Your Team
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is 1,000 times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Leaders often feel like they must demonstrate hard leadership skills to build a strong team. To gain respect and followership, the leader consistently demonstrates attributes of power and confidence. The leader “takes charge” and pressures the team towards the objective. Hard leadership skills require little team depth. They rely on position and authority. Hard leadership skills are effective for simple and clearly defined problems that need quick solutions. Conversely, soft leadership skills emphasise collaboration and typically take longer to build dynamic and effective teams over time capable of solving complex problems.
Empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence are three soft leadership skills that develop strong teams. People inherently want to work with someone who recognises and encourages a life outside of the workplace. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go smooth — stuff happens. Leaders who empathise with their employees recognise and acknowledge there are outside catalysts that impact their employee’s performance. Life can and will challenge employees, preventing their maximum effort on the job.
Effective leaders provide compassion and understanding while supporting and allowing the employee to navigate life’s challenges. Effective leaders leverage their influence and authorities to relieve their employee’s suffering to the best of their ability. They can encourage time off to address the challenges, provide resources to support the employee, and/or adjust the employee’s workload to reduce work related stress.
Simply acknowledging the employee’s life challenge and articulating support adds strong layers to a team’s foundation.
Finally, emotional intelligence builds strong teams. Great team builders can recognise an employee is struggling through observation and provide empathy and compassion without confronting the employee. Conversely, emotionally intelligent leaders do not demonstrate frustration or disappointment when employees request the resources they require to address their challenges even when it will impact the team. Team builders recognise that building strong teams is an investment. A leader’s investment into supporting struggling team members pays enormous dividends towards team development.
Hard leadership skills have their time and place however, they do not build strong and enduring teams. Applying hard leadership skills when an employee is struggling and vulnerable might result in accomplishing a goal but it will also demonstrate the leader’s priority of the goal over the employee.
Conversely, soft leadership skills build in-depth and resilient teams. Leaders who protect their employees and provide them resources to overcome their challenge demonstrate their people first approach. Consequently, the employees galvanise together, forming a strong team. Leaders who demonstrate empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence use soft leadership skills to build strong teams.
To find out more about how Mettle can assist you in strengthening your team, contact info@mettle.global or visit our website.