This article draws on research and finding from the Green Peak Partners and Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations ‘Nice Guys Finish First’ study.
We’re all familiar with the picture of the hard-charging, take-no-prisoners, results-at-all-costs manager – the one who doesn’t spend much time on ‘soft skills’, but who wins the loyalty of boards, investors, and ultimately staff because they drive results. It’s the results that matter – so the thinking goes – and concern with the staff’s happiness, their feelings, their motivation, and their sense of feeling wanted and needed is a distraction from that.
It’s a tidy wee story. It satisfies our ideas about what it means to be tough, to be focused, to know what really matters. It suggests that success can be driven by focussing on tasks and processes: much simpler than dealing with messy, inefficient people with all their opinions, values and emotions!
The only problem is that it isn’t remotely true, even when we focus solely on core financial metrics. In fact, managers who lack interpersonal skills and just focus on numbers and processes actually perform poorly over all but the shortest of time periods. They also wreak havoc on their people and their businesses.
Leaders with bullish, or even bullying tendencies, those who are impatient or stubborn are poor performers, not only as people managers, but also at developing strategy and delivering bottom-line financial results. Leaders who possess strong core leadership skills and engage their people on the other hand, produce better strategic and financial performance outcomes. If we want hard results, we need to look at our soft skills.
People are your business’s biggest asset and greatest risk! And every one of us is different. When we understand what makes us truly unique, we can leverage that knowledge to make better decisions, work smarter and inspire others to do the same. In fact, diversity of strengths, skills, preferences, work styles, challenges and areas of expertise is what makes teams and organisations stronger.
“There is no cure and no improving of the world that does not begin with the individual.”
Fundamentally, self-awareness is the basis for all positive human endeavour and interaction. So what is it? Self-awareness is the ability to recognise and understand your moods, emotions and drives and their effect on others.
Self-aware leaders aren’t pushovers. They are able to hold teams accountable and execute tough decisions in an inspiring and fair way. Rather than stamping out disagreements, they encourage productive conflict and the challenging of ideas – even their own. They flex and adapt, they can cope with changes, and they coach and support their teams to adopt the same flexibility.
Like a net rope woven from hundreds of individual threads, the sum of a diverse team is more than its parts. Woven together right, it catches more opportunities and can bear the heaviest of loads.
Do you need to build a cohesive, high functioning team quickly?
Do you need to eliminate friction and counterproductive behaviour?
Boost your team’s self-awareness, authenticity and resilience through our profiling services. We start by diagnosing your needs to apply the right tool and after profiling is complete, we make sure your people understand how to read and apply the insights provided. Contact us to find out more about our behavioural, values and emotional intelligence profiling tools.
