Achieved Strategies

New Era Leaders today symbolically represent a tipping point of a leadership style positively influenced, in part, by contrarian acts exhibited by the endless examples of selfish, unethical choices by executives, politicians, even athletes.  Such examples bleed into our life and leave us needing something deeper from the leaders in our own world.

A New Era Leader learns from this social occurrence and changes how they give something deeper to those whom they inspire to contribute. 

How? New Era Leaders inspire others to contribute by enabling dreams of others.

• Refresh your people practices.  A VP of HR once told me that “we aren’t here to help people self-actualize.”  This is the epitome of an outdated belief in the relationship between a company and its employees.  Today employees long for meaning in their work.  And this includes helping employees become better people in life while at work. Enable dreams of your people by refreshing these people practices:
  • Pay for classes that satisfy interests of your employees, brings them happiness. Don’t limit your tuition reimbursement programs to classes limited solely to what your company does.

• Vineet Nayar advocates in his book Employees First, Customers Second to open up your 360-degree review. He means this to make the results available to everyone in the organization to increase belief in the assessment.  Take this a step further. Let non-management employees participate in the process.  Let them learn from peers and upper management what they are doing well and what needs to improve.  This type of feedback can increase employee self-awareness, helping to inform their future thoughts of themselves and their actions.

• Alter interactions.  To enable dreams requires that you switch up how you interact with your team, or volunteers, or community.  New Era Leaders ruthlessly make room in their calendars to connect face-to-face (virtually or physically) with their team.

Alter the interactions of your employees, too. Give up the usual suspects approach to putting the same people on high profile projects. These projects often are prestigious. Make them more about contribution and matching talents (gifts) to the project and give employees the opportunity to interact with others in new ways.

• Help employees have great lives.  Employees at all levels spend much of their daily lives at work.  I believe employers need to create a relationship that isn’t merely a transaction: pay for services. It’s one that recognizes the opportunity costs of working, and not having the time to pursue actions that help employees have great lives. 

Google believes that they should make it easy for employees to take care of routine errands from work.  This is a gift of time, giving employees the time to do something meaningful – dream worthy.

If there’s one key message I want you to leave with it’s this: New Era Leaders place greater importance on helping employees achieve their dreams, greatness. Any one of us will do great things when we know what we do matters; it makes a difference. Customers are more satisfied. Work becomes more meaningful.

This post was written for SmartBrief’s Smartblog on Leadership in June, 2011.

Graphic by Shawn Murphy