Episode Details

Summary

How do leaders create an environment where people thrive? This week we look at the importance of leadership styles in helping to bring out the best in our people.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 28 of the Leadership Today Podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we're looking at how leaders create an environment where people thrive, which is building on some of the themes from last week's episode.

When I was 15 my first part time job was at a large retailer. My job title was 'Customer Service Security', which sounds pretty impressive, but in practice that meant I was the person who checked bags as people left the store to make sure they hadn't stolen anything. At that time the retailer had a garden department with its own street entrance, so it wasn't uncommon for people to come in the main entrance, steal something, then try to make a quick escape through the garden department. Of course they had to get past Customer Service Security first. By any measure, this wasn't a great job to give to a 15 year old, but it was character building if nothing else. Another of my responsibilities was to help people who were returning goods, checking their receipts and passing them through to a person who could give them a refund.

There's one refund that has stuck in my mind 30 years after the event. A man came into the garden department one Saturday morning carrying what looked like a stick with a black plastic bag on one end. He let me know that he wanted a full cash refund on the item. I looked at the receipt, and what he had originally purchased a full three months earlier was a bare-rooted lemon tree. You see occasionally had specials where we would sell a bunch of young trees with minimal soil around the roots which were then sealed in a plastic bag - which made it much easier than shipping and selling them than putting them in pots. But this guy had bought the bare-rooted lemon tree, taken it home and put it in his garage for a full three months - no sunlight, no water, no nutrients, no space to grow. It didn't take a horticultural qualification to realise the lemon tree was dead. Amazingly, our generous refund policy meant the man left with a full refund, and we were left wondering what to do with a dead stick in a bag.

There are a few important leadership principles wrapped up in this story. The most obvious one is that, as leaders, we need to create an environment where people can thrive. Just like the lemon tree needed to be planted in good soil, with access to sunlight, water and nutrients to thrive, as leaders we need to provide an environment where people can thrive. I'll talk more about how we can do that shortly.

The second equally important principle is that we can't force people to be motivated and to grow - that comes from within the person themselves. As leaders it's important to recognise that we can't directly motivate anyone to do anything. The closest we can get is through demands and threats, which is unfortunately what all too many leaders default to. While that might lead to a short-term lift in performance driven by fear, ultimately the impact is negative on the individual and the organisation.

Instead what we're aiming for is aligned motivation. If someone shows up at your workplace, they're motivated. As a leader our role is to uncover what specifically motivates that individual, and to help align that with the direction and needs of the organisation. We do that by creating the right environment.

In summary - the person owns the motivation, and the leader owns the environment that helps to align that motivation.

So how do leaders shape the environment? We shape the environment through the leadership behaviours we demon