Hey, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership on today's discussion on employee engagement. I want to go over some content that I saw on LinkedIn from Susan David. She's a PhD and a psychologist, best selling author, uh, and she's a lot of a lot of influence on LinkedIn, and I saw something from her recently that I liked because I think it calls out something that a lot of leaders have kind of been kind of put into
a box. You know. We talked about over the years, how it used to be these you know, hard skills that that leaders had to have with them accountability, you know, results, uh, and then we moved into this kind of era of where softer skills are are required, and no one likes using that term anymore because some because they are harder
for a lot of people. If you're really good at at the at the accountability piece and the driving results and numbers piece, you might it might be more difficult for you to have softer skills like empathy, which makes
those kind of the harder skills. But the part of this I want to talk about is that I think that the word empathy and the skill of having empathy has become this almost umbrella term for the softer skills, the people skills, the ability to get people to follow you and to do what is necessary to get the job done, not because they're afraid of losing their job, but because they have made a commitment to the relationship
between their leader, you and them. And I know a lot of leaders out there who are very good at this, who have empathy, but they lack other areas of these you know, kind of softer people skills, and yet it becomes like this get out of jail free card of having empathy. And this post by Susan David kind of
called this out. She talks about things like emotional regulation, values, aligned responding, and authenticity as equally important hearts of what matters to leadership, and that kind of really struck a chord with me because I started thinking about leaders in
my life. For leaders that I know who are very empathetic people, but they're not great at regulating their emotions, they're not great at being authentic there maybe they don't respond aligned with a with a perceived value system, and so they kind of have this like box checked of soft skills, but it doesn't make them as impactful or as as productive in terms of the leadership space as they could be. And so I kind of want to kind of dissect this a little bit because these skills I think.
Are just as important. Yeah, and I think too, I like about the pie chart that she's got here, this is like the whatever you want to define this quote unquote hard skills, whether it's accountability or driving business or whatever that might be. That's also a part of the pie chart of course. So again, yeah, but I think sometimes we have this thing where it's like it's one or the other, or it has to be fifty to fifty, or like they know all of that these things are
required around having great leadership. I think all of these things have an element of emotional legility. While there's a lot of things that I do as a leader over the years where I've learned how to, you know, kind of connect with people and and be consistent in my own emotions for the most part. For the most part, I will say that, you know, to be authentically who I am, to to have, you know, an element of empathy,
to engage with people, meet them where they're at. There's still very much a part of me that is driven in regards to making sure that we have consistent things like accountability and responsibility and that we are understanding how all of this work ties to the outcomes that we
are responsible for. So again it's I think even the and I like that we're even kind of challenging the idea of the words soft, like you know, you think of now these soft skills and how it got labeled that way many decades ago, you know, which was really just kind of you know, code for like people that are you know, doing well at connecting and understanding and listening.
And these are not bad things. I just think they were very h They were very against the grain when it came to that old authoritative leadership, right, and the realization that if you really want people to show up at their best, if you really want people to take smart calculator risks and want to learn and to grow and to push the agenda, you have to find a way to connect with them. Besides just work really hard
and do these things and check these boxes. You've got to connect with them in a way that allows them to be curious and to ask more questions, and to show elements of humility and and and show the elements of courage, and these are all things that I think matter a lot when you're trying to grow your business.
Right, I agree with that completely. I think you know, as as everything or almost everything human beings do, it's a pendulum and it has to swing wide before it finds it. It's you know, kind of happy medium. And so you know, if you if you think back to you know, the last you know, call it thirty years, the percentage of the pie chart that would be you know, soft skills like empathy and emotional regulation would be you know, zero percent or one percent of that of that required
pie chart. And then over the years it became a larger and larger requirement in terms of the ability to lead people to the point where it where it overshadowed or even replaced the you know, harder skills like accountability and the expectation of results. And I think there were a lot of leaders, you know, over you know, maybe ten years ago or or you know, five to ten years ago who who indexed so much higher on those skills that they actually didn't know how to hold people
accountable or drive for results. And it became it went too far. And I really like that. I think the pendulum has swung back a little bit without losing the requirement of those other things. I think we're in the process of finding our happy medium where you have to have skills like empathy and emotional regulation, value aligned responding, authenticity, and you have to hold people accountable, you have to drive for results and get the results that are expected
out of the job. It's the way you get those done. The expectation of results has never gone away. It's the way you get those results that has changed. And I like that that we're getting there. I don't think we're one hundred percent there yet, but I know a lot of leaders who have really threaded that needle well, and they have these skills and they still get the results that they're looking for, and they're by far the most effective leaders from a long term standpoint of any leaders
I've ever known. The ones that indexed higher on the accountability you know twenty five years ago, they got the results there, but they had higher turnover because people didn't want to work with them for long period of time. And then people who indexed a lot higher on the you know, on the softer skills, but didn't have the ability to hold people accountable or drive for results, they ended up having higher turnover because no one wants to work for a person who can't tell them what the
expectations are or hold the accountable. People want to be held accountable because they want to move up. They want to see where they where they sit compared to their peers, or their likelihood of getting a promotion. And that's a lot harder to do if you don't have the ability to hold people accountable. And so the leaders that do all of this are definitely, you know, the better ones.
I want to talk specifically about these, these concepts of emotional regulation, authenticity and values aligned responding and how people do it well versus how many maybe they don't do it so much. But first I want to give up forard to one of our sponsors. All Right, the first one of these I want to talk about is this this concept of values aligned responding. Now, I've always believed that everybody has their value system, and whether or not
you can articulate it, it doesn't matter. There's something intrinsically in you that is your value system, and it may or may not align with somebody else's value system. But when you act in any way, people will assign a value system to you based on that action, and largely it's through the filter of their own values and what they what the expectation is. And then the more they see you act or respond, the better picture they are
painted of what your values system actually is. And the less they interact with you, the less information they would have. If you are responding in a way that is not aligned with your own values, or if you don't see yourself doing that, I don't think that means that you
actually aren't responding and align with your values. I think what that means is that you have articulated inaccurately to yourself what your values are, and if you respond differently than that, then it means that what you thought your
values are are not actually that it's something else. If you're a leader and you want to be consistent with your people, I think it's important to really be clear with yourself on what your values are, and the way to do that is to think of situations where those values would be tested and how you would respond and really be honest with yourself about how you'd respond.
Yeah, And it's a very I think deep practice. Yeah, because it's one of those things that we think about our values and we want to hold tight to them, and we think about what we've learned over time and what we gain from our our our families, what we gain from peers, from we gain from mentors, and we
feel very strongly that we all live our values. And it can be really hard to think about times when you didn't live your values or when you you know, when you're not showing up in the way that you feel that you should show up, when you're allowing things, whether it's your emotions or your ego or whatever it might be, to have to impact a decision or an action or behavior that you're going to have, and it can be really hard to consider that think about it.
It's much easier to deflect it. It's much easier to give you all the reasons why you did it the way that you did it, versus just owning the fact that like, nope, like no matter what was going on around me, no matter what may have been influencing this, I still made this decision. I still did this thing, and I have to own it. And that can be
a really hard practice. I think that one of the ways in the leadership space to make sure that these are coming to life is as you are connecting with your people, as you are building those relationships over time and creating places of trust and everything. It's to share, share these values, share these things that you feel mean the most to you, and then ask people like am
I living this? Or can you think of a time when maybe this value that I hold really dearly to me is that didn't come to life in a way that it should have. Like because to your point, the the not just living the value, but working with other people and how they see the value that you did or how they perceive it through their own values is also a big part of building the trust needed with a team to have you know, the best relationships possible and to be able to do the best work possible.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's spot on. It's it's easy to come up with hypotheticals about how you think you would respond in a situation, and usually what those result in is an aspirational values system. And that's okay. Like, if you don't have the experience to have gone through it, then there's no way to do this besides hypotheticals and aspirations.
What's important, though, is to make sure that you debrief with yourself after something happened to see did this align because because if you're stating what your values are to people and then you do something that doesn't align with it, it doesn't mean that you went against your values. It means you were wrong about your values. It means you were wrong about what your actual what's actually important to you.
And that doesn't that isn't necessarily a bad thing. You know, life is a learning process, and leadership is a learning process. But the goal is to make sure that what your stated values are and what you actually value are the
same thing. And the only way to do that is through that debriefing process and and kind of you know, kind of doing this this self, having the self awareness to go through the actions and if you are and if you're unhappy with the result, if you don't like that you responded in a certain way, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would do it differently next time, because if you don't like the way you responded, that's the inherent headbutting of what you thought your values were to
how you responded. Kind of meeting each other in the street, Right, it's this like, uh, oh, I thought I was I thought I believed this. It turns out I don't believe it. Enough to actually do something about it or whatever that whatever that is, but that doesn't mean that you would do it differently next time. If you would do it differently next time, then you have to find out why it is that you didn't do it this time, what what kept you from doing it, what other elements were there.
And that's fine too, you go through that, but but it's but having the skill of being able to do this process matters just as much as any empathy you might have for your people, because this will pay picture to them about what your values actually are, because they are going to start trying to predict how you respond, how you will respond in situations, and the more predictable you are, the better you will be perceived as a leader, because they want to know what they can come to
you for and what they can't come to you for. They want to be able to know how you're going to respond in any situation, and if you are aligned with your values and clear both of those are, and they can predict how you're going to respond based on the situation, then they will see you as a far more effective leader than a person who is, you know, kind of unpredictable but maybe still has empathy and so I think this is a it's a very important process
to go through as a leader. It does take time, but it can be done as long as each opportunity you have you take advantage of it. Thank you for joining us in this discussion on employ engagement. We'll see you next Thursday for the next one. Have a great day.