Leadership Skills
How do your leadership skills stack up compared to your peers? There are innumerable statistics and metrics driving never-ending debates about how to measure leadership effectiveness. So rather than adding to what is likely an irresolvable debate, let's keep things simple.
An essential characteristic of great leaders, regardless of one's preferred management model, is approachability. This doesn't mean that your door is always open or that you're easy-going; it simply means that people feel comfortable giving you the information that you need to hear.
Approachability means that if you were to ask your employees to share with you their frustrations, demotivators, or challenges, they would candidly tell you.
While it seems like a simple leadership skill, being approachable entails a few different activities and attributes. First, it requires a sufficient level of trust with employees. Too many instances of shooting the messenger and employees are more likely to hide, not share, critical or bad news. Second, being approachable necessitates being open-minded and willing to consider suggestions and complaints. Unfortunately, as we learned in the study, The State Of Leadership Development, only 27% of employees say their leader always encourages and recognizes suggestions for improvement.
Finally, approachability requires empathic listening. If an employee calls their boss to share a work problem, and the leader's response is, "life isn't fair, and griping about it won't help," it won't be long before that employee abandons any thought of approaching their boss in the future. Although listening seems like an easy skill, less than a third of people receive a perfect score on the test "Do You Know How To Listen With Empathy?"
How To Test Your Approachability
There are many ways to test the extent to which your employees find you approachable. You can track how much bad news you get (including whether you're the last person to hear it), you could use employee engagement surveys, or you could assess the candor and openness of your one-on-one employee conversations (especially those involving coaching or stay interviews).
But the easiest way to test your approachability is to simply ask each of your employees this question: "At work, what's one frustration you have that you believe I have the authority to fix immediately?"
This question comes from the Leadership IQ study, Frustration At Work, and it provides a great test of whether employees truly feel comfortable sharing with their boss. Why does it work so well? Some of the frustrations employees face at work are caused by their boss, and it takes a lot of managerial approachability for an employee to share those.
Look at some real frustrations that employees shared in the study:
- My boss never leaves his office and won't resolve the rampant conflicts we have on our team.
- My boss doesn't know where to find answers but he still wants me to run all requests through him, which delays me for days rather than letting me go directly to the other departments.
- My boss brought us back to the office supposedly for collaboration but they closed all our conference rooms and we have to maintain social distancing so we don't have face-to-face meetings anyways.
If an employee is comfortable enough to share those frustrations directly with their boss, then that leader has top-notch approachability. But if you're a leader whose employees aren't sharing at least some of their frustrations, then you know where you need to focus.
One final thought: The study, The Risks Of Ignoring Employee Feedback, revealed that only 23% of people say that when they share their work problems with their leader, the boss always responds constructively. But if someone does say that their leader always responds constructively, that employee is about 12 times more likely to recommend the company as a great employer.
