Part 7: Fill the glass more than half way
Inspired performance is not routine. It comes from a much deeper place within, a sacred part of followers where they choose to offer their best. It is the contribution that exceeds expectations, goes beyond what is good enough, takes ideas to unprecedented heights, and sets personal records. At one time or another, we all have a need for the source of that inspiration to come from outside of ourselves. We need to know we matter and that there is reason to remain committed to the mission, especially when circumstances are less than ideal. Leaders need to provide such inspiration, so long as it is genuine and not rooted in Pollyanna-ish platitudes.
Organizations are too often draining places. While passion, engagement, and vision are common vernacular, what is less common is the energizing impact they are intended to have. Followers, bereft of a sense of meaning and purpose, yearn to know their work matters to a larger context. They want to feel part of, and contribute to, something greater than themselves. While it is unreasonable for followers to expect their executives to be personal cheerleaders, therapists, or vessels from which to quench their insatiable needs for emotional support (and we’ve seen many executives get lured into becoming these things), it is reasonable to expect that some portion of a follower’s emotional gauge is directly impacted by her executive’s choices.
We ask people to take pride in their work, to see their contributions as a personal expression of themselves, and to discover those things about which they have the most passion. So when they do, executives need to be prepared with the emotional reinforcement required for followers to sustain engagement. Many executives are uncomfortable with the expression of emotions, especially strong emotions like anger, sadness, panic, or even sheer delight. Fearful of their own emotional range, they often unintentionally squelch such expressions from others by withholding their own.
Peter Bregman goes so far as to say that “people who suppress their emotions aren’t safe in an organization.” Further research goes on to suggest that spending energy suppressing emotions only brings them back twofold. People who “never get angry” actually spend twice as much energy trying to suppress their anger as those who regularly exercise it. When expressing a range of emotions is signaled as unacceptable, such suppression becomes a widespread norm. The sad result is that it arrests the individual and collective capacity of an organization to rally when needed, to celebrate when great success is achieved, and to productively channel discontent, even outrage, into double-down recovery efforts when major setbacks occur.
What they really want
Followers need a reason to maintain hope. They need to know that what lies beyond the horizon of their perspective is a reason to keep going, and they need to know you sense what that reason is. In a truthful and balanced way, they need to hear from you the realism of what is, and the optimism of what could be. Peterson and Byron (Exploring the Role of Hope in Job Performance) point out that high-hope individuals are more goal oriented and more motivated to achieve their goals than those with low hope. It doesn’t matter where in the organization people are. Peterson and Byron found that regardless of whether they were talking about sales employees, mortgage brokers, or management executives, high-hope individuals had higher overall job performance. They also found that higher hope executives produced more and better quality solutions to work-related problems, suggesting that hopefulness may help employees when they encounter obstacles at work. Hope, then, is also a fundamental choice. Hope would not be the powerful force that it is if it were chosen only when a reason to do so was obvious. The true power of hope lies in choosing to have it when the presenting data would suggest otherwise. Hope invites the leap of faith to place one’s confidence behind an initiative, an endeavor, a dream, without necessarily having the tangible evidence to back it up. Your conviction about, and expression of, hope in the future underpins your credibility in asking your followers for their hope.
The executive stage is a high-wire act without a net. For sure, your performance will be judged against leadership standards you’ve not seen before. Some may give you a standing ovation when you feel like you deserve to be booed off the stage, and others will throw tomatoes when you think they should throw roses. You will have to be content with the reality that executive leadership through the experience of followers doesn’t always feel rational, and the more you resist this, the more you will struggle. Anchoring yourself with a set of principles and values that aren’t vulnerable to that sometimes fickle, unpredictable need of followers; knowing yourself well – your character, your strengths, your flat sides, your passions, and possessing a genuine desire to make a difference, not just for yourself but for the organization in which you lead, will help you weather the sometimes overly harsh blows dealt by followers through stringent and unrealistic expectations.