As a CEO, managing people is undoubtedly one of the toughest parts of the job. You might have a brilliant business idea, excellent strategy, and a great team to work with, but managing diverse personalities, skill sets, and expectations can be a daunting task. Whether you’re leading a small startup or a large corporation, managing people effectively is key to achieving your goals and staying ahead of the competition.
People are messy and life is messy but as a CEO you are required to create order, structure, and process. Managing people is the hardest part of being a CEO so what you can do to overcome these challenges?
People are complex
Managing people is not like managing a machine or a process. People are complex beings with emotions, desires, and unique personalities. They have different motivators, communication styles, and work preferences. As a CEO, you need to understand your employees’ strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits to effectively manage and motivate them. This requires a lot of time, effort, and patience.
Managing expectations
When you’re in a leadership position, everyone looks up to you for guidance and direction. Your employees have high expectations of you, and it’s your responsibility to meet or exceed those expectations. This means setting clear goals, communicating effectively, and providing regular feedback. You need to ensure that everyone is aligned with the company’s vision, mission, and values. Managing expectations is challenging, especially when you have to balance conflicting demands from different stakeholders.
Dealing with conflicts
Conflicts are inevitable in any workplace, and as a CEO, you need to be prepared to handle them effectively. Conflict resolution requires emotional intelligence, empathy, and active listening skills. You need to be able to identify the root cause of the conflict and find a mutually beneficial solution. This can be particularly challenging when dealing with difficult personalities or high-stress situations.
Building a strong culture
Culture is the backbone of any successful organization. As a CEO, you need to create a positive work environment where people feel valued, respected, and motivated. This means fostering a sense of belonging, encouraging open communication, and recognizing and rewarding high performers. Building a strong culture takes time and effort, and it requires a continuous focus on employee engagement and satisfaction.
So, what can you do to overcome these challenges?
Firstly, invest in your employees’ personal and professional development. Provide them with the resources, training, and support they need to succeed. Secondly, communicate regularly and transparently. Keep your employees informed about the company’s performance, goals, and challenges. Thirdly, lead by example. Model the behavior and attitudes you want to see in your employees. Finally, create a culture of trust and psychological safety. Encourage your employees to share their ideas, concerns, and feedback without fear of retribution.
In conclusion, managing people is one of the hardest parts of being a CEO, but it’s also one of the most rewarding. By understanding the complexities of human behavior, managing expectations, dealing with conflicts, and building a strong culture, you can create a thriving workplace that drives business success. Remember, your employees are your most valuable asset, and investing in their growth and development will pay dividends in the long run.
The impacts of excessive stress affect your ability to lead and also your team’s performance. As a leader, it’s natural to experience a certain level of stress when managing a team. However, there’s a fine line between healthy stress and stressful leadership. When leaders become excessively stressed and create a culture of stress within their team, it can negatively impact the team’s performance and productivity.
Everyone at some point has worked under a manager who handles stress poorly. They respond by “kicking the cat”. The “kicking the cat” analogy refers to the effect of emotional contagion. Anger and anxiety pass from senior management to subordinates, from the powerful to the weak, and eventually to the bottom, the most vulnerable, who have no place to vent their anger and who then become the ultimate victims.
The impact of stressful leadership on team performance can be felt in so many different ways but none of them are helpful.
High-stress levels among leaders can lead to several negative consequences for their team members not just emotional contagion and mental health concerns but reduce the capacity and capability of the team. Below are a few ways in which stressful leadership might impact team performance:
Reduced Productivity
Leaders who constantly exhibit stressful behaviors may cause their team members to lose trust in their abilities. This lack of trust can then lead to reduced productivity and reduced morale. When you are in these team environments you see symptoms like the blame game, gossiping, and presenteeism. Without faith or confidence in leadership, staff will be unable to perform at their best. If the leadership is not demonstrating confidence in the vision and decisions staff themselves become unsure. Staff really struggle to be their best if they feel that leaders themselves are struggling to perform.
Decreased Creativity
Teams that operate under high-stress environments may not be as receptive to new ideas and may lack creativity. Stressful leaders may inadvertently stifle creativity by not allowing their team members to think outside the box.
Higher Turnover
Stressful work environments may eventually cause some team members to become burned out. This would ultimately lead to them leaving the team and even the company. High turnover can lead to lost revenue, decreased productivity, and increased employee recruitment costs. Even staff who stay in this environment generally won’t be the high performers. It is the staff who can fly under the radar and simply turn up.
Tips for Reducing Stressful Leadership
It’s important to recognize the signs of stressful leadership and work to reduce it. Here are a few tips for reducing stressful environments for your team:
Create transparency
Leaders should be transparent about the effects their actions might cause on their team. Open communication helps to create a positive work environment. Owning mistakes and using this space to create learning moments can not only create transparency but also provide ways to relieve some stressful moments.
Encourage team bonding
Encourage your team to bond and create connections through events and team-building activities. Fun can relieve stress and shared stories. Connection and trust are essential ingredients for high-performing teams. Team bonding is more than just one event it is essential that this is a learned skill and one that is continued to enhance culture.
Support autonomy and creativity
Giving team members the autonomy to make their decisions can increase creativity and lead to greater productivity. True leadership is about empowering staff to work independently and allowing them opportunities to make their own decisions and mistakes.
Celebrate the team’s work
Recognizing and celebrating the team’s accomplishments can create a positive work environment and increase team morale.
In conclusion, it’s necessary for leaders to be mindful of how their leadership styles can influence their entire team’s dynamics. Creating an environment that is less stressful and more open can help increase the team’s performance and productivity.
Emotional Intelligence in the workplace separates high performers from the average employees. This is something gaining popularity as leaders become aware of the role emotional intelligence plays in the workplace.
Self-awareness; is an understanding of how you are feeling at any moment in time. It is also understanding how your behaviour impacts others.
Motivation – An effective self-motivation requires you to have a positive attitude towards goals across the organisation.
Self-regulation – Processing our own emotions effectively means we have the ability to read the situation effectively. Our response is only possible when we can self-regulate. We need to work to commit ourselves to the goals of the organization with integrity.
Social skills – are critical in a workplace the ability to build teams, forge change, and manage the conflict are important.
Empathy – Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another. Managers need insight into how their decisions and behavior will impact their subordinates, peers, and superiors.
Emotional intelligence is a set of skills and behaviors that can be learned and developed.
According to Harvard there are some telltale signs of people with low Emotional Intelligence and those with high Emotional Intelligence.
People with low Emotional Intelligence:
Often feels misunderstood
Get upset easily
Become overwhelmed by emotions
Have problems being assertive
People with high Emotional Intelligence:
Understand the links between their emotions and how they behave
Remain calm and composed during stressful situations
Are able to influence others toward a common goal
Handle difficult people with tact and diplomacy
When staff lacks emotional intelligence they can be extraordinarily damaging to the culture.
The good news is that we can improve our emotional intelligence it is a skill that we can learn. We can improve on skills that improve knowledge of how others and we feel. We can also learn to harness our emotions in a way that meets the needs of our organisation.
At the individual level, exercises such as meditation, psychotherapy, coaching, and eliciting feedback from peers can provide meaningful insight into our own emotional landscape.
Within organisations, team-building exercises, corporate retreats, staff support groups, and training can pay handsome dividends for both collective and individual employee emotional health. In addition, you need to recognise and call out the behaviour.
Leading Together runs emotional intelligence workshops. Engage your leadership potential to improve your self-awareness, self-management, empathy, social awareness, and motivation. Horses are very aware of how you are feeling in the moment and can help you find a powerful way to experience emotional intelligence. The workshops are conducted in a relaxed environment with a horse trainer and leadership coach. They run for a couple of hours depending on the people attending and you will come away with a deeper understanding of yourself.
When creating connections with horses and people beautiful things happen.
Building emotional intelligence in yourself is one thing, but building a culture of emotional intelligence in the workplace can be a challenge. Our leaders must learn it first and model that behaviour. Changing behaviours doesn’t have to be complex. Leading Together uses horses to shortcut the learnings in team workshops. By scheduling team workshop sessions over 5 weeks you can radically change your workplace culture.
The success and failure of the societies and organisations are in the hands of their leaders. How they lead and manage is what makes the fundamental difference. The more charismatic, the more visionary, and the more enthusiastic they are, the greater their influence. A charismatic visionary leader has the ability to create a movement, transform an organisation, and even rewrite history. When I think of a charismatic and visionary leader several springs to mind: Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Mother Theresa. You can see from this list charisma and vision are not related to the purpose. Leaders and leadership styles are pivotal to the success of any business. Even an entire countries fate can be determined by its leaders’ charisma, vision, and ethics.
Style
A leader’s style is the greatest way to influence those around them. With an inspiring vision and motivation, anything is possible. Look at the impact of a teenage girl in Sweden, Greta Thunberg. Her vision and purpose are clear calling on others to take action on climate change she is leading towards a shared purpose. Leadership is not defined by where you are in an organisation but your charisma, vision, and purpose will define leadership. Among the many great leaders in the world, those who are successful are because of their vision, passion for the work, and creativeness in their ideas. Charisma and vision also need motivation and enthusiasm. We all know some leaders who because they thought differently were criticised. Innovation and motivation to change require a commitment to the vision. A change manager, leader, requires resilience to be able to weather the criticism for innovative thinking. It is only their motivation and drive that can change directions. A charismatic leader that has a strategic plan for the organization’s success, and is passionate about his vision is a powerful force. The strategy will keep everyone else focused on the vision in the organisation. This strategy is what makes the charismatic leaders’ vision a reality for others to understand and engage. It allows others to have an additional source of motivation and performance measurement. Great charismatic leaders are excited and motivated by their vision, so much so that they have the ability to inspire others. Even in the tough and challenging times where others will have given up.
Purpose, Passion, and Vision
Great leaders can be made. there are lots of opportunities available for people and organisations who want to focus on their leadership capabilities. Values and emotional intelligence must be where you start to ensure your purpose and values are aligned. If you want your staff to remain you need to ensure your leadership team is ready for the work not just on the organisation but also on themselves. The key to great leadership is simple, find your purpose, passion, and vision and you will and can change the world.
My experience growing up was children were “to been seen and not heard.” We were taught to respect our elders. Authority was something to be revered and definitely not questioned. When you are bought up in a house where parenting technics consisted of phrases like “because I said so” and “do as I say not as I do”. I understood the wooden spoon was a real threat. You genuinely believe that anyone who has authority is something or someone to fear. Principals and teachers were still allowed to give you the cane. In growing up in this era physical punishment is a legitimate tool and in some cases the only tool. You believe that hierarchical structures are the real authority. Teachers all had Mr or Mrs no one had a first name and friends of the family were Aunts and Uncles. Positions of power demanded respect regardless of their behaviours. So when my title stated that I was a manager I wholeheartedly believed that I needed to be respected because I had a position title. I thought management was something that should be feared. I reflect now on how much times have changed.
Respect for leadership is now earned
We now expect leaders to be questioned about their decisions. Leaders are held to a higher moral standard because they are a leader. Workplaces are now being asked to do more for staff than simply provide a paycheque. It is an environment where employees are asking more about leadership than ever before.
So it’s no wonder that “75% of careers are derailed for reasons related to emotional competencies, including the inability to handle interpersonal problems; unsatisfactory team leadership during times of difficulty or conflict; or inability to adapt to change or elicit trust”. -Center for Creative
As the world continues to go through yet another crisis we need to support people in leadership to develop their emotional competencies. Poor leadership can do more than increase staff turnover or poor productivity. You can have a lasting impact on someone’s life. So as we learn more and know better we need to do better. Invest in your leaders and emerging leaders to understand how to be effective people managers. As leaders develop their own authentic people skills their respect for leadership changes as well. The more you develop your skills in emotional intelligence, it can change your workplace, your culture, but also other important relationships around you.
