As per McKinsey Organizational Health Index, top reported behaviors of successful leaders include solving problems effectively, operating with strong results orientation, seeking different perspectives, and be supportive of others. These should be table stakes for any leader, but apparently, they are not. What prevents it and what can you do to make these critical behaviors your second nature?

Contributor

• • Helen Norris, Chief Information Officer, Chapman University

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:01:01]:

Hello, and welcome to CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And our topic for today is Acing the 4 Critical Behaviors For Leadership Success  . And our guest today is Helen Norris, who’s the CIO with Chapman University. Hi, Helen. How are you?

Helen Norris [00:01:19]:

I’m good. Fantastic. How about yourself?

Sanjog Aul [00:01:22]:

Oh, great. Could not be better. And the reason we wanted to invite you and also talk about this topic is because leadership is very close to our heart when we work as a media to support the CIOs and other ITCX besides business in terms of how they can grow, and everyone is a leader in him or herself. However, we have to see if there is a way to get them to become better. There was some research done and we found that, as per McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, they said there are plenty of different attributes which contribute towards leadership success, but they found 4 in particular which are critical that every leader should develop. Now the things are like problem solving or result orientation or seeking different perspectives or be supportive of others. So these are the 4 that were identified, but we thought these are table stakes and many others are, but that’s why even though that’s the case we see some people very good at that leadership and others don’t. So when these things are so common why is that not happening? So we thought why don’t we have a discussion and invite you on this. So let’s start with your definition of leadership success as a starting point.

Helen Norris [00:02:43]:

Sure. Well, that’s an interesting question. There’s lots of definitions of leadership. You hear people say leadership is about doing the right thing and creating a vision or inspiring a team. But for me, I feel that as a leader, you have true success when you put together a team, a really high functioning team. A team that’s driving in the same direction, focused on the same results. A team with the right amount of constructive conflict, but with a great collaborative approach. So from my perspective, or from the leader’s vantage point, I guess, leadership success is all about having a well performing team. So that would be my definition. If you’re a great leader, you’ve put together a well performing team and they achieve the results that you’re driving towards.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:39]:

See, your definition, of course, it is with humility: a leader is only as good as the team. Right? So I totally agree with that. But then at times, you would see that while they are very good and they’re trying to do their best, they still have to look up to the leader, and those are the junctures which actually make or break what an organization or a team achieves.

Helen Norris [00:04:06]:

Go ahead.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:09]:

Yeah. I’m just saying, if you were to define success, one is the overarching definition of what a successful leadership is. But another thing is to take your vantage point and look at the followers as well so that we see both sides. So have you ever asked your team to say, hey, what would you think a successful leader would look like who you would wanna follow?

Helen Norris [00:04:34]:

That’s a great question, and I agree. I think it’s really important to look at it from the team members’ or the followers’ perspective. So in my experience, and I have asked my teams that question, from the followers’ perspective, I think it’s about the leader having clarity or providing clarity to the end goal, being a great communicator about what the goals are of the organization, communicating well to the team or to the individual team member about what their role is in the organization and in achieving the results of the organization and then providing the tools that the team member needs to be successful. So there’s a big piece of it that’s about communication and clarity, transparency; we can’t all drive in the same direction unless we know what that is. Right? So that’s a really important piece. And then providing the tools. By the tools, I mean things like the right training, the right technical tools, the right access to the right people, and in fact, the correct amount of time to achieve the goals. So that’s what I’ve heard from my team is the goal is what they want to hear from me as a leader: clarity about where we’re going and a clear path as to how to get there. I think it’s also important from the follower’s perspective that the leader is a great listener, and I think we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that later, because people on teams want to feel heard, included, and engaged. And by the way, I’m a leader, but I’m on my boss’s team, and that’s what I want from him. I want to know what he expects of me, what the organization expects of me, and I want to make sure that he understands what I need to perform well within his team.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:53]:

So your response is very on point. Now, if I was a leader in my organization, you are in yours and listeners are in theirs. When we try to go to sleep and say, okay, did I do my job? It should not be a fuzzy science. It should not feel like, oh, yeah, I am doing leadership almost like predicting; we may not be accurate, but somewhere we are in that journey and don’t know where we are going. So do you think there should be a benchmark, or can there be a benchmark for someone like us before we go to sleep or when we get up in the morning to say, okay, what do I strive for? It’s not an incremental continuous improvement process. Yes, it is. But then you have to be able to follow or look up to something. Right? Where we want to go. So can there be a benchmark? 

Helen Norris [00:07:48]:

That’s a great question, and I do think that we traditionally looked at leadership in a kind of a fuzzy light and I kind of people have said, oh, I know in my gut if I’m doing a good job or if I’m following a good leader. I do think that there’s an element of that, but there are benchmarks. There are benchmarks of, I guess, what I might call a healthy or a great leader leading a healthy organization. There are benchmarks of a healthy organization. It’s about turnover. Are you losing staff? You know, the old saying that people really leave their managers, not their companies. So if your leader is losing a lot of staff, and it’s not about salary or personal issues, I think that’s an indication that there’s an issue. So that’s one benchmark, I think, that you can look at. Are our teams happy? But ultimately, I think the truest benchmark for great leadership is really around results. If your team is getting the job done and meeting the expectations of the organization, then you’ve got a high functioning and highly satisfied team. So I think you can benchmark team performance to measure the leader’s success. That’s, in the end, what the real measure of leadership success is.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:23]:

So let me take a contrarian view. What you just mentioned: suppose the team or the staff is leaving, or you mentioned the team is performing well. Take the example of a marathon runner: the person has to drink water before they feel thirsty.

Helen Norris [00:09:44]:

Yes.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:45]:

Right. So if a person already starts seeing the staff is leaving, that means the person is too late and even working on the skills which would prevent it. Second, when you talk about, let’s say the team is performing well. Now that “well” is a relative term. You may want to see, “okay this is well as per my definition,” but is it the best? So if your benchmarks are set at par with the average or at most the max that you feel is the max, there could be many other heights that this team could go. If we do that, then we risk complacency, and we could also risk undermining their true potential. So where do we actually set our bar so that we are not just setting ourselves up for failure, but at the same time, we are not just feeling happy with the average?

Helen Norris [00:10:44]:

I think that’s a really interesting point. I want to talk a little bit about the other point about people leaving, but first, let’s talk about goal setting for the team. I don’t think in my experience as a leader I set that goal in a vacuum myself. I don’t look at it and say, oh, I want my team—I’m in IT like many of your listeners. I do a lot of projects. I could set a very attainable goal for the team like a very lengthy project timeline that makes sure with minimum risk that we will meet that goal. But actually I have to set my goals in consultation with the management of my organization and in partnership with my colleagues around the organization, the colleagues to whom I deliver results. In my experience, when you set your goals in that way, you will set challenging goals. When you include the organization in setting the goals, sometimes the goals are set in an unattainable way, which is okay. So I think the key is to not set the goals yourself, not allow the team and the leader to set their own goals, but instead engage their customers and management in that. In a company, your goals are often set as what your customers want to see. So you’re going to avoid complacency by engaging your customers in that process. Getting back to your first point, you’re 100% correct: if you wait until you start losing staff, that’s an indicator that you’re already not doing your job as a leader. So you do have to find a way to constantly reach out to your staff to ensure that they have what they need to remain satisfied and to get their jobs done. I do think you don’t wait until you’re losing staff every five minutes. Maybe I need to change something. I think that’s the challenge for leaders: we have to constantly be on alert around what’s going on in our teams. You can’t shut yourself off from them. You have to constantly be doing outreach to your team members to take their temperature, to take their pulse, to keep especially your high performers, to ensure that you keep them happy and continue to challenge them because I believe most people want to be challenged in the workplace. You really need to be in constant contact with your team around that.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:42]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners, we’ll be right back and let’s talk about the first behavior which is gonna contribute towards leadership success: solving problems effectively. So what do we mean by effectively? Are we dropping the ball somewhere in terms of how we approach or analyze or evaluate options or even execute on the chosen path? Where does the effectiveness risk being reduced from its true expected levels, which in a way impacts your ability to solve problems effectively? Let’s explore. When we come back, please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:27]:

Welcome back. So, Helen, we all want to solve problems well, and this is a behavior which is expected to be one of the critical ones for leadership success, and that is solving problems effectively. So I’d like to dissect it a little bit to say, if someone is not solving the problem effectively, is it just dependent on the outcome, or is it the process of solving?

Helen Norris [00:16:51]:

Well, I think the outcome is the indicator, but I think it’s the process where we’re having issues when problems aren’t getting solved the way they should. And I personally believe that the key to solving problems is listening. I think the most common reason for dropping the effectiveness ball is that we don’t really understand what the problem was in the first place. And we actually went about solving something different. So really understanding the problems our partners are raising with us is the key to solving them. They don’t always raise them in an obvious way. A lot of times people will bring to us a symptom of a problem and say I need this when they really need that. So I think it’s our job as leaders to really delve into what the problem is and ask deeply probing questions to figure out what we need to do. Now I can give you a pretty simple example, even from what a team member might hear from a person in the organization who brings forward a problem. I had a situation one time where somebody on my team heard a problem from a customer in the organization, “I need more disk space. I need more disk space. I don’t have enough space to store everything I need.” And my staff member’s response was to come to me and to see if we could find a way to purchase more disk space when in fact the problem was really something completely different. It was really a problem in how the person was working with video files. That’s a really simple example, but you can see if my team member had said, “What’s really going on? Why are you storing this in such a way?” they would have gotten to the root of the problem and actually solved the underlying problem. That’s a simple example, but you can see how that technique might be applied to any number of problems, whether it’s a problem in how we’re doing business in the company or a problem in management. I think the key is really understanding what the problem is because you can’t really solve a problem if you don’t know what it is.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:17]:

So here, what you just mentioned is the first step: how we approach or how we understand what the problem is. Here, the bigger task I am referring to is solving problems effectively, which is the journey. As the first step, yes, you have to understand the problem by listening. But then you have to evaluate options on how to potentially solve the problem, analyze and maybe involve others. As you go about solving that problem, you may impact others, develop others, or may have to sideline some people because the problem could be bigger than all people and all resources combined. In that process, if you drop the ball in any of them, that becomes the weakest link and somebody looking at this whole solving problem effectively as an initiative or an instance might give a thumbs down on how effectively you solved the problem, and that was beyond just the listening part that you mentioned. So this is a bigger exercise than just listening. If you were to take this segmented way  you approached and listened to understand it, then you analyze and evaluate options, and then you execute. Where do you think people typically drop the ball unknowingly?

Helen Norris [00:20:46]:

Yeah. I think in my experience a couple of things. As I said, a lot of times we make a mistake in understanding what the problem is. But once we’ve correctly identified the problem, there are many other things we have to do to ensure that we execute on solving the problem. Where I think people drop the ball is really evaluating all the options and pulling in input from a number of people who need to be involved. In today’s world there are very few issues a person can solve by themselves. They need to bring a team of people in most cases to work on an issue, find the right skill set, ensure that they take the input of experts in various different areas to put together a correct solution. So that’s another area where we fall down: we try to solve the problem ourselves without engaging others who might bring critical skills to the mix. I think that’s a key to leadership: to bring in the right people at the right time and listen to the expertise of others who might have skills in different areas than ourselves. The challenge, of course, when you have a team is that things can move slower and can get bogged down in decision making and discussion. So that’s another area of concern as we move forward to executing on a chosen path. Another key test of leadership is that with a team, the team members will understand the role and accomplish what they need to do to get the task done. So I think that’s another area that as leaders we have to really pay attention to. 

Sanjog Aul [00:23:05]:

So as part of solving the problem, one is to get to the end result and get a badge of honor that you did it well. Another is you develop people along the way. Many times as a leader, we inherit problems or the problems get passed upwards to us by our team. Right? The reason it comes to us is because somewhere we fed them fish but never taught them how to fish. So the problems ideally should not come to me. In fact, I was talking to a CIO of a very large company, and I called him at 3 PM, and he picked up the phone. He said, “Hi, Sanjog. How are you doing?” I said, “I did not expect you to pick up the phone because I thought you’d be busy.” He said, “If I’m busy at 3 PM, that means I’m not doing my job.”

Helen Norris [00:23:52]:

That’s a great approach.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:56]:

Right. So where are we falling short of teaching our people how to fish so that the problems do not originate at the top? Problems typically originate in the trenches and bubble up to the leader. But how can you teach these people how to fish? Because then you will still get the badge of honor that you helped solve the problems effectively, but essentially you are sitting chilling on your recliner while your team is doing the job. Right?

Helen Norris [00:24:29]:

That’s right. I totally agree. An effective leader doesn’t just come in and solve everyone’s problems for them. What they do is develop their team so that they can solve the problems by themselves, as you pointed out with that CIO. There are two barriers to that kind of teaching people how to fish that leaders have to work hard at. The first barrier is ourselves. It’s really hard sometimes for successful people to not take on the problem. After all, we got into our roles by being highly effective and successful and sometimes it’s easier for us to just say, “Here, let me just fix that for you.” It’s kind of cool to be the hero, but the right approach, I think, is a coaching approach so that when a person brings a problem to you, rather than just giving them answers, really working in a coaching way with them, asking questions to lead them to find a solution themselves. For example, I once had a manager who struggled with a particular team member who wasn’t performing well. She came to me and said, “What am I going to do about John?” I think she wanted me to tell her to fire him or whatever approach she thought I would do. But instead of telling her what to do, we went into a conversation with probing questions. “What is he not doing?” “He’s taking too long to get things done.” “What’s taking too long?” “He gets hung up on this task.” Ultimately, she came to the conclusion that he was lacking a skill in a particular area and determined that she needed to provide some training for him, which hopefully would improve the situation. The point is that she came to that conclusion herself. I didn’t tell her what to do even though she came to me wanting me to tell her. Sometimes that does take longer than telling the person what to do. In the short term, it is quicker to solve the problem yourself, but then you haven’t taught a person how to fish. The second challenge for leaders is sometimes a person will come to a different conclusion or have a different approach than we might. So I think it’s important for us to focus on the results that the person comes to and not how it’s done, which may be different from how you would have done it yourself as a leader. Does that make sense?

Sanjog Aul [00:27:37]:

Yes. It does. Moving on to the strong results orientation, that’s another behavior recommended as critical for leadership success. Now this brings up a couple of points. One is if someone is so driven by results. That person invariably gets labeled as dictatorial or a taskmaster, someone who wants to trample over people’s heads to get something done. How do we prevent that label? Because frankly, result orientation has almost never been for the benefit of people or at least that’s how the perception is. It’s always for corporate success. So the organization comes above people, whereas it should be the other way around for an organization to be successful. So if a leader is expected to show a behavior where they’re focused on a strong orientation towards the results, then you, in a way, are at huge risk of being seen as someone who’s not really working in the interest of the people who are making those results. How do we remove this catch 22?

Helen Norris [00:28:48]:

No. That’s a great question. The way you described it, often the results are very focused on the company, what we want to achieve, and not so much about the people. I think it’s the job of the leader to turn that around. In a perfect world, all team members would be focused on results. It’s the leader’s job to get the team members enthused about the results. Some of that comes back to things we’ve discussed before: clarity and communication. But it’s also important for team members to understand what’s in it for them. The key to ensure success is that the success is shared. After all, if the leader is striving for strong results so that he or she will be rewarded or look good, they will be seen as just a taskmaster. They’re asking people to work so that they can look good. If the team reaps the benefits and rewards of the great results, then they will be focused on achieving those results. So ensure that the team shares the glory when there are successes. Be sure that the team is in the limelight when things go well. It’s really important to recognize the team’s great work so that they see the benefits of the results for themselves. I think that’s the key.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:42]:

Let’s take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Helen, so hold your thought on this one because there’s another very important thing that you mentioned here about when the success happens, then the team gets the reward. That’s great. But then let’s also look at the journey when you do deliver the results because the journey should not be painful. And as you go about building profits and growth for the company, the team should also build their capabilities and feel good about the journey because otherwise, you will never have the next success. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be

Sanjog Aul [00:33:17]:

Welcome back. So, Helen, you remember we spoke about teaching people how to fish. We would not have the patience or the tolerance to teach people how to fish if we are too fixated on achieving a number and telling our team that, hey, you will get all the kudos. I don’t really care if we win. Right? But that’s a painful approach, and it will result in a painful journey. How do we prevent that?

Helen Norris [00:33:40]:

So, as you mentioned, people are motivated by what’s good for them, and they also want to be recognized for what they do. Let’s use an example of where a team was maybe driving towards a mission rather than a result. I recently read a Harvard Business Review article describing the growth of the company Burt’s Bees. In the early 2010s, Burt’s Bees’ mission was to go global or to really turn into a global company. The CEO, John Replogle, was really focused on global expansion. He wanted to focus the company on global expansion. So obviously, it’s a very high pressure situation, a lot of focus on company growth. But he started every single day by sending a company-wide email praising a team member for the work that they had done in the global rollout. He reminded his managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values and goals every day so that it wasn’t just driving toward a number but really getting buy-in and engagement into the mission of the company. People were bought into the success of that rollout because they understood what the value was to the company and what the value was to themselves and they were further engaged by being recognized when they contributed to that mission. In a situation like that where it was very focused on growth and results, the company still had enormous success because the leader at the very top paid attention to the team both from the perspective of appreciation, which I think is really important, but also engagement and clarity. So that is a way to avoid getting churned up in the approach of being a taskmaster.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:01]:

And why even building the team’s capability should not come across as predicting the weather or something fuzzy. Do you think when we say strong results orientation, is it realistic and a good way to approach it where we say, while we will get X results for the company, we will also get Y results in terms of specific measurable capabilities we built in our people — individuals identified, team identified, departments identified. Is it possible?

Helen Norris [00:36:32]:

I do. I think it’s possible to do that. It’s difficult. It takes balancing and understanding that sometimes adding the goal of ensuring that people have growth or learning and development as leaders or in other areas that does add to the time it might take to achieve the results. So as leaders and organizations we have to look at that balance and see what’s right in each situation. It takes longer to teach a person how to fish than to hire a bunch of fishermen.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:18]:

So what you just said, Helen that balance.Yeah. So what you just said, Helen, which is a fight between urgent versus important? that’s correct. Right. So if you are a leader and judged objectively from all directions — how followers see you versus how corporate management sees you — you would miss one or the other if you forget. You lose the battle between urgent and important and go after the urgent alone. That’s what separates leaders because once you’ve taught other people how to fish or built their capabilities, next time around, you’d be able to get the same things done better or without even leadership intervention, and that will allow you to sit at 3 PM and take a call from Sanjog.

Helen Norris [00:38:04]:

That’s exactly right. I think that’s exactly right that it takes longer in the beginning, but you reap rewards in the long run because you develop a team of high performing leaders across the organization. Whereas if you just bark orders at people and tell them what to do, then that’s the kind of performers you have on a day to day basis. So I do think it’s important to look at, when you look even as an individual at what you’re working on, whether it’s immediate or important, we tend to be naturally inclined to focus on what’s urgent, what’s come up, what email did I get, is there a crisis in the data center? Whereas focusing on our long term goals like developing people is a long term goal. So taking time, setting time aside to focus on the long term goal does reap rewards but it takes longer and your organization has to be supportive of taking that long term approach which I think was the key to success in the Burt’s Bees example. The CEO himself, while he was very focused on the global rollout, was very engaged in ensuring that teams were given the opportunity to really learn and understand as they went through that process more about both the company and the mission of the company and how to perform in that company.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:50]:

Let’s talk about the next critical behavior, which is seeking different perspectives, which is, of course, seen as a critical behavior. But in the world that we are living in today, you simply cannot have your own mental bandwidth to calculate and see all different data points. So, yes, you will collect the data, and then you will try to get perspective. I know leaders are attempting to do that, but where do you draw the line where you collect the data, but then you say, okay, I’m going to run with this now versus getting paralyzed by the consensus building type of mindset? Because you want to come across as someone who seeks different perspectives and not be dictatorial, but at the same time not someone who never takes the decision?

Helen Norris [00:40:39]:

So that’s a great question. I agree that seeking different perspectives is absolutely critical for a leader. We don’t know everything, and different perspectives really help inform our decision making. So we do need to listen to lots of different points of view before we make decisions. But I think it’s very important to be clear about where the decision is made. And I think that’s situational. In some organizations, in some situations, deep consensus building is important. But in other cases, it’s important to be decisive and to move fast. Think of the model of a general on a battlefield. In that situation the general absolutely needs to receive a lot of information. He or she needs to hear various perspectives, needs to know data, needs to know facts. But when push comes to shove, he or she will make a decision as to how to move forward on the battlefield. What’s really important is to be clear upfront about where we are in this particular situation on that line between consensus building and dictatorial and also to have a clear timeline around when the decision will be made. I think that’s a key to good decision making. Be clear about which situation we’re in. Be clear about the timeline: say I’m going to hear information from this corner and this corner and this corner and then I’m going to pull it together and make a decision, and then be clear about the decision when it’s made and ask people, even those who maybe had a different perspective on the decision, to come on board with the decision once it’s made.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:01]:

So to increase complexity, the world around us has been changing and everything is getting disrupted, whether technology or what customers want or how business wants to react. Everything is fundamentally changing, and some of those decisions — in fact that’s becoming the quantum of decision making in the company. Many people within the company or even outside have no idea how to give an informed input even if you go to them, and in that case a leader still has to make a decision. So should a leader just go with their gut and intuition and make a decision and not wait, or still ask people who also say, “I don’t know, but here is their 2¢”? Is that still a good approach? But please hold your thought, Helen, we’ll be back. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll discuss how in such cases in a disruptive environment you can still bring people along and come across as someone who seeks different perspectives. Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:15]:

Welcome back. So, Helen, as we discussed, we want disruption to happen, and yes, we want to use other people’s perspective and be inclusive in our decision making. But there could be areas where nobody has a clue. So do you wait for other blinds to lead you, or do you say, you know what? I’m going to just put a stake in the ground, run with it, accept whatever happens as a result. But then in that process, do you lose that so called certificate of someone as a successful leader who seeks other people’s perspectives? What do you do in such cases? 

Helen Norris [00:46:52]:

I think it’s a great question. I do think we have teams with different levels of skill and experience, but I do caution against running solo. There are times when you have to do it, but there is going to be a cost associated with it. Certainly in a situation where it’s unusual that the leader is the only person with knowledge in a certain area and nobody else has that knowledge, it would probably be more time effective for the leader to just say we’re going to do it and move forward. However, recognize that your team members are going to feel excluded and that you’ll probably have to do some work on the back end with them to make them continue to feel valued as team members. It does come across when a team leader does that as if they don’t value the input of the team. So you can make a decision as to whether it’s worth having a conversation upfront even if you don’t believe that that conversation is going to impact your decision so that the person at least feels listened to, or you can make the decision to not do that and find a different way to make a person feel listened to later. One approach to ensure that people feel listened to or develop in those areas is to give them the opportunity to either lead or to participate in decisions that are in lower stakes situations where if they make a mistake or the decision is not correct, the failure is not quite as devastating, and then you could follow-up with them for feedback purposes. Sometimes you don’t have that luxury. Sometimes you don’t have a lower stakes situation where you can develop people but then I would suggest that if you don’t have an opportunity for people with lower level skills to take a chance and you’ve only hired people with lower level skills, maybe the mistake was made in assembling that team in the first place. Does that make sense?

Sanjog Aul [00:49:14]:

Yes. It does. Because if you got all B players and you yourself want to be an A player, the only way you will become a player and get the chance to have other people help you is to hire people who are smarter than you. If you do that hiring, it’s going to lead you to that comfort. Totally understand and appreciate. So that said, let’s talk about the critical behavior to make other people feel important and appreciated and the way you could do is just by being supportive of them. So now could the conflict arise when on one hand you want a strong results orientation and you want to drive people towards the results that are to be measurable, on the other hand you are being supportive. So can supportive be misconstrued as being a parent or someone who’s a lenient parent? Or is it a strict parent? How would you see a leader who’s demonstrating behavior of being supportive of others? How would you define something like that?

Helen Norris [00:50:16]:

You know, I think this is a really fascinating area. I think we’ve seen a lot of research recently that shows team leaders who have strong emotional intelligence and strong empathy for their team members actually have far more productive teams. I know that there are organizations where there’s such focus on the bottom line that it feels like people don’t matter. But I think that’s a mistake. There’s plenty of research that suggests that there’s a link between a person’s happiness and productivity. In fact, a study at the University of Warwick in Great Britain in 2014 suggested that happiness can lead to a major spike in productivity. Happier workers can be 12% more productive according to this study. Other analyses show that the number can be even higher. So I kind of think the two things go hand in hand like in the Burt’s Bees example. I think there’s very little cost to being supportive of your people. As a team lead or as a manager or as a leader it doesn’t cost us anything to thank our people when they do a good job. When you constantly thank people and recognize those good behaviors they’re more motivated and encouraged to do the right thing and when you have to correct them when they have a behavior that’s not appropriate it’s much easier to do so because you’re not the person who only points out when they’re making a mistake. I feel that being supportive really adds to the bottom line and helps deliver results. I think there’s a difference between empathy and sympathy and sometimes we’ve been confused being empathetic with our staff with being the parent who always helps. I can think of a situation where a person who reported to me was really struggling with his performance due to some personal issues and rather than showing sympathy for him and saying, “Take whatever time you need,” what was important for me was to have empathy for him to understand that he was in a difficult situation but to also demonstrate to him that having success in the workplace would really help him feel better as a human being. In that situation being empathetic but not reducing my expectations about the work he would deliver was good for him as a person and also good for the organization. So I think supportive leaders actually have better success and have teams that perform in a more productive manner.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:54]:

One last question, 30 seconds. If you were to embrace all these 4 critical behaviors, of course, you’re on your way to become a successful leader. But while we go through that journey and adopt those behaviors and develop skills, how can we ensure that at no point do we compromise our values and stay ethical throughout the journey?

Helen Norris [00:54:15]:

A common description of leadership is that leadership is about doing the right thing. For me, to live our values, it’s important that we’re in an environment that’s consistent with our values. So I think it’s really important as a leader to work for a company or an organization that we believe in and to work with people who share similar values. For most of us that means working with ethical organizations and colleagues where honesty and collaboration are truly valued. That’s how we can ensure that we live our values and behave ethically: make sure we’re in the right place and to approach our work with honesty and clarity at all times.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:06]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Helen, for sharing your thoughts on how leaders can embrace the 4 critical behaviors plus more in order for them to not only take their people to the next level, make the team perform to the best, help the organization deliver the best value they can for the customer and essentially achieve leadership success. Thanks so much again.

Helen Norris [00:55:28]:

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:31]:

And let’s just please like us on Facebook, search for CTN, that is CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week. Take care and God bless.