If you haven’t listened to the latest episode of The Knowing Self Knowing Others podcast, here’s a quick review of my Top Takeaways from my discussion with Sophie Bryan who’s shifting workplace culture through freedom, curiosity and play…..
Self awareness is introspection of the heart, mind, soul and body, it’s a whole body experience. If we acknowledge that you can’t park your home-life at the work-place door, then – this matters
Self aware leaders notice others. They are observant of other people’s contribution and curious about their role in encouraging and facilitating other people’s experiences so that colleagues can show up at their best, most comfortable and most confident.
What do we want from work? Results and relationships. Results mean participation, contribution and achievement. Relationships mean friendships, connections and collaborations. When leaders focus on both of these elements, then companies and organisations achieve amazing things.
Leadership is about inspiring and motivating people, which means that leaders can be found anywhere. We see children showing up as leaders from a very young age – you observe them showing empathy, gathering people together, facilitating collaborate and helping friends expand on ideas. Leadership isn’t a job thing it’s a people thing.
Strategic level leadership is often more about the results than the relationships – it’s a numbers game, a financial profits game, and if the KPIs are being achieved and the money is rolling in, do we care? If we think about retail, it’s an area of high staff turnover. This is often because customers and results are prioritised over staff and relationships. Boards need to prioritise employee happiness over customer happiness. Richard Branson says, ‘If you look after your staff, your staff will look after your customers’ – and it’s worked out just fine for him!
Even after what we learned through COVID, organisations are still trying to deliver on the staff wellbeing and engagement agenda with tokens and false gestures. What they’re missing is the conversation about prevention being better than cure. Let’s talk more about preventing stress, burnout, overload and poor mental health so we don’t need to worry about gimmicks and freebies.
We create ineffective leaders by promoting people with technical expertise into people management roles. What we need to do is separate out the two skillsets and allow people to play to their strengths. People need to be self aware to help them make the decisions about finding a better fit in a different role.