The Leader's Lens: Now Is The Time For Strong Leaders To Step Up
Leaders have become weaker versions of themselves and it's time to turn things around. We need strong leaders to take back the reigns of their teams and organizations.
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You might not like what you’re about to read but it’s what I’m seeing and what leaders at organizations are experiencing yet don’t want to publicly acknowledge or talk about. You won’t read about this or hear about this anywhere else.
This will be a theme I’ll explore more frequently and I’ll do my best to dive into specific aspects of this in other posts.
Over the past few years, especially post pandemic, I believe we have witnessed a steep decline in the number of strong leaders we have at organizations around the world. Or perhaps a better way to phrase it is that the collective strength of leaders has declined.
I hear stories of leaders who are scared to give their employees tough feedback, scared to ask them to come back to the office, scared to tell them to work hard or make the occasional sacrifice, scared to give negative performance reviews, scared to NOT promote someone on a team, scared to talk about tough topics, and scared to…lead.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that many leaders today have simply become weaker versions of themselves. This might sound weird coming from a guy who wrote a book called, Leading With Vulnerability, but even in that book I stress the importance of combining competence/leadership with vulnerability.
I actually started to explore this in a previous post which is linked below.
Recently, I’ve traveled to several states around the U.S. and countries including France, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and others. While I don’t have quantitative data, I do have qualitative data in the form of what I’m seeing and hearing from several CEOs and CHROs (not all, but many). I’m also working on a new book on employee experience where I’m interviewing over 100 CHROs (85 done so far) and am hearing a similar sentiment from them as well, again, not all, but many, which is enough to concern me.
The message is clear, leaders need to step up and take back the reigns of their teams and organizations.
During and post pandemic, organizations around the world became obsessed with things like well-being programs, access to therapists, emotional support, and creating psychologically safe spaces (I have a podcast coming soon with Dr. Peter Cappelli where we explore the danger of too much psychological safety at work). Organizations went above and beyond to attract and keep their employee including giving them ridiculous salaries, perks, benefits, equity, and and on top of that telling them that they didn’t (and many still don’t) need to come into the office.
Leadership was replaced with an attitude of, “please don’t leave, what can I do to get you stay and love me?”
As one CHRO told me, her company made the mistake of creating a company for children and as a result the company has been struggling. Now, they are turning things around and creating a company for adults.
It’s ok to have strong leaders…we need them!
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