Setting up the next generation of leaders for success
In This Episode:
In this episode, Ultimate.Ai Head of People and Culture, Dora Hoffmann, joins Within People partner Nikki de Vet to explore the difference between managing and leading.
Together, they dive deep on what it takes to develop yourself as a leader and how to align that leadership style to your organisation so you and your people can thrive doing meaningful work.
Listen here:
Listen into some key moments:
Key Learnings:
What is the difference between managing and leading? Managing is focusing on the day to day tasks, KPIs and other operational markers to grow a team or business. Leading is inspiring, empowering and enabling your people to do their best work.
Invest in your leaders: Growing your leaders takes time, space, and focus. Get really clear on your desired outcomes and the support needed to get you leaders up to task.
Step in with vulnerability when thinking about and visioning next stages of growth with your leadership and or larger team:
Connecting to the human behind the role can help us uncover individual needs and ways of working
When we can zoom out and see that everyone is showing up to work with their own personal challenges or obstacles, we are able to approach conversations with empathy and better support our teams.
Invitation for Leaders:
Read our blog about why humanity is the most important leadership quality for leaders today:
In the last two years alone, we’ve seen leaders operate at both ends of the humanity spectrum.
On the positive end, a surge of empathy in the workplace accompanied the pandemic. Suddenly leaders were seeing into people’s homes, and sharing a collective time of fear, uncertainty and grief that had little regard for hierarchy. New levels of trust were built from the rubble of office hours, as leaders watched people get work done remotely, on their own terms. It was as if employees were able to shed their office exoskeletons and return to being humans.
And at the other end, we’ve also watched leaders systematically dehumanising people. A dictator invading a democracy with no care for the human cost. Legislators stripping the LGBTQIA+ community of its rights and dignity. A rogue U.S. Supreme Court jamming the biggest of sticks into the gears of women’s rights. Right down to leaders in the workplace insisting people return to the office because it’s easier to control them there – often stripping away the life-changing flexibility and empowerment that flexibility brought.
Leadership has always had a relationship with power. Old leadership was mostly concerned with taking it (often directly from others), and then hanging on to it. Amassing power and control gets a whole lot easier if you dehumanise the folks you want to take it from. (I have strong feelings about old leadership and why we’re done with it – here’s a rant if you’re interested.)
But human-centred leadership seeks to use a leader’s power as an enabling tool to help others step into their own power. And when more people have access to power, we make progress on creating freer, more equitable workplaces. So it follows that if your goal is to create a freer, more equitable world – even at work – first you need to re-humanise the workplace.
And, you guessed it, that starts with humanising leadership.
Read more about the 8 essential qualities of human-centered leadership here.
