Genuine engagement

The Disney Institute Blog (DI) is one of my favorite blogs to follow.  I was fortunate enough to attend one of their locally hosted workshops earlier this year and I hope someday to attend one of their larger leadership seminars in Orlando.

Today I read a piece that talks about genuine care of leaders for their employees as a critical component of a culture of care in the workplace.  The DI folks spend a lot of time emphasizing consistency as the key word within the concept. I agree with their thoughts, and I like the direction they steer the culture development, but I think this application is for people who are already well developed in their leadership style, and in cultures that already value care and are simply learning to better integrate care into their organization.

What about leaders who don’t have robust leadership toolkits, or organizations where the concept of a care culture is new or even alien? I’ve worked for some of the most well-known employers in the country, all of whom ranked in the Forbes Top 100 workplaces at the time I was employed there, and I honestly think less than half of them really embraced and integrated cultures of care at the time.    More recently, I spent time at an organization that prides itself on the integrity of its care culture and the commitment to employees and I’m currently employed at an organization whose very mission statement includes the concept of cura personalis. What I see over my career are a lot of leaders who know (or have been told) they need to show care for their employee, but they don’t really understand what it means.

I would argue, then, that while ‘consistent’ is a great word to include when offering continued development and refinement of leadership styles related to cultures of care, it is important to begin the leadership development process with the word ‘genuine.’  One problem with offering genuine care is that everyone interprets a genuine gesture differently, and every employee will have a different value structure or metric to evaluate the kind of care demonstrated for them by their employer. Employers can help develop employees to understand the kind of care culture they offer, and can thoughtfully recruit employees who fit their model, but ultimately the manager or leader must also spend time tailoring their output of effort into understanding what genuine care looks like for the individual.

Here’s a personal example. A co-worker recently lost a spouse following an unexpected and brief illness. This co-worker remained at work through most of the experience and returned to work only a few days after the funeral. One of our leaders, looking at their own concept of genuineness, decided to ‘chat’ with the employee about taking more time off while the spouse was ill “to enjoy the time left,” and staying home longer following the funeral. This was offered with the best of intentions- the leader truly believed they were helping the employee- but in actuality, the leader’s actions intruded on the employee’s needs. Instead of being a genuine care source, it became a source of insensitive leadership projecting their own values on another, causing the employee to feel shamed or judged in their work environment.

Let’s look at a less extreme example. A previous employer valued team building events highly as a source of morale, relationship building, and a way to impart culture to employees.  Sounds great, right? But the employer lacked the commitment to engage on meaningful and individual levels. Instead, team leaders were instructed to schedule mandatory ‘fun’ days for employees, given a set budget, and told to implement a one-size-fits-all solution. The problem? Not everyone can take a day off to have ‘fun’ and not all activities are one-size-fits-all.  Rock climbing, paint ball games, even pottery painting might all be acceptable activities- but without a source of genuine relationship between the leader and recipients, it feels forced and superficial. Employees often voiced feedback along the lines of, “Just give me the twenty bucks you spent or let me go home an hour early.”  Employees who feel their time is wasted by a leader demonstrating disingenuous care are not going to find the interactions satisfying, and some may even find them discouraging or demeaning. This is not the path to an engaged workforce. A well intentioned effort that lacks genuineness will still fail.  

This is a tricky challenge for leaders- they work hard just like everyone else, and asking them to take time to actively engage in meaningful ways with each employee on a personal and individual level can become an enormous undertaking. It is expensive from a labor standpoint, taking up time of the leader. It is emotionally expensive too, because the leader must engage on a personal level with their team, rather than keeping a measure of distance. However, if an organization truly believes that employees are assets rather than resources, the investment is worthwhile.  Organizations should teach their leaders how to be genuine- how to ask about value statements of their employees, and to solicit active feedback about what care looks like. Empowering the leadership to implement solutions appropriate for their team, and the individuals who make up the team, is crucial. The first step to integrating culture into the everyday lives of employees is to give them something to believe in…and that means, making it genuine.