Empathic leadership E-Book

Yvonne Danielsson

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 119

Beschreibung

Working in a competitive engineering environment, with problem-solving at the center, and efficiencies as a mantra, there is a risk of ignoring the time needed to reflect and drives a more commanding approach to generate results. When we are successful in creating strong trusting relations we have greater prerequisites to set high expectations and create results, while ensuring the longer-term well-being of our people. This book describes 33 practices, divided into 6 chapters around Trust, Belonging, Feedback, Growth, Accountability, and Tricky situations. This is not about theoretical leadership, as you will find in other books, this is practical advice coming from my real-life leadership experience.

Leseprobe

To my team with love

What is this book

The purpose of this book is to share my leadership experience and describe practices to guide how to evolve empathic leadership in an organization, as an effective way to create business impact and well-being for people.

Who is this book for

Informal and formal leaders at all working levels, who strive to create an impactful empathic environment for people to thrive, grow, and innovate.

Being a leader of any kind, formal or informal, your behavior and values affect the people you meet. Being a formal leader, representing the employer, means you have decision power over others, setting salaries, leading work, and dividing roles and tasks. As a leader, what you do and how you do it, affects people around you more, therefore it is paramount for leaders to understand how.

No prior skills are needed than the experience of working together with others, which we do from a young age at school, in families, in communities, and at work.

Who is the author

I am Yvonne Danielsson, I have a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering and have been working as a senior engineering leader for more than 30 years, leading large organizations in the technology space.

I have been leading teams from small teams of 10 colocated people to large organizations of hundreds of people distributed internationally.

As a leader, you create impact through others. My leadership approach is to create impact through safety, empathy, and humanness. My leadership values are based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and with that as a model, I always strive to create a culture where people feel safe and seen. This enables experimentation and collaboration to create business impact for the company and growth for the individual and team. I believe in teamwork and when you create something together with a colleague or friend in a trustful relationship, the results you create together are more innovative and accurate.

In my free time, I am a classical singer and sing both as a soloist and as a part of a chamber choir.

When making music together, it is obvious we depend on each other for the result.

Trust and belonging are key ingredients for an excellent result in all aspects of life.

How to use this book

Use the book based on the current needs in your environment as a guide and for inspiration.

You can read it from start to finish - or select practices that are useful for you in your current situation. You can adapt the practices to fit your operations, work environment, and needs. I recommend reopening the book when you start using the practices, as you might read things differently when applying them.

The practices in the book are described in the context of my experience, in a company where product development is based on a team setup. Some of the examples are described in the context of a multilayer organization to show how a practice can be used in a complex environment.

However, the practices are useful and can readily be applied to other organizational settings.

Each practice is described with the purpose, time needed, and pitfalls to be aware of.

How this book is organized

The practices are grouped into chapters based on which needs you have and which situations you want to improve.

Trust building Practices -

These are practices useful when you want to build more trust between yourself and people, or within a team.

Belonging Practices -

These are practices to shape inclusion and belonging to a unit or community.

Feedback Practices -

Here you find practices enabling feedback, that makes people and the organization grow. Dare to work with feedback!

Growth Practices -

These are practices to identify and build on the talent you already have, to bring growth into play.

Accountability -

These are practices to make the work in your environment more efficient and empowering.

Tricky situations -

Some advice on how to work with tricky situations involving shame and challenging changes.

Why is this book needed

After working many years as a leader in an engineering environment, with problem-solving at the center, and with efficiencies as a mantra – “save 15%”, “which parts can be automated”, “we have a deadline”, “the customer is waiting for it” - there is a risk of ignoring the time needed to reflect and drives a more commanding approach to generate results All businesses need to create results for their customers and shareholders. I believe that there are more empathic ways of creating better and more sustainable results and at the same time making people feel better at work.

I experience a prejudice about empathy and humanness as if it is about being “soft” or “nice to people” and as a characteristic opposite to setting expectations and creating results. I maintain that that thinking is wrong. When we are successful in creating strong trusting relations we have greater prerequisites to set high expectations and create results in an oftentimes stressful environment, while ensuring the longer-term well-being of our people.

I want to share how to create a more empathic workplace and as I am an engineer, I want to be practical, therefore I describe my experience as 33 Practices.

Finally, this is not about theoretical leadership, as you find in other books, this is practical advice coming from my real-life leadership experience.

This is why this book is needed.

Finally

These practices evolved in a male-dominated engineering environment, based on the illusion of rational thinking, facts, and problem-solving. The environment is highly multicultural, with people from all around the world, sometimes colocated and with office locations across the globe. This means that these practices have evolved to manage empathic leadership in large, globally spread technology organizations.

As I have been practicing for years, the practices are born in a prepandemic office-centered setup. The COVID-19 pandemic changed our work lives dramatically, and some of the practices you see are shaped by the working-from-home and the post-COVID hybrid setup. The practices are thereby post-covid and hybrid-working proven, to enable impact through a highperforming organization.

All views expressed are my own. The practices are evolved together with many engaged people.

I hope these practices can guide and inspire you in your work on your journey as an empathic leader. Every small step counts.

Yvonne Danielsson

Contents

Introduction

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Collaboration for survival

What to consider when getting started

Practices

Why practice

Trust building Practices

Practice 1 - One-to-one talks

Practice 2 - Temperature check

Practice 3 - Meet every day

Practice 4 - Tactical meeting

Practice 5 - Fika

Practice 6 - Good-morning routine

Practice 7 - Human interaction

Reflection

With all these practices – do you have time to work?

Belonging Practices

Practice 8 - Leaders gathering

Practice 9 - Extended team

Practice 10 - Unit gatherings

Practice 11 Social events

Practice 12 Manage inclusiveness

Practice 13 Symbol competition

Feedback Practices

Practice 14 Personal letter

Practice 15 Instant feedback

Practice 16 Coffee corner talk

Practice 17 Many-to-many feedback boost

Practice 18 Failure Management

Practice 19 Recognition Culture

Growth Practices

Practice 20 Marketplace

Practice 21 Talent Management

Practice 22 Superpowers

Practice 23 The disruption game

Practice 24 Personality styles

Practice 25 It’s hard to communicate.

Practice 26 Cocreation - Design thinking

Accountability and Delegation Practices

Practice 27 Accountability

Practice 28 Peer collaboration

Practice 29 Delegation

Tricky situations

Practice 30 Shame

Practice 31 Put it on paper.

Practice 32 Intent versus effect

Practice 33 Challenging change

Epilogue

My learnings

Thank you!

Bibliography

About the author

INTRODUCTION

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

We are human beings, with bodies, brains, and emotions. I often return to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, to relate to life and the people around me. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a theory of motivation, which states that five categories of human needs dictate an individual's behavior. Those needs are physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and selfactualization.

We need water, food, and sleep. We need a safe shelter. These are the basic needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy. As our brains are trained to see threats, manage threats, and react to threats – physiological and psychological safety is the foundation to go beyond the basic needs in the hierarchy.

The practices you see in the chapters about Trust building and Belonging, are there to create a solid base for psychological safety, belonging, and inclusion - the lower layers of the hierarchy. In subsequent chapters, practices address selfesteem and growth, in Feedback, Growth Practices, Accountability, and handling Tricky situations.

In the Epilogue, I elaborate on the self-actualization part of the hierarchy.

Figure 1: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Collaboration for survival

Why is it so important for us human beings to feel we trust each other, and that we are part of a group of people? These seem to be basic needs in the lower part of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs.

As described in Anders Hansen’s book Depphjärnan (Depressed Brain), one of the largest threats perceived by us is loneliness, causing 20% of depression. Loneliness triggers the sympathetic nervous system which is connected to fight-flight reactions. The book describes how we perceive the surrounding world as more threatening when we feel lonely. One plausible reason for this is that we depend on each other to survive.

Therefore, one important aspect of feeling safe is to have other people around us, that we trust – family, friends, and colleagues. Trust-building and Belonging Practices described here are present to shape this key part of well-being. How we trust is individual and therefore I see it as a personal journey of discovery.

What to consider when getting started

Let us imagine that this is the first day of the rest of your life. Let us imagine you have decided you want to create a more impactful empathic environment and take that journey with the people around you. How may you start? What may you consider?

It takes time to build trust. My experience is that it takes at least three months of consistent trust-building to get the basics there. It takes years to build deep trust. Trust gets stronger and more resilient when you have worked on it for a long time. Treat it like treasure you never want to lose.

Trust starts with you and your values. Which values are important for you? Who do you want to be? Can you truly be that person or shape yourself to be that person? You need to know yourself well and accept yourself as you are now. There are probably things that you see you are not proud of, and you need to accept those and work on them. Acknowledging that you can improve and wanting to be better is the driver for selfimprovement.

Analyze yourself and explore what you believe in and be consistent in displaying the values you cherish repeatedly.

Words matter! Be aware of what labels you put on yourself, as that shines through. Body language matters a lot as well as words, but body language and what you say in aligned combinations are powerful. The opposite can also be true:

when your body language says one thing and your words another. This is highly confusing and often creates uncertainty for the receiver of the message. It is more important that you do what you say, than that you say what you do.

We are sometimes vulnerable and uneasy sharing our feelings. Depending on the environment you are in, you may be more or less able to say “I don’t know” or “I am nervous”.

In a highly political and competitive environment, you may tend to avoid displaying uncertainty and weakness. In a fail-safe environment, you may be more open to sharing your honest thinking, often leading to better solutions. This is one of the key reasons for building an environment of trust and belonging.

A true inspiration for me is Björn Natthiko Lindeblad, a Swedish former Buddhist monk, whose book “Jag kan ha fel och andra lärdomar från mitt liv som buddistmunk” (I might be wrong and other lessons from my life as a Buddhist monk). The title of the book describes one of his meditation mantras to remind him there are other views to consider than his own.

This is one of my key values – “I might be wrong”. What happens when I remind myself I might be wrong? I will be a more curious listener, to understand the views of others. When I have a deeper understanding, I will be more able to support and make reasonable conclusions and create an impact at work and in life.

Simon Sinek – visionary thinker and author – says: The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. This does not mean you should neglect your needs. Rather, you need to recognize your own and other people’s needs and based on that make your choices. You need to ensure you refill your needs consistently to be able to support others. It is a great starting point to decide to live with an empathic leadership style.

PRACTICES

Why practice