
Business owners and managers are often driven by their huge dreams, big ideas, how to achieve them, and the big results they want to achieve. Many business leaders believe they have been sent to change the world and they brag about the outcomes they want to have. While they brag about the uniqueness of their dreams and ideas and how smart and superior they are, they forget the real drivers of those dreams.
For every big dream held out there by a business owner or manager, the real drivers of the dreams are the “dream catchers”, those who dared to believe in other people’s dreams! And the real MVPs are those who gave business owners a chance when the dream did not have direction when the only thing that could be seen were the speeches of what can be and the desirable future!
It’s not worker’s day today and it’s not employee appreciation day, just appreciate your dream catchers, everyone who dared to believe in your dream.
“the real drivers of the dreams are the “dream catchers”, those who dared to believe in other people’s dreams!”
Valuing people is one attribute that everyone talks about and throws around in mainstream conversations, only a few really value people. A word and concept that adequately captures value for people across any spectrum of life – whether family, friendship, workplace, or business relationship, the principle holds true – is EMPATHY.
Let’s take a deeper dive into how empathy in today’s businesses can create an opportunity for immense growth, meaningful and lasting impact, and business transformation.
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings in a situation from their point of view, rather than your own.
The principle factors individualization, introduces perspective and situational approach whether in customer management, business transactions, teamwork, or leading people. As a matter of fact, the entire HR value chain and principles must be built on empathy.
Life is filled with experiences; positive and negative. Life is filled with different kinds of people; good and bad. Many times, we take the excellent incidents that occur every day for granted, we glaze and frame the negative and sometimes redefine things significantly based on such experiences. For example, if you have committed, faithful and loyal staff, that is taken as a given. You expect it and perhaps demand it. The one staff that chooses to act negatively becomes the talk of the town! It becomes important to watch one’s reactions so that actions and inactions do not negatively impact those who have been faithful over the years.
More often than not, that’s what happens! That’s the conditioning; 1 staff out of 10 misbehaves and we make a rule that impacts unfairly or negatively on the rest of 9 people! Why, we are afraid! We don’t want to be caught unawares, so we apply the rule of precedence. What are the possibilities, a few of the 9β staff may start to feel deprived, mistreated, or disadvantaged. They may begin to question actions and inactions.
A case in point is an organisation that scrapped hybrid work mode because 1 staff member was caught on camera in the gym while at an office meeting. While that is an unacceptable situation especially when conditions for hybrid work were defined and he chose to flout it. Is it fair to cancel the entire program because of such? Empathy thinks not!
Business owners expect their staff or team members to work with them forever. You invest in them, train them, nurture them, and then one day, they decide to give you 1-month notice and leave πββοΈ. God help you if there is succession planning in place and you have a ready replacement, or you are able to do quick recruitment, otherwise, you are on your own and the business may be negatively impacted.
Raise your hand if you are on this table.
Getting a resignation letter from a beloved staff can turn a kind manager into a vengeful boss, creating a battlefield and turning people against themselves! Some staff donβt want to give notice because they are afraid this can happen. Some, therefore, will rather lie about reasons for exiting. Meanwhile, some bosses will hold on to salaries till they squeeze all they need from exiting staff.
Why?
This is a mindset that needs to be adjusted or changed completely. Your business should not be a place for enslaving people through employment. It’s never going to be easy to let anyone go but the skills to manage such a situation must be learned, infact it’s not optional, whether now or in the future, you will need to have the conversation.
There’s a saying, “To come we may, to go we must”.
You don’t have to get angry when you receive resignation letters, after all, you left your own boss too π€·ββοΈ.
Let me share with you some simple strategies for managing exits – highly important, especially in this age of increasing migration patterns.
It is usually a painful experience when businesses are impacted by a staff member’s disloyalty, misbehavior, or criminality as the case may be.
It is difficult not to own the feelings and perhaps transfer aggression. The feelings may range from confusion, disappointment, failure, or hatred. Some business leaders believe they must take responsibility for everybody’s actions and inactions and then wallow in self-blame. They believe they must have done something wrong to have a misbehaving or aberrant staff.
Your staff members are firstly humans who can be as positively influenced as they can be negatively influenced. Also, they are adults, which implies that they take decisions for themselves. They can do great things today and make grave mistakes tomorrow. They can do well today and switch tomorrow for no just cause other than overriding self-interests.
The tendency to be self-focused and take such disappointment personally is high. Therefore, be careful not to, like many CEOs, allow or use the occurrence of negative experiences to shape your leadership styles and perception of how work should be done.
How do you move forward and make more positive changes within your business? How do you elicit empathy from or build a more empathetic staff going forward?
You will need to make some changes. I call them simple systemic changes. Let’s start with new mindsets that you and each member of your staff must maintain. Here are five quick steps toward establishing empathy in the workplace:
Would you like a printable Empathy Goals sheet to place in your office or share with leaders and members of staff? CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.
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