In recent months, we’ve heard more about compassionate leadership than ever before. We’re 18 months into a horrible pandemic experience, and we’re still juggling remote, hybrid, and office-based work. Many organizations have delayed their Return to Work plans. Employees – from executive leadership to front-line employees in client organizations – tell me they are zoomed out and burned out, and many have experienced tragic situations.
At the same time, the work goes on and we need to meet deadlines and goals. Managers I talk to understand the need for compassion and coaching employees through the continuing difficult time, but they struggle to balance that against accountability when getting results is vital. How can managers strike this balance to make accountability compassionate?
There are three foundational aspects to set the stage for an effective blend of accountability and compassion.
1. Crystal Clear Expectations
Several of my blogs have provided ideas around keeping performance high in teams and individuals through setting clear and measurable expectations for each employee and for each team, asking the question, “What specific, measurable, realistic outputs or results does the organization need to see from each person or each team, per a specific period of time?” 2020 and 2021 may have brought some changes to your work processes, and measures from the past probably needed to be clarified to answer this question and to accommodate those changes. Having very clear, current, realistic expectations and measurements is vital to success for most employees.
How can you do this compassionately? Because processes, products, and services may have changed over the past 18 months, I recommend that you involve individual employees and teams, as appropriate, in redefining and improving the processes, activities, tasks, and in generating realistic expectations and measures. Employees have been working in these processes throughout the pandemic (or well before) and know where the processes work and where they don’t. As you do this, use every opportunity to focus on genuine relationship building, openly soliciting feedback from both individuals and teams related to how they are doing with the stresses of the pandemic, the return to the office, and their abilities to meet key performance measures.
2. Clear communication and transparent measurement
Expectations and measures for teams and individuals need to be communicated clearly and repeatedly, including the “why” behind expectations, because in the current business climate, job roles and expected activities may have evolved. So how do you do this compassionately?
Some expectations and measurements are absolutely required. In communicating these expectations, a manager may need to collaborate with the employee or team, reinforcing that the expectation or goal itself is not negotiable. But there may be room to collaborate on how to achieve the expectation including resources, additional training, realignment of some other tasks, etc. These communications need to be real conversations, soliciting employees’ input related to how challenging the goals seem to be, what obstacles may need to be overcome, whether they have adequate training for the activities, etc. Check in with them regularly. When they ask for help or indicate that they may miss a key expectation or deadline, coach them and work with them in developing a solution. Think of the conversations as a way of creating a plan for meeting the expectation. As you collaborate on forming or meeting expectations, also collaborate and communicate clearly about how the expectations will be measured and tracked.
One client organization recently engaged their teams in creating (and improving) a map of the current process flow, tasks, and activities within a process, and in defining how individuals and teams in that process should be measured. There were several “non-negotiables”—goals and activities where certain things had to be done in certain ways to meet customer and quality goals—but there were other areas in the process that were open to re-thinking and improvement. Additionally, teams generated some ideas related to measuring employees in the process. The effort was worth it. Engaging the teams allowed for improvement; but more importantly, it supported ownership of the change and mutual accountability within the teams. Given the specific, agreed-to performance expectations and measures, the managers’ roles now can focus more on consistently providing feedback and coaching related to expectations and measures.
Whether you use teams or individuals to provide input to realign processes, activities, and measurements, a key outcome should be that each employee or team should know on a regular basis how they are doing related to expectations and performance measures. Employees should be able to know how they are doing without anyone telling them. The performance measurements should be that transparent.
2. Consistency in coaching for results
Once expectations and measures are created, they need to be applied consistently among all the employees or team members. Consistency is vital. Compassionate accountability will require more one-on-one meetings, more individual and team coaching sessions, and more genuine relationship building with employees than ever before.
This blog focuses primarily on how to use compassion balanced with accountability as relates to setting clear expectations and measurements. In the next blog, we will further discuss what compassionate accountability looks like in managing performance on an ongoing basis.
For more information or for a complimentary 60 minute strategy session for preparing your managers to be more compassionate leaders, please set a meeting, email me and/or follow or message me in LinkedIn.
Leave a Reply