Cast your mind back to when you first became a leader of a team and take a moment to think about that experience. How was it? Were you like a duck to water, or were you the Swan that was paddling very quickly underneath trying to navigate through, hoping nobody would notice?

My first leadership role was rather challenging. I was appointed as office manager at 21 with a company I had worked at for a couple of years. I got the promotion I think, primarily because of my work ethic but also because the owners were finding it difficult to manage people effectively. The people who I was supposed to be leading were also my friends, one who I’d known since I was two!  I was definitely a Swan. Out of my depth in deep waters.

The only leadership training I received, was the owners of the business telling me that I was no longer allowed to be their friends in work and my role was to ensure they achieved what the owners wanted them to achieve.  

Ring any bells for you? Was your first management experience like?  Was it a team you already knew and had worked with previously. Were you told that you didn’t need to be liked?

Leadership is hard. There are so many leadership books that have been written, some fabulous, some not so fabulous.  Many of them talk about how to get the most out of your team, how to set goals etc. Equally, most organisations focus on results through KPI incentives.  Both of the above are appropriate but and it’s a BIG but, very few focus on enabling their managers to support, encourage and inspire their teams through a compassionate leadership approach.

If you are serious about getting the most from your team, then looking at what your organisations leadership style is the best starting point.  Some questions below for you:

• Is the current leadership style working for your organisation? 

• Do you have high trust within your teams? 

• Do you have high engagement and retention rates? 

• If the answers are no, or we could be better to the above questions, are you willing to learn to lead differently?

At the Institute of Health and Social Care Management, we know that leading compassionately and enabling your teams to support, encourage and inspire people, leads to better organisational outcomes.

Want to know how?

You probably won’t be surprised when I say you can achieve this by adopting a compassionate leadership approach. Compassionate leadership is proven to be more effective and significantly improves outcomes. 

Perhaps you are thinking “yes that maybe so, but I haven’t got time for that”. Well, it is also proven that it takes very little time for those improved outcomes to be achieved.

To provide a brief outline of what is needed, I have set out below some key essentials to adopt:

• Start with values. Some organisations that I’ve worked with say they have implemented a values-based leadership approach, but when I’ve dug deeper into this, it hasn’t actually been the case. You need to have both trust and respect values. Trust is around connecting with others, having warmth characteristics, and respect is around professionalisation, skills and knowledge. These values should run like a golden thread throughout every part of the organisation. They should be used in recruitment, marketing, service proposition, 1-2-1’s, appraisals and any business decision making process. 

When you have values, it makes everything so much easier when managing a team. Think about having to have a critical conversation, conducting meetings, managing change, writing policies & procedures. When you have your values at your core, the above is much easier to implement because you have aligned it to your values.

• Connecting with others – Compassionate interactions are something that we have evolved to do, it’s an evolutionary adaptive function, as social groups benefit our existence. Yet, the current modus operandi doesn’t align with this.  Leaders often want their employees to operate like machines. Humans however, need to feel like they belong, valued, supported, have a purpose and have autonomy.  

With such a diverse workforce it is critical connect with every person you lead. This can be a challenge because we generally link up, and like people who are like us. As a leader though it is so important to connect with people who aren’t like you.  There are many ways you can do that. Start with being curious, not making assumptions and ask open questions about their likes/dislikes, what social groups they belong to, their interests. Build from there.

• Compassionate Conflict – Most people don’t like conflict but when you connect and build relationships with your team compassionately, it becomes much easier to have those critical conversations. Much of this is around building psychological safety. When every individual feels safe to speak out, connections and trust build. This is a core component of our leadership programmes.

At the Institute of Health and Social Care Management we are committed to supporting all who lead teams, in a way that enables them to support, encourage and inspire the people they lead. Our CPD accredited leadership programmes are practical which means anyone who attends will be able to implement immediately. Compassionate leadership really is effective leadership.

Are you ready for a different way of leading?  Find out more here