Care Personally
An Essential Mantra for High-Performing Teams
If you are new to Leadership Letters, recently I have decided to share bite sized contents about leadership and things I have learned as my software journey has exposed me to a collection of cultures and leadership styles. Today we will discuss the need for caring personally and how this one change can alter the course of the success of your team.
Leadership is about getting the best out of your team. The key here is people. A leader and the team are like the two main pieces of a puzzle that shapes the technology of tomorrow. Remove one, and the whole thing falls apart. Big achievements happen when you have both a really good leader and a committed team.
If you're a leader, you're probably leading more than one person in your team. Remember, it's not just one person – each team member has their unique goals, motivations, and challenges. In this letter, we'll look at what you, as a leader, can do to turn your team into one that's dedicated and performs at its best.
What does it mean to Care Personally?
The idea of caring personally is grounded on the fact that we are all different. Whether you're the leader or not, you're a person. You're going through life, dealing with your own challenges, and making unique choices. It's clear that one leadership style won't work for everyone. Caring personally is the leadership dimension that helps you understand the lives of the people you lead. This is important when you have to make decisions as a leader.
Let’s do a role-play based on a hypothetical story, here we will briefly go over a 1:1 between a manager (you) and your direct report (DR).
You: Hi, how’s it going?
DR: I’m good, how are you?
You: Great, great. (brief pause)
You: So last week in our 1:1 you mentioned your dog was having some issues with her ears, how’s she doing now?
DR: Yeah, I had to take her to the vet a couple of times, but she’s doing well now. Thanks for checking in.
You: Of course, glad she’s doing better. Based on my experience with golden retrievers they tend to get seasonal ear infections. Continuing to clean them regularly might help.
DR: Yeah, that’s what the vet recommended as well.
You: Looks like you have got multiple items on the agenda for today, good.
<conversation went on>
Looking at the conversation above between you and your direct report, you might feel it was not professional or unnecessary. If you think that, please pay attention to the next part of this edition. A key observation you should be able to make, the manager is not just “showing care” by regularly checking in how their report is doing, but she takes it one step further and follows up with a personal difficulty her report faced last week. How’s this different?
It draws the line between “showing care” and “genuinely caring”. Showing care might work for some time but often will fall short due to lack of emotion. I am talking about genuinely caring for others, not just the people you lead. Empathy is a common term used to describe good leaders, but I like to disagree to a certain extent because of the misuse of the term. As a leader it is very important to understand that you need to be proactive in showing care rather than simply considerate. I know it might be a lot in the beginning and might not gel well with certain personalities, but my urge to you today would be to try.
How does showing care help?
I have been on both sides of this conversation and I am sure many of you have as well. Asking someone how they are doing might be nice, but when you take it one step further, it shows that you are not just being nice, but you genuinely care about the wellbeing of the individual. Benefits are multifold, it
leads to higher trust
creates psychological safety
better transparency
… and the list goes on.
All of these are very essential in building a sustainable high-performing team.
Today we discussed how a subtle change in your style of leadership can have exponential impacts downstream. I’d like you to walk away from today’s letter with a changed mindset. Try incorporating this simple change in your 1:1s over the next quarter and share if it had any impact on the performance of your reports. Keep in mind, “genuine” is the keyword here.
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