Hands work for money.
Minds work for praise.
Hearts work to provide value.
Activity: Think of the last time a colleague or a boss brought you a change. How did they do it? Did you feel that you had participation in the decision? Did you feel respected and that your role mattered? Or did you feel that it was a command issued to you for execution? Which approach would make you put your weight behind the change?
We’re doing the activity at the beginning because I want you to consider how you receive change. If you are a human, you likely desire to have some measure of understanding and even control over how the change in your immediate surroundings is orchestrated. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you don’t like it very much when someone comes into your realm of authority and tells you how things need to be done.
Consider that this is also true for the people you work with, whether they are direct reports, colleagues, or contractors. Taking the time to generate buy-in – capture their hearts – may seem like a lengthy, arduous process. In the end, it will result in a more stable and effective change than if you just tell them what to do and why they have to – that’s the mind level – or force them through incentives or threats – the hands.
How do you engage each of these parts? Engaging hands is easy – you pay them a sum of money they agree is worth their time. Engaging minds is a little more difficult – often, praise, acknowledgement, and communication of high regard and respect will engage minds.
But hearts. How do you engage the hearts of the people you have on your team? Engaging other people’s hearts starts with your own. Is your own heart engaged? If you’re a business owner or in a position of leadership, likely your heart is DEFINITELY engaged – perhaps even overly engaged. Leaders of small business often capture the hearts of their employees without realizing it and take it for granted until the organization has gotten big enough where blood, sweat, and tears are no longer a reasonable requirement for day-to-day work.
Three principles for engaging the hearts of your team:
- Assess your assumptions – easier said than done. Most likely, you have predetermine ideas about what your team is capable of and what they are not. Some of these may be based on reality. The first step is to take an honest assessment and identify what is true and what isn’t. If you have wrong assumptions, you just gained an asset where you may have seen a waste of space before.
- Communicate your expectations clearly – one of the biggest barriers to engaging hearts is communication and the lack thereof. How are you making sure the expectations of the job are clear? If they are not clear, you can’t expect them to be followed to your specifications. If they are clear, you may have an opportunity to find a better fit.
- Trust – this is the hardest one. When was the last time you were cognizant of being capable but not trusted to execute? It was probably the last job you left. Trust is the biggest aspect in capturing the hearts of the people working for you. It’s easy to “trust” when your company is small and you’re doing all you can to get it off the ground. It’s harder when you feel like things are more under control.
Ideally, we want people who work for us to execute their work product well. We want to be able to trust what they are producing so we don’t have to shoulder the burden ourselves. Where we often struggle in business is that we have this expectation but don’t lay an effective groundwork for achieving this kind of dynamic. We require excellent execution but at the first mistake, chastise employees for failure rather than seeking out the root cause of the issue so as to find a lasting solution to the real problem. Or we just pick up the slack and do it ourselves.
This is not rocket science. Nor is it anything new. We are all aware of the principle and we live it out on a daily basis. We give our loyalty to leaders who seem to consider us as a whole person and we withhold it from those who are myopic, rude, and selfish. My question and challenge to you is: how will you change your approach today? Is it worth it to you to capture the hearts of the people you work with for the cause you support? Do you prefer to have inefficiency and lackadaisical attitudes?
Today:
What will you assess?
How, to whom, and what will you communicate?
Who will you trust, and with what?