An article by Scott Williams
published on 5 Oct 2023
Summary headline.
In this OPS:Innovator podcast episode, I spoke with Daniel Murray about developing great leaders.
Here’s the tl;dr:
- Curiosity flourishes in safe environments
- Get leaders to the front lines every once in a while
- Your “leadership team” is still a team
- Empathy is understanding why people do what they do
In a podcast that’s about bringing innovative thinking to all aspects of how companies work, it’s challenging to have a conversation without creativity being a core part of it. After all, what is creativity in the workplace other than actively looking for ways to do things differently?
But, curiosity only flourishes in safe environments. Daniel reminds us what happens to our brain when we feel unsafe; when we think there’s potential danger; when there are low levels of trust between people. In those instances, our brain tends to look after itself. It looks after us and keeps us protected. That means curiosity starts to shrink. Alternatively, if you have an environment where people feel safe, they feel like they can trust the people around them and leadership is helping to propagate that sense of trust, it opens up a space for them to be creative and curious about the most important questions.
For leaders, that can mean spending some portion of their time going “back to the front line”, as Daniel puts it, in order to really understand the experience for your people and your customers. The simple act of listening to what’s actually going on; to watching what your team members are trying to do there – usually results in some form of “oh my God, I can’t believe how hard it is”.
And, (spoiler alert), that is what the idea of having empathy is all about.
Another thing we need to remember as leaders is that “our team” is more than we think it is. Daniel gives us a great tip to help bring this to light, and that is to ask any leadership team at an organization a simple question: “hey, how’s your team going?”…and listen for the answer.
Here’s the fun part: that question is not meant to actually find out how their team is doing. It’s actually to see who they’re talking about when they mention “their team”. What a lot of leaders will do is say that their team is great, and go on to tell everyone all the work they’ve accomplished. They are, by reflex, referring to the people who report to them as “their team”. Their default mindset isn’t the fact that the other leaders they are in the room with (or on the video call with) is actually their team. They aren’t treating each other as teammates, but instead often as competitors for scarce resources. How much better would it be for everyone if leaders worked together as a team for the overall good of the business? I think we all know the answer to that one.
All of this takes empathy as leaders, Daniel tells us, and he has a really simple definition we can use to get started. Empathy is simply understanding why people do what they do. He cautions us about thinking about empathy as “walking in someone else’s shoes”, because when you try to do that you can only ever have your experience of walking in their shoes…not ‘their’ experience.
Empathy is about their experience, not yours.
To hear more of this conversation or those with any of our other notable guests, check out OPS:Innovator wherever you get your podcasts or find all our shows on YouTube.
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