6 Habits of Great Leaders
At Yapster we’re passionate about helping you create a culture of performance in your team. In this endeavour, we consider ourselves the tool and you the talent. As you may have heard our CEO, Rob, say: “We are the microphone, but you are the band!”
Our technology allows leaders to reach frontline colleagues through Yapster private messages (yaps), group yaps and dedicated organisation-wide newsfeed. Most recently we’ve even been helping customers turn trading data into dynamic site vs site scoreboards and run KPI Games.
“We are the microphone, but you are the band!”
These features are great but the level of colleague engagement you generate using Yapster will, ultimately, depend on the quality and frequency of your leadership team’s content. If you want your people at every level to engage and follow, you can’t just hand them the platform and leave them to it. Here is a list of 6 high impact habits we’ve observed in the best leaders to get you started in setting an example for your business:
Be present
Express gratitude often
Monitor engagement
Actively solicit feedback
Break down barriers between people and teams
Be consistent
BE PRESENt
If you think children are quick to sense when you’re paying attention to them vs scrolling social feeds on your phone or keeping one eye on the TV, employees are 10x more perceptive - even when most of their exposure to you is limited to a digital network. The best Social Leaders understand that the ‘last seen’ time stamp on a profile says something about levels of investment in the colleague community, and that taking a minute to comment on someone’s content means a great deal more than giving a ‘thumbs up’.
A great foundational habit to get into is carving out a few minutes in your calendar at the beginning and end of every day to share your latest news and really read and engage with colleague content. Your activity should be meaningful - with comments targeted on colleagues who really embody your desired culture and operating philosophy for the organisation.
EXPRESS GRATITUDE OFTEN
Expressing gratitude sounds really obvious, but sadly when we look at the data on the back end of Yapster we can see that not all of the leaders on our platform are taking the opportunity to do this digitally yet. This is a huge missed opportunity, as gratitude expressed digitally can travel further and faster than solely saying thank you in person during site visits.
Showing gratitude is important in driving team productivity and labour retention (watch our Labour Reduce labour turnover episode for more details), as people often feel unvalued in the workplace and report this as one of the leading drivers of low productivity and switching employers. Ironically, when we speak to managers we find they almost universally do appreciate their people. The problem it seems is managers not showing gratitude, rather than not feeling it. The brutal reality of leadership communications is you can think and feel something and your employees can perceive something entirely different. They can’t mind read!
Expressing gratitude is an extraordinarily high Return on Investment (ROI) habit to develop. In the current environment, with organisations and teams struggling for resources, you can lift engagement and productivity in many cases just with a few words of thanks. Words of gratitude are precious to a receiving employee and extremely inexpensive to the praise giver (typically less than 30 seconds on Yapster, to send an individual or site level message, or shout someone out on the newsfeed).
Leaders who make a habit of expressing gratitude also tend to create higher feelings of psychological safety within their workforces, as employees who feel appreciated are more likely to trust that an appreciated boss will ‘have their back’ when needed. This is hugely valuable in business, with research showing that teams who feel ‘safe’ tend to outperform rivals because they’re able to take intelligent risks in pursuit of better outcomes, free from fear of failure.
MONITOR ENGAGEMENT
There’s so much talk about the role of data in the modern business world, with colleagues in finance and corporate planning typically most comfortable in this area. At Yapster, we enjoy working with finance stakeholders, but we love bringing hard data to stakeholders working in traditionally ‘softer’ functions like HR and Communications and empowering them to show the impact their good work can have on a business. In our experience, great leaders make a habit of monitoring engagement numbers at least weekly.
Monitoring engagement is all about supplementing (not replacing) gut feel. For example, do you know as a leader who the main ‘influencers’ are within your organisation? These are the folks who drive the narrative and culture - and they may have big jobs or your org chart or not. Learn more about People Data from HR Leader perspective in our Take the Lead episode - Monitoring Engagement with Ed Godwin
Often the strongest influencers, particularly digitally, will actually sit way down a company’s formal hierarchy. This can be great if those influential frontline folks are representative of your intended company values and culture, and if they ‘get’ your strategy and support the execution of your operating plan. However, it can also be hugely disruptive, if your most influential folks are not a good culture fit and end up sabotaging at site-level (particularly in the absence of your own counteracting Social Leadership activities). Learn more about ‘how do you measure leadership?’ from a Yapster case study with Tossed.
You can only know if your local influencers are a help or hindrance to your mission if you know who those folks are. And you can only know who those folks are if you monitor engagement and communications activity data, as you can using the Yapster dashboard.
In addition to understanding who the cultural influencers are within a business, leaders who habitually monitor engagement are also able to more easily run agile management experiments in pursuit of peak team performance. For example, you may experiment with different formats of business update (video vs text, target group messages vs organisation-wide news posts) to see what gets the most traction with your people and ultimately what generates the greatest operational compliance or commercial impact.
ACTIVELY SOLICIT FEEDBACK
Many leaders find asking for feedback a lot more difficult than offering praise, but this is an equally - perhaps more - important habit to form for organisational health and productivity. Asking for feedback exposes you to some vulnerability, giving colleagues the chance to challenge your decisions or style. However, the best leaders push through the discomfort and create feedback cultures at every level by setting the example of seeking feedback for themselves.
Great leaders and managers understand the concept of leverage, where an individual’s output is amplified by the people s/he leads. Organisational leverage gives us much greater power than any of us can achieve alone. However, as Peter Parker of Spiderman fame learned long ago, with great power comes great responsibility. When you do something mistaken or misinformed as a leader, far more harm can be caused than would be the case for an individual contributor. Feedback is a critical mechanism for ensuring that you maximise the positive effects of management leverage and limit avoidable mistakes at scale.
Lower level colleagues will generally not volunteer corrective feedback to someone higher in a company hierarchy unless the leader specifically asks for such feedback and creates a culture where feedback is routinely given (and not punished). Your teams need to internalise that not only is it ok to give feedback, it is expected.
BREAK DOWN BARRIERS BETWEEN PEOPLE & TEAMS
Great leaders have a habit of ‘connecting’ people, functions and ideas across their organisations. Innovation often comes from cross-functional relationships, as experiences, ideas and cultures fuse and create something unexpected and new.
Actively connecting people is not a natural act for many, as most of us feel most comfortable with people we already know and (especially in the UK) tend to act on the shy side when it comes to initiating conversations with new folks just for the fun of it. So, as a Social Leader within a business that needs to do a better job building cross-functional relationships, a fun and simple way to get yourself in the right mindset is to think of yourself as the host of a party. A good host of a party typically takes it upon his or her self to ‘work a room’ and start little conversations with pairs of guests before moving on to repeat the process with another unsuspecting duo.
Connecting teams and people takes mere seconds on Yapster, even if you do it manually. The bigger challenge is coming up with something compelling to say to the pair of sites or colleagues you’re putting together. Asking for feedback on a topic which relates to all participants is often a good approach, especially as it ‘kills two birds with one stone’ in terms of desirable leadership habits.
Where you don’t have the time or desire to manually connect people and teams to each other within Yapster, you can use our KPI Gamification feature to configure Yapster to automatically create conversations between pairs of teams with commercial data presenting as a ‘scoreboard’ to stimulate healthy competition and conversation between them.
BE CONSISTENT
Finally, you need to “walk the talk”. You can’t expect your team to become Social Leaders and build these leadership habits if you aren’t doing so yourself. It is critical that you lead by example and make time every week to speak to all of your people using all the tools at your disposal.
If you’re struggling to make the time amongst all of your other life and work commitments, I suggest reading James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. According to Clear, his proven approach to habit forming will help you “build a system for getting 1% better every day; break your bad habits and stick to good ones; avoid the common mistakes most people make when changing habits; and overcome a lack of motivation and willpower.”
We hope you have found this article useful and can see how you can begin forming some of these habits right away, but don’t fear if you’re still not sure how to get started or to make these tips feel authentically your own. There is a growing community of Social Leaders building across industry now, with many people happy to discuss their experiences and share emerging best practices. If you’re interested, please check out our 2022 Social Leadership report to see stats and names of some of the best.