Derek Irvine hits the nail squarely on the head in his blog post: “5 Human Truths in the Modern Workplace and How to Address Them.” Here’s the teaser copy.
“We are all human. Our workplaces, relationships and interactions need to reflect our humanity to help us all deliver more productively and achieve success together.”
Lately, it seems, a lot of people are zeroing in on the human aspects of leadership. Derek’s firm, Globoforce sponsored what will probably be the first of many WorkHuman events in June 2015. Walter McFarland writes that “Managers in the Digital Age Need to Stay Human” for HBR. Terry “Starbucker” St. Marie answers the question, “What is more human leadership?” with eight principles.
Part of me is thinking, “Big deal. We’ve always needed that.” And another part of me knows that some things are different.
Leadership development for the things that don’t change
Technology changes. Leadership fads come and go. But human nature doesn’t change.
This isn’t new, but we need to get better at it. We need to develop leaders who do the best job possible of helping their teams and their team members succeed. Almost every list of things that people want from their leaders is mostly about the soft stuff.
Some people call that “the warm and fuzzy stuff.” But Guy Kawasaki reminds us that “The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard.” We still need to develop leaders who are better at the warm, fuzzy, soft stuff. We need to do it better.
Leadership development for the things that are different
The human beings may stay the same, but their work environment is definitely changing. Those changes offer real leadership development challenges. Many challenges are rooted in the things technology makes possible.
Technology has created the leadership challenge of helping team members succeed in an always-on world. A big part of that is helping developing leaders understand how they can both create and meet the challenges.
Technology makes it easy to work with people who are far away physically and creates the leadership challenge of how to create team cohesion at a distance. Top performing teams have always provided human, social support for team members. How do you meet that challenge when team members are time zones apart?
Leadership development challenges are a mixed bag. Some are the same important things we must learn to do better. Some are new challenges to helping our teams and team members succeed.
