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Authoritative leadership is out. Leadership based on integrity and purpose is in vogue.
The proof is in the mood of employees: those in workplaces where there is a lot of trust they are 76% more engaged and 29% more satisfied with their lives.
As CEO and founding father of the company Creative Nogginan promoting and marketing agency whose mission is to empower smart, passionate women to enjoy work and life, I’ve seen the evidence firsthand. Leadership based on integrity and purpose has resulted in a culture of trust in which team members remain for an average of over eight years.
I also experienced the other side.
Before starting Creative Noggin, I worked for several organizations, some of which didn’t have a clear purpose. Despite checking all the boxes when it got here to advantages, birthday cakes, and comfortable hours, employees didn’t feel like they were a part of a larger purpose beyond meeting revenue goals. Burnout was common, morale was low, and turnover was high.
These experiences taught me that leadership is not only about advantages and rules. It’s about at all times doing the right thing and giving your team members a real reason to come to work every day, beyond checking boxes and selling widgets.
When a customer pays an invoice twice, there is never any query as to what’s going to occur to the more money. This clear sense of integrity goes a good distance towards building true trust with our team and customers.
As a company with an all-female leadership team, I consider women have a unique ability to encourage this trust. When you think about common feminine traits like loyalty, optimism, and compassion, it’s no surprise.
If you wish to learn the way to instill a sense of trust in your workplace, there are three basic practices you will find in leaders who exemplify integrity and purpose.
1. Lead by example
As an worker, I often heard: “If you want to be successful, you should imitate your boss.” As a leader, I take this to heart.
My goal is for my employees to show their whole selves every day and work hard and play hard. To achieve this, they have to be present in their personal lives and support their families. As a leader, my job is to model sustainable living. I often tell my team that we should always all “work to live, not live to work.” While I never hesitate to work hard, side by side with my team, to complete projects, I do not hesitate to leave in the middle of the day to pick up my children from school.
Mary Barra, the first woman CEO of General Motors, is one other leader who strives to lead by example. Her inclusive leadership style is about building teams and working together to solve challenges. Thanks to its purposeful leadership, General Motors has consistently performed well in its gender equality reports, and this has been the case one of only two firms with a global reach no difference in pay between men and women in 2018
2. Support others with a goal-oriented culture
When employees understand the purpose of their work, they are much more likely to be engaged and perform at their best. At Creative Noggin, our purposeful mission to empower women takes shape in many ways. To name just a few:
- We donate at least 5% of our profits to social organizations supporting women, comparable to Women’s empowerment AND Saint John’s Program for Real Change.
- We cooperate with goal-oriented organizations. Over 70% of our work was with mission-driven organizations.
- Each of us takes ownership of our work and roles and improves business operations as a whole. I give my team autonomy in terms of responsibilities and running the company on the EOS platform (entrepreneurial operating system).my team usually identifies and solves problems inside the company, comparable to improving our business services, systems and processes. No one on the team has a “it’s not my job” mentality; as an alternative, everyone works together to improve the business.
All of those practices helped unite my Soldiers around the organization’s core vision and provided a strong foundation for our purpose-driven culture.
A pacesetter I like and who also prioritizes purpose-driven cultures is Sarah Friar, former CEO of Nextdoor. She combined her personal commitment to supporting a higher world through the transformative power of community with the company’s mission: to be a global platform that helps neighbors connect and strengthen their communities.
3. Prioritize transparency
It literally pays to be transparent with your team. Disengaged employees cost the U.S. economy up to $600 billion annually in lost productivity 80% of employees you wish to know more about how organizational decisions are made.
I try to talk openly with my team about where we are and where we are going. This goes beyond skilled issues. For example, during my divorce in 2018, I made a decision to share my situation with my team, although I initially kept it to myself. When I noticed I wasn’t fully showing up at work or giving my all, I called a meeting to explain what was going on. They were extremely compassionate and supportive, which helped me through a difficult time in my life.
Transparency with my team built a foundation of trust. Many years after that meeting, she revealed her personal situation to me. I feel grateful that they felt protected doing so, and that I have gained knowledge as a leader that I’d not have otherwise had, so that I can higher support them personally and professionally.
Honest and purposeful leadership stays integral to our success. As women’s presence in the workforce increases, the need to shift from authoritative to more compassionate types of leadership will increase. Those of us who embrace it and stand in it should succeed. Those who don’t do this risk being left behind.
After all, leadership is not about power. It’s about the goal.