Simon Sinek argues that people get promoted into leadership without learning how to lead. He says leaders need human skills like listening, patience, and empathy. He shares how to give feedback effectively: schedule it, prepare the person, and hold people accountable, which employees actually want.
One of the things I find so fascinating about when we enter a position of leadership is very rarely does anybody teach us how to do it. You know, like when we're junior, we get tons of training how to do our job. Yeah. You know, and then if we're good at our jobs, we get promoted and eventually we get promoted position where we're now responsible for the people who do the job we used to do. But we very rarely get taught how to do that. And so we tend to either.
Lead the way that we've been led or we lead the way we like to be led. So, for example, I like Blunt give it to me straight feedback. That's how I like it. And so I like to give Blunt give it to you straight feedback because that's what I like. Turns out not everybody likes give it to me blunt feedback. And so what good leaders have to do is they learn this new set of skills called leadership, because that's my new job. And that means how to give them receive feedback and all the different ways in which you can do that. So I had somebody who worked with me and I gave Blunt give it to her straight feedback. And every time I did, there were times where we actually were yelling at each other like it was. It didn't go well. And at one, one of the times we were shouting at each other and it was just completely ridiculous. And I interrupted and said, well, clearly this isn't working.
If I can't give you feedback, then how do. How do I help you? Like, you're not, like, this isn't going to work. Like, how do you want me to give you feedback? Because that's not working and I'm frustrated. And she said, you can give me feedback. I just need you to prepare me for it or book a time to give it to me. So I learned to say, on Thursday at 3 o', clock, I need to talk to you. We're going to. I want to talk to you about some stuff that happened this week. Or I would say, can I give you some feedback now? And she'll say yes or no. And then once she could, like, take the deep breath, I could be completely blunt. I just had to. So I had to learn that. And I think we don't teach these skills. We don't teach listening, we don't teach patience, we don't teach empathy. We don't teach how to give and receive that feedback. And these are the essential skills on how to hold people accountable. We absolutely want to hold people accountable. And by the way, people want to be held accountable.
But not everybody likes it the same way. And we have to learn to adjust our styles. Just like that. We expect a frontline associate to adjust their style for the customer. We have to adjust our style for the people in our care and our span of care. It's the same relationship.
