AN ADDITIONAL MANAGEMENT TASK?
The same issues prevail in companies and organizations almost everywhere: shortage of skilled workers, increased energy prices, stagnant supply chains, increasing absenteeism and fluctuation. Those responsible for results and managers suffer from high pressure and employees feel insecurities in many ways.
The question often arises as to when and how good leadership should actually take place under these circumstances.
1. MANAGEMENT TASKS IN LEADERSHIP ATTITUDE
First of all, it should be understood that all the tasks such as planning, organization, coordination, delegation, controlling and reporting are daily management tasks. Leadership is not an additional management task, but an attitude in which management tasks should be carried out. In all management tasks, in order to prevent fluctuation and further absences, the appreciation and recognition of those who carry them out, must be authentic. Right now, employees have to be involved in realistic visions of the future, confident impulses have to be given and employees have to be supported in their insecurities, so that they can strengthen their strengths and really be motivated to contribute to positive further development.
2. ACQUIRE LEADERSHIP AWARENESS
It takes the leadership attitude that companies should not primarily focus on maximizing profits for skimming off profits, but on maximizing profits in order to create and maintain jobs, to create infrastructure, to enable healthy living environments and to positively influence the way their employees live their lives. Then the profit maximization arises from the mutual dependency for all participants. This requires the humble and responsible attitude of being allowed to be a leader, whom employees can trust in such a way that they base their long-term life planning on their employment relationship and do not just look for the opportunity to jump off in internally prepared dismissals because they are too far away decisions of the management levels causes people to lose trust even more every day.
3. EXEMPLARY BEARING RESPONSIBILITY
For managers, this means that leadership first and foremost includes the understanding that they act as role models, are aware of their responsibility for the employees who trust them and, as the RESPONSible, not only have responses but also give them authentically. That doesn’t mean obsessing over work until you burn out. On the contrary. Being able to see and feel your own self-care in an exemplary manner helps employees enormously. However, it also does not mean pretending to have ad hoc solutions ready, but also being able to admit, for example, that you do not have everything under control at the moment, but that you are looking for solutions. However, this also means changes in the corporate culture that have been pending for a long time, not to be postponed any longer, but to be proactive right now. And leaders shouldn’t do this alone.
4. RECOGNIZE AND INVOLVE EMPLOYEES
Those who are in the middle of the process every day know it best. Therefore, leaders are very interested in what employees experience and learn about the process. Here is the real know-how center with which good leaders are in close contact and from which ideas and valuable contributions can be obtained. But this does not only require the famous “empowerment”. First and foremost, the prerequisite is the preservation, or even better, the active increase in creativity and innovative strength, the active change in corporate culture towards genuinely emphatic and socially competent leadership. This means adjustments in employee communication, real presence in encounters and conscious perception. It means the authentic recognition of fears, worries and hardships in the increasingly inscrutable, fragile economic world for employees.
5. HAVE THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS
There is no time for micromanagement at this time. Not even for wanting to preserve management priorities that once worked, such as increasing productivity and efficiency. Especially not through mere process optimization, hasty digitization and hectic cost reduction. The leadership topics of preventing fluctuation, employee loyalty, employee motivation and responding to the change in values are currently the priority in order to become and remain able to change in times of strong change. Good leadership is the key to maintaining productivity and efficiency and can even increase them if leadership is present, benevolent and involving. Before process optimization can contribute to profitability, the prerequisite must be created for employees to be resilient, creative and motivated and to remain so. Real leaders now optimize the decision-making processes for leadership, evaluation and design of service provision in companies and organizations in a timely manner and taking the change in values into account, in order to then jointly devote themselves to optimizing operational processes.
6. PUT THE RIGHT NEEDS BACK
Managers with leadership qualities do not see themselves as managers whose importance and brilliance can be seen in the number of employees to be managed or their hierarchical level. In the present times, they do not primarily secure their own position, even if this would be understandable in view of the fragile, frightening, non-linear developments that are hardly comprehensible anymore. In these times, real leaders are practicing good self-management more than ever. They don’t ignore their own needs for security, esteem, and approval. But they responsibly put aside the need for personal security and sheer authority and turn to the employees entrusted to them in full presence. And always, with every performance of every single management task of the day. They actively establish contact with employees, they consciously listen, give motivating appreciation, strive for a common understanding of values, set an example for others and thus ensure that good relationships are maintained, that trust in the existing employment relationship is maintained.
If you would like to know more about how the real leadership attitude, better still the mindful leadership attitude, can be learned and how in these times of great change it contributes significantly to curbing fluctuation and absenteeism, please contact me and book one of the current seminars on the topics “Mindful leadership – from manager to mindful leader.” Or, for example, “Corporate and employee management in times of greater change”. To the seminars