In the past years, emphasis has been given on leadership styles based on their approach to managing the company well. Today, the push is to lead with your heart. There is an invisible pendulum that swings between effective fiscal responsibility and great people skills. The truth is, a successful leader needs to have strong skills in both categories.
Leading from the heart is often mistaken for kindness without accountability. Making decisions based on emotions such as guilt and sympathy rewards neediness, undisciplined and irresponsible employees. Feeling sorry for someone is not a good reason to give them an award to entice them to do better. This is a recognition of negative behavior when allowed to continue, becomes contagious.
When you give someone a job out of guilt, you find yourself justifying your decision with poor excuses. Such as they need the job to improve their self esteem or they need the additional income (i.e. they need my help more). Is this really the type of behavior you want to promote – a dependence on you? A great leader knows how to develop people at varying levels of competence and skill without pitting one against the other. After all, the is to goal have employees you can trust to do the work well with little or no assistance.
Another frequent excuse is they live too far away (the assumption is they will not be available on demand). In reality, it does not matter where you live with today’s technology. A teleconference is literally at our fingertips. When given this excuse, you have taken away the person’s right to choose to move closer if the job truly demands it. Thus, this reasoning if false and often made because the employer/boss does not want to admit the real reason such as age, or they are getting paid more.
Leading from the heart means you are honest with people and use empathy (not sympathy) to reach an understanding. Truth never hurts as much as a lie. Telling someone who did not get the promotion they live to far away or someone else is much faster, scars a person’s self esteem. Leading from the heart means you maintain the integrity of both people. Make it a collaboration rather than a competition. Be the kind of leader who effectively manages the fiscal responsibilities as well as develops and empowers your people.
