Being able to support your employees is one of your main responsibilities as a thoughtful leader.
After all, your team members are the people who are really going to get the work done.
Sure your role is important, but if you don’t support them, you’re on your own.
In this post I’ll cover four things to keep in mind to better support your employees.
Of course, we’ll keep in mind that you are a thoughtful leader, so I’ll also cover some of the challenges you might find along the way.
What Does It Mean to Support Your Employees?
We’ve all seen them.
The leaders who go out of their way to do anything for their employees.
Bending over backwards, even doing the work for them sometimes. Always stepping in to help.
That’s all well and good, but I have a different view of supporting your employees.
Supporting means helping your people succeed, but it also means helping them to support themselves.
Otherwise you simply become the crutch that everybody leans on.
For me, supporting means giving help when it’s needed, and helping people develop and grow at the same time.
The other extreme is failing to support your team at all.
As a thoughtful leader I don’t think that’s very likely, so we’ll move onto some of the key ingredients for supporting your employees.
Learn More: How to Lead Effectively as a People Pleaser.
1. Support Your Employees By Getting to Know Them Individually
One somewhat frustrating part of leadership is that you can’t treat everybody the same way.
If you could have a one-size-fits-all approach to leading people, things would be a lot easier.
The reality is, people are complex unique beings with lots of different factors influencing them at any given time.
You’ll need to tailor your approach to how you lead them.
This does not mean you need to be a different person at work, changing your personality like a chameleon.
It simply means adapting your approach to different aspects of your employees.
What Individual Aspects Should You Pay Attention To?
There are a few aspects to pay attention to when it comes to supporting your employees.
To start with, it’s useful to try to understand what makes them tick, including what they believe, what they value and what motivates them.
These are not easy things to understand about people, because people are complex.
There are a few tools to use as a starting point.
First, I like Gallup’s Strengths Finder assessment to understand each employee’s strengths. It is reasonably priced and provides some excellent information to help you understand your people (and for them to understand themselves).
Next, I like to use a motivational assessment called PRINT, which helps you to understand people’s “unconscious motivators”.
This one needs a consultant to help you do it and costs money.
But if you want a free option, try 16personalities.com.
Note that none of these tools will describe a person perfectly, and they should only be used as a starting point for discussion and to help your people reflect and gain insight.
What About Motivation?
I always find it helpful to understand a few motivation theories and models so I can try out different things with people, to see what works.
You can read about some useful motivation factors in this post: Make the Most of Motivation Models in Your Team.
The post also talks about how to use them to adapt your approach, and to see how people respond.
Listen and Learn to Support Your Employees
It’s easy to get stuck on tools and models and go down deep rabbit holes.
But often a simple approach works well too, and that is to talk to your team members and listen.
Listen to what they want, what they like and what they don’t. Talk about the weekend and what they do outside of work, if they’re open to it.
Share information about your own life to try to build a more personal connection.
Then respond to what you hear and see how you can help them.
So How Does Knowing These Individual Differences Help?
Over time, you’ll gain a sense of how your team members operate.
This includes aspects like:
- Communication style – are they reserved or outgoing? Do they work better with a lot of detail, or just high-level information? Do they prefer to work mainly alone or with others?
- Feedback – how do your people respond to feedback? Do they prefer direct comments or a softer approach?
- Schedule – Do your team members require flexibility in their work time and location, or are they happy with a regular routine?
- Motivation – what drives your people? Is it to help others, to achieve goals or are there some other important factors?
Obviously there are many more aspects that could be included here.
But the important thing is to use your knowledge of your team to try to support them in a way that suits their style and personality.
2. Be Available to Support Your Employees
So far, we’ve talked about some of the differences you might look and listen for with your people.
But all of this is pointless if we’re not available when people need our support.
And this is where you need to look inward, and work on yourself.
If you’re in back-to-back meetings all day, or never at your desk or available to respond to messages, then you’ll struggle to provide the support your employees need.
Many thoughtful leaders have people-pleasing tendencies which mean they struggle to say “no” and push back on meetings or other requests that take up their time.
So the questions I have for you is:
“Are you as available as you would like to be?”
“Do you have a nagging feeling that you’re letting people down by often being unavailable?”
“Do you know when your people need support?”
“Do all the people in your team have the opportunity to speak to you about important things? Even the quiet ones who might not speak up much?”
Depending on the answers, you might need to develop some strategies to clear some time.
I’ve included some of the simple and common strategies in this post: Too Busy at Work? Try These 5 Things.
3. Support Your Employees By Encouraging Open Communication
Being available is one part of the equation.
I’ve worked with leaders who say they have “an open door policy”.
The problem? The employees don’t want to go in the door because they’re scared, or they think they simply won’t be listened to.
Therefore, open communication is a must when it comes to supporting your employees.
They need to feel safe coming to you with challenges, rather than keeping them all to themselves.
This starts with encouraging your people to learn from mistakes, identifying what to do better next time.
Open up about some of the mistakes you’ve made. Showing vulnerability can help to create open communication as I discuss in this post: Why Leaders Should Show Vulnerability at Work.
You need 1-to-1 meetings with each of your people, too.
No ifs or buts here.
I believe that if you can’t afford to meet with your people 1 on 1 on a regular basis, then you’re either too busy or have too many people reporting to you.
How regular is regular? I prefer every 2 weeks at least, booked in the calendar in advance.
This means they always have a chance locked in to speak with you, even if it can’t be right this instant.
For some tips on how to make your 1 to 1 meetings better, you can read this post too: 1 to 1 Meetings: Let’s Make Them Better.
4. Support Your Employees By Holding Them Accountable
Something y0u might not expect in a post about supporting your employees is that it’s important to hold them accountable.
As I said earlier, it’s all about balance.
Supporting people without holding them accountable is a one-sided affair, that may result in a team that relies on leadership too much, which can stifle their own growth and development.
So in order to support your employees effectively, I believe you also need to be holding them accountable.
This means setting goals in collaboration with employees, providing oversight to monitor progress, and to be there to course-correct along the way.
It also means supporting them to develop their own plans about where they want to go.
This includes short and long-term career direction and development planning, encouraging them to pay attention to where they’re going and to spend time on getting there, as well as on the actual work they do.
You want to support your people in being proactive and effective, and you do this by adopting a balanced approach of help and accountability.
And for effective strategies on how to hold your people accountable as a thoughtful leader, you can try my Team Accountability Builder online course.
Supporting Your Employees is Simple… but Not Easy
As with many things in leadership, it’s not rocket science.
However, it does require attention and continuous effort.
You’ll need to adapt your approach to each team member and the situation.
This means you need to have the self-awareness and understanding of your people to realise how your team are responding to your leadership.
Focus on these four aspects and you shouldn’t go far wrong.
What would you add to this? Let me and all the other thoughtful leaders know in the comments below!
Leave A Comment