What does it mean to care for your team?
I’m often asked by clients to recommend books or articles to deepen their knowledge of a particular topic. Lately, I’ve found myself recommending Radical Candor by Kim Scott a lot. If you haven’t read it or seen one of Kim’s talks, Radical Candor is a leadership philosophy based on “caring personally while challenging directly”. It’s often introduced when talking about ways to give feedback, but I think it can be applied to a broader question that has popped up in a number of my coaching sessions over the last few weeks…
In the context of leadership, what does it mean to care for others?
Over the last 12 months, as we transitioned to remote work and are now beginning to return to the office, we’ve had to adapt the way we demonstrate care for our teams. It hasn’t always been easy — especially when caring for one team member might mean missing the opportunity to care for another.
I’ve heard a few examples of care this week that fall into the category of “the squeaky wheel gets the oil”. Clients have described situations where they have dropped what they were doing to respond immediately to a request for assistance. In all cases, the responses were driven by strong personal values around helping others. They were well-intentioned, and they were automatic. They made me wonder…
How could we be more deliberate about the model of care that drives our leadership behaviours?
I’m not suggesting it’s wrong to help others in that way. Rather, if our roles as leaders are about showing our teams who and what they should care about (aka prioritise), how could we make sure our own behaviours reinforce our messaging?
Whether you’re a leader or a team member, here are a few questions that you can use to provoke thought and conversation among your team…
- What is my definition of “caring for my team”?
- How do I want my team to describe my care for them? How do they describe it? What’s the difference?
- What is my perspective on “I’ll drop everything if one of my team need me?”
- What is the role of “tough love” in caring for my team?
