The leaders that embrace empathy will be the ones that see a return on investment rebalance from the very same workforce, says Mimi Nicklin
This year – 2021 – starts like no other and the new financial year mimics the same levels of disruption that we saw this time last year. We may be far more practiced at the new work/life integration realities today than we were twelve months ago, but the discomfort and anxiety around our future is perhaps ever higher one year on. The connectivity between our organisations has been changed permanently.
We remain physically apart most the time, we have to continue trusting each other in entirely new ways, and our workplace is still far more likely to resemble a kitchen table than a boardroom table. The need for shared understanding and deep cohesion this year will be ever deeper, and no leader today can afford to ignore the emotional intelligence they imbue into the organisations they build. Forbes recently named ‘empathy’ as their word for 2021 and it is becoming increasingly obvious why.
According to Deloitte, 85% of employees around the world are not engaged or are actively disengaged from their work. Lay on the disrupted work environments we have been trying to balance for nearly a year and people are overtly reconsidering what work means to them and how they see the future of their career choices. Many employees are questioning their need to maintain an office-based role at all, and none more so than the millennials who have never been a group afraid to challenge the status quo. The generational gap between the younger and the older team members has perhaps never been wider as the two generations grapple simultaneously to work out what this year of remote working means to their future.
Rebooting the way we manage
The requirement for leadership teams to reboot the way they manage and motivate both generations within their teams has seen corporation’s needing to shift culturally, and indeed operationally, at speed. This article was in fact written a few hours after we saw the UK Chair of KMPG step down from his role following an unempathetic slew of comments in a digital meeting of 1,500 staff that asked people to ‘stop moaning’ about their pandemic realities. Words that no organisation can accept in these changed times.
As we move through 2021 the necessity to create connected teams that trust the ability of their leadership teams to understand them will continue to rise. The creation of an empathetic organisation that delivers on this won’t happen overnight, but we are now seeing conscious and long-term commitment from senior executives to the critical combination of emotional intelligence, wellbeing at work and trust as performance mandatories.
Employees today are driven by the need for leadership that goes beyond the rational and connects with people on a far more authentic and motivating level, within a context that values holistic employee health. This is a time for Regenerative Leadership. It is a time for leaders that can understand their teams beyond the output that they create, and really empathise with them. These will be the leaders that manage to lead their troops to recovery at a pace. The KPMG chaos surrounding the Chair’s seemingly unempathetic commentary shows the globe’s speed to negatively react to anything that resembles a generationally irrelevant response to the new needs of our workplaces and teams.
Changing expectations
The expectations of the workforce have changed and many already feel that their eyes have been opened to the possibilities of far more flexible and trust-based organisations. Regenerative Leadership skills are focused on transforming and regenerating people, and their organisational construct, by emotionally engaging with the key inputs that people need to thrive as human beings. As the country comes out of a period of slow down we need to take heed to step into a period of regeneration of our people first, if we are to see a regeneration of our profits.
For a large number of leaders today, many of whom were trained in a previous era of leadership thinking, this move to more emotionally intelligent, empathetically influenced and regeneratively led business is infinitely difficult to grasp. When you have the same conversation with a millennial leader however they understand intrinsically that this move isn’t an option, it is what 21st century business, and certainly business post the Covid-19 pandemic, is already poised to be founded on.
Regenerative Leadership is transformational in its ability to prepare our businesses and teams for a new world of business and consumption. From home working, flexible formats, purpose led goal setting and cohesive sustainable agendas, it covers tenets of organisational success that recent times have proven are more valid and more current than ever before. As we navigate the year ahead it is my prediction that these areas of focus, of empathetic influence in the workplace, will be recognised as the most desired facets of inspirational and impactful leadership. Accenture, it seems, agrees with me as they recently placed empathy as trend six in their forecasts for the year ahead.
The leaders that embrace empathy will be the ones that see an ROI rebalance from the very same workforce. This is no longer a nice to have, or a one-off training course from the human resources team, this is now the only path to sustainable growth as humanity continues to embrace the inconsistency of our business world.
Mimi Nicklin is a globally recognised millennial thought-leader. She is host of the Empathy for Breakfast show, Secrets of The Gap podcast and author of new book Softening the Edge. For more information go to www.miminicklin.com
