Meet People Where They Are
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Click here to view and download the Discussion Guide to utilize with your Group and/or Team over the next 12 months. The Guide and questions will be updated each month to reflect the TOTM concept.
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“When people lead at a higher level, they make the world a better place because in addition to results and relationships, their goals are focused on the greater good.”
Ken Blanchard and Renee Broadwell
Servant Leadership In Action
Thank you for investing the time with us in 2022 as we explore the 12 tenets of Developing A Leadership Mindset. We hope the concepts and principles shared here will bring you value and be of benefit to you as you develop yourself and develop others in your leadership role.
If we truly desire to lead at a higher level, we have found it is nearly impossible, or at the very least, highly improbable, that sustained individual and organizational success occurs unless Leaders are willing and able to meet people where they are.
Leaders are called to build trust by demonstrating caring and to consciously enhance the quality of life and the quality of work of those they lead. Compelling or coercing compliance and adherence to rules rarely, if ever, achieves desired results and outcomes. It certainly never results in highly engaged, empowered, and equipped Team Members.
Meeting people where they are begins with a Leader’s willingness to embrace the philosophy of servant leadership. Without a servant leader mindset and discipline, one’s self-interest will rule the day and ultimately individual and organizational outcomes and effectiveness.
Robert K. Greenleaf, former AT&T CEO, developed the concept of servant leadership and introduced the thinking in his original essay, “The Servant as Leader” in 1970. More than fifty years later the understanding and practice of servant leadership is being pursued and ever evolving across the globe.
Mr. Greenleaf’s work has spawned decades of study, training, and implementation of servant leadership practices. Leadership guru and another revered father of leadership development, Ken Blanchard, wrote extensively about the concepts and practices of servant leadership in the book we will be sourcing for the second quarter 2022 Tool of the Month, “Servant Leadership in Action.”
Servant leadership requires the mental and emotional agility to engage in developing an effective leadership mindset. Both and thinking, which we explored in the March Tool of the Month, is at the core of servant leadership.
Ken Blanchard describes two aspects of servant leadership:
A visionary/direction or strategic role–the leadership aspect of service leadership; and
An implementation, or operational role–the servant aspect of servant leadership
Servant leadership is often misunderstood, and sometimes rejected, as the language of servant leadership may connote a subservient posture, indecisiveness, and weakness. In a world where power, position, title, and authority are held in high regard, meeting people where they are may seem unwise, unproductive, and even nonsensical.
From my perspective, servant leadership means an intentional focus on creating environments where individuals and teams can become the most effective and engaged versions of themselves while ensuring organizational and operational effectiveness. Very simply, it means helping people grow and organizations grow and putting their needs first.
Central to the concept of servant leadership is meeting people where they are. Becoming a servant leader, meeting people where they are, and practicing service leadership, requires a conscious, intentional choice. It is a life impacting decision which requires a lifelong shift in perspective, mindset, and skill set.
Before we explore meeting people where they are further, I would like to clarify that it is vital to meet people where they are however never leave them where you found them.
As Leaders, individuals most commonly find themselves in roles and positions of leadership, ironically, not due to their leadership ability or expertise, but due to their subject matter expertise. As humans, we tend to project our expectations for performance and behavior on others.
We have found individuals possess a range of self-sufficiency in the workplace:
o ESSP - Extremely Self-sufficient People – generally 2% of the workforce
Risk takers
High sense of drive
Innovators
Strong sense of self
Independent thinkers with a bias toward action
Can be highly entrepreneurial
Low need for approval and affirmation from others
o HSSP - Highly Self-sufficient People – generally 18% of the workforce
Strong sense of responsibility for self
Subject matter experts (“A” students)
Consistent, reliable, dependable
Self-directed
Learners and achievers
Desire to make a contribution/recognized for performance
o VDSS – Varying Degrees of Self-sufficiency – generally 80% of the workforce
Value and appreciate clarity and direction
Generally willing
Specialists
Bias towards responsiveness versus initiative
Value and need affirmation, recognition, and appreciation
Consistency, reliability, and dependability tied to circumstances
Reliance on external versus internal motivation
Regardless of your self-sufficiency assessment, every human engages in some form of self-limiting behavior. Should our extreme or high degree of self-sufficiency prevent us from meeting people where they are, that becomes self-limiting behavior.
Leaders have a strong belief everyone has intrinsic value and is deserving of respect and dignity.
Meeting people where they are does not mean lowering standards of behavior, performance outcomes or ignoring results. It does mean adjusting expectations and providing others with the “4 Cs” of leadership we introduced in January; caring, clarity, communication, and consistency. As leaders, we do not have the liberty of deciding what other people need from us.
Servant leaders recognize individuals are doing the best with can with what they have and what they know. Meeting people where they are takes grace, humility, and patience for yourself and others.
It takes humility to recognize we all engage in self-limiting behavior and to develop a willingness to give people what they need from you. Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less and focusing on undercovering, understanding, and meeting the needs of others.
Meeting people where they are means becoming a student of other people’s behavior. Seeking to understand their preferred communication style, level of change readiness, their paradigms, filters traumas, triggers, strengths, goals, hopes and greatest challenges.
As Leaders who accept the responsibility of growing people and growing organizations, we are both responsible for coaching behavior and managing performance. I am convinced the more time we invest in meeting people where they are by coaching behavior, the less we will have to manage performance.
Spend time using the formal monthly 1-1 meeting process to coach behavior by engaging in dialogue to help your Team Member become more self-aware. Provide clarity and coach specific behavior by making specific requests; as Brené Brown exhorts, “clear is kind.”
Assess their capacity, their degree of emotional intelligence, how well they tolerate anxiety, ambiguity, and pressure. Look for signs that may mean they are hesitating or reluctant to engage - they may lack courage or trust in themselves, the process, or in you as their Leader Manager. Adjust your pace and ask Team Members how much clarity, information, time, support, and details they might need or want. Invite questions - questions can be clarity seeking mechanisms rather than oppositional behavior.
Differentiate between your capacity, perspective, communication style and expectations that you need and those that your Team Member needs. For example – people may have a sense of urgency, but they might not recognize they do not, or do not know how, to display a sense of urgency. Utilizing effective coaching techniques will help meet an individual where they are resulting in individual growth.
As a coach, remember, all progress an individual makes is some progress. If you meet people where they are, cheer their progress and recognize the relativity of that progress, you will most likely experience more progress!
Cautions to meeting people where they are may include engaging in ruinous empathy as Kim Scott identifies and describes in her book Radical Candor. If, over the appropriate amount of time, energy and resources are invested in meeting people where they are, it may be necessary, and wise, to find a role in the organization where they will be more effective. It takes wisdom to know when it is appropriate to transition a Team Member out of the organization.
I love the fact that Southwest Airlines guiding principles for all Team Members includes living with a Warrior Spirit, a Fun-Loving Attitude and a Servant’s Heart. While no individual or organization will ever achieve perfection in this world, we can certainly emulate Southwest Airlines’ commitment to each and every Team Member by demonstrating a servant’s heart.
Robert Greenleaf stated, “the best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?"
I encourage you to take the test and ask yourself, and most importantly those you lead, am I meeting others where they are?
-LS
Group Discussion
Guide
Click here to view and download the Discussion Guide to utilize with your Group and/or Team over the next 12 months. The Guide and questions will be updated each month.
Recommended Quarterly Reading
Servant Leadership In Action
edited by Ken Blanchard & Renee Broadwell
2022
Managing From The Inside Out
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February 2, 9, 16, 23
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