Episode 3: Creating leaders who ask, listen and respond to employee needs
with HR and leadership expert Rachel Cooke
Key Takeways
The engine that powers your business is your people. Telling employees to go follow a bunch of instructions is not the way to do change.
The problem is that we don't ask, or sometimes we ask, but our culture is not necessarily one of psychological safety. The worst thing you can do is ask for employees for input and disregard it.
Leaders have to engage their employees in the solutions and provide a vision with empathy. It's not so much a requirement to care, but it's a requirement to ask and listen and respond. Empathy is the asking and listening and compassion is the responding.
Managers need to celebrate small successes in team processes. Managers need to be having more conversations with their teams, infused into their day.
Training is not the answer to develop human skills.
You will never believe or shame yourself into a good habit. Accountability is about being willing to step up and do the thing you need to do in service of the outcome.
Good leadership can be learned from books and trainings, but great leadership comes out of reflection. Managers need to take time to just pause and reflect.
The goal is not to help people manage burnout it's to help prevent burnout it's to help mitigate it from happening in the first place.
Companies need to invest time in getting very rigorously clear on their priorities. The biggest secret that leaders haven't yet quite caught on to is focusing on impact
Bio
Rachel Cooke is the Founder of Lead Above Noise - a firm specializing in designing interactive experiences that rev up team performance within organizations. She has partnered with clients including American Express, Cisco, Bloomberg, Wolters Kluwer, Scholastic Books, and more. Rachel was named by Inc. Magazine as a Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Her collection of passions include leadership, employee experience, transformational change, and workplace success. She is the host of Macmillan's Modern Mentor podcast - a weekly show delivering actionable tips and insights for those striving to define and achieve their version of success. Her work has been featured in such publications as Inc. Magazine, Thrive Global, Bloomberg Quint, Fast Company, Business Insider, HuffPo, and more. Rachel holds her Masters Degree in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and her Bachelors Degree in Human Development from Cornell University.
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