Putting “Leadership” into the Management Equation:

Creating a Context to Assure Employee Equality, Voice and Engagement for Business Success

By Gary Huckaby and Kim LaFevor

Today’s climate of managing ‘from the middle’ to carefully navigate operations in assuring business sustainability during the COVID19 pandemic has created a context to stray unconsciously away from the ‘True North’ of our leadership compass.  Effectively directing operations to maintain profitability margins, insuring organizational assets are protected, and finding methods to operate differently within the present constraints, including capitalizing on the unprecedented situation to reinvent our organizations, has shifted our focus in many cases elsewhere from our true business engine.  As good business leaders, we search for the right methods and approaches to govern our tangible assets and assure return on investment, especially during this period of unpredictability, but in our honorable quest to be good stewards, we have to insure we are not only managing, but leading and engaging our most important organizational asset of all…..Our People. 

Personal Leadership Acumen:  Time for a Self-Assessment

The reality is the pandemic has brought about conditions that magnify instances where leadership is absent, insufficient, misguided, and/or uninformed, as well as cases where conversely it is engaging, empathetic, knowledgeable and/or innovative.  What makes the difference between leadership shortcomings and leadership excellence lies in our individual paradigm to one central question:  What is our greatest key to our organization’s success?   While the answer may seem rhetorical, it really is not.  As organizational leaders, we can say one thing publicly, then do another.  What do our actual behaviors and actions say about us as leaders and our belief systems about what best contributes to organizational success?

What do they say about our view of the ‘who and what’ that are truly important to business success?  If asked, how would those outside our business compared to those within our own walls of the organization respond to the same questions?

Huckaby’s True Story From the Front Lines:  A Simple Leadership Lesson on Equality, Voice and Engagement

As one of the authors of this article and reflecting on our intended points to convey, I am drawn to one of my own personal stories to articulate the points we are making about intentional leadership actions and creating conditions that exude employee equality, voice, and active engagement.   For a few short years, I was a Plant Manager with an international, but locally- based, manufacturing company helping to lead them through some turbulent times.  It is common in this environment for sales reps to come in and take the decision makers to lunch.  My requirements for such a lunch were simple, for us to go, you must include workers from the manufacturing floor.

One day, after such a lunch, we all began to exchange business cards.  When one was offered to one of the men who had gone to lunch with us, he replied, “I am just a machinist; I don’t have a business card.”  While the individual did not seem all that affected by the interaction, it certainly left an impression with me.

The workers had heard me say many times that everyone in the plant was “equally important” and that we all just had different job titles. Yet I realized in that moment that not only had I missed an opportunity to reinforce this, I had inadvertently put an employee in an awkward situation. I immediately looked to correct this situation, and I instructed my assistant to order business cards for each employee.

Most factory/manufacturing workers never really have a reason to have a business card, I thought to myself. But I knew it would be a nice gesture and if in the rare instance they ever needed one, they would have it. I have never been so wrong as to think that an individual, based on their employment status, may not need a business card.

Not until the outpouring of thanks did I fully understand how much a small card can mean.  If you have always had a business card, it may mean very little to you.  But to some, it can be a stamp of validation, proclaiming “I am someone” and “I matter.”  Unfortunately, in society today, we are often judged more by what we do rather than who we are.  A card has a way of saying, “I am somebody.”

Many of the workers came up and told me about showing it to their spouse, offering it to friends, or just having something to put in a luggage tag.  One younger employee profusely thanked me, telling me how proud his father was, stating, “He just kept staring at the card and that he had been showing it to all of his friends.”  However, one individual really made me stop and realize the importance of validation.  He stopped by after work to personally thank me for the new business cards.  I flippantly said, “That’s great; I am glad you like them.”  He then asked if I remembered a time when I had not had a business card.  I admitted it had been quite a while. He said, “People have asked me all my life, ‘Do you have a card?’ I have always apologized and said no.”  He relayed a story of standing in line at a local deli restaurant in which his youngest daughter was inquiring about a free lunch give away and a large glass bowl filled with business cards from which the winner would be drawn. “Daddy, do you have a card?” she asked.  Before he could even answer, he shared with me that his oldest daughter interrupted and told the younger sister that “business cards” were for people who were important.  He didn’t say a word.  He couldn’t. In that moment, he realized his daughter now saw him differently than she once had when she was young, and he could do no wrong.  He sat down at the table and quietly requested a to-go box.

Fast forward three months later, he shared with me that armed with a stack of the new business cards I had provided to each employee, he was once again found himself in the deli line with his daughters and that same fishbowl full of business cards coming closer as they moved through the service line.  However, this time, as he stopped at the bowl, he proudly turned to his youngest daughter and asked her if she would like his card for a chance at the drawing and with a wink of any eye to his oldest daughter, he handed the youngest a business card that to the world may have had the title of “Lead Machinist,” but to his daughters the title read, “My Daddy—A Very Important Man.”  

a card and with his wink of an eye to his oldest daughter, he handed the youngest a card that to the world may have had the title of “Lead Machinist,” but to his daughters the title read “My Daddy–A Very Important Man.” Upon telling me this story, he looked at me, and with tears in his eyes said, “you will never know what this business card meant to me.”

Sometimes it is these types of simple lessons of leadership that teach us the real importance of employee equality, voice and creating conditions for active engagement to make a difference for meeting organizational goals and outcomes, as well as favorably influencing the lives of those around them.

How We Lead Speaks Volumes About Us

Leadership is not about telling people what to do, rather it is about providing a clear and properly calibrated strategic plan and effectively motivating others through an environment grounded in equality, voice and engagement.  Mind-body expert Deepak Chopra purports that “influence is the soul of leadership.”  The question is:  Is all well within our soul?  How are we as organizational leaders creating the right conditions for employees to thrive?  What is the evidence that we are treating those we lead as equals?  What forum or modality have we provided our employees to have a voice in decisions that affect them?  Have we created conditions where employees leverage their talents, find their passion in their work and are actively and fully engaged? 

Tom Peters, considered an irrefutable management and leadership expert, has contended that the most important leadership traits are honesty, competency, ability to be forward-looking, inspirational, intelligent, fair-minded, yet broad-minded, courageous, straight shooting, and imaginative.  Before we write this off as Leadership 101, let’s go back to the questions asked earlier in the self-assessment.  What does our behavior actually say about our leadership acumen to others, both internal and external to the organization?  Are we sure that how we rate ourselves is how others, in actuality, would equivocally assess us?  What are we doing or saying that communicates our leadership effectiveness (or ineffectiveness)?  We have to think about small acts as well as bolder larger scale actions of leadership that define whether our leadership compass is working, miscalibrated, or broken. As Colin Powell once said, “Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.” 

In Closing-Our Leadership Imperative

As organizational leaders and human resource professionals, we have the opportunity each and every day to make a difference in the people’s lives and organizations we serve. We are an integral part and linchpin in driving the desired organizational culture where our organizations and its people can thrive.
Therefore, it is our leadership imperative to promote fairness and equality, elevate and integrate employee voice into decisions, and create the conditions where employees are actively engaged and accountable to the organization.  Such an approach to both ‘leading and managing’ serve an integral part of a human capital management strategy that not only focuses on the organization’s true business engine, its people, and facilitates and optimizes performance and desired business outcomes.