What followers want from Leaders

I'm also reading "Strengths Based Leadership" by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie.  This is one of several books published by the same Gallup organization famous for it's Gallup Polls and Surveys.  What I like about these books is that they base their recommendations on exhaustive, objective research.  Most business books develop theories based on more limited experiences and on speculation.  These other books MIGHT be right, but I like the way the Gallup books are built on empirical data.

What I've read in the book that has had the biggest impact on me is its findings on what FOLLOWERS want.  To evaluate what makes a good people, they did a survey of 10,000 people who FOLLOW leaders.  The survey was simple.  First they asked if the person ever had a leader who made a positive impact on their life.  Then they asked them to list four words describing what the leader provided for them.  This was "fill in the blank", not multiple choice, lest they bias the responses.

The Gallup folks looked for the most common themes and came up with these four:

• Trust (as in the leader was someone who the follower trusted, someone with integrity and honesty who they could depend on)
• Compassion (the follower felt that the leader cared about them personally)
• Stability (the follower felt safe with the leader because the leader was making sure the organization was stable and that the work environment had some continuity rather than constant change for the sake of change)
• Hope (the follower felt that the leader was guiding them toward a better future)

These themes seem to explain which of the teams that I lead are going well and which teams have few people showing up to any conference calls.  For one information systems team that is going well, I've had lots of opportunities to welcome conflicting opinions and adjust based on input (trust), to spend quality one-on-one time addressing individual concerns (compassion), to show that I can gain alignment with leadership at all 5 sites so that our initial proposals don't get reworked during rollout (stability), and to define a couple of big improvements in systems that everyone is excited about (hope).  In the calls that have had poor participation and low ownership, above all, I've failed to meet many deadlines due to conflicting priorities (loss of trust) and  the changes in timing and priorities probably have affected confidence in future of the project (lack of stability).  It isn't too late to address these issues, but it helps to get clear on their priority.