People Scaling: Getting along versus getting ahead II
Carrying forward from the previous article, we do have leaders beyond the Burning Star & Genius Sage….read ahead!
The Pampering Pink: As empathy and kindness is overspilled into the workplace as part of behavioral competencies required to enhance team performance, it is the Pampering Pink leaders who might go on an overdrive trying to keep the team satisfied without pushing for accountability. While certain pre-disposition of behavioral traits within the Pink leaders could be influencing such abundance of pampering, our belief systems often prompt us to consider such a false positive trait, not realizing the impact of diminishing margins and the limitation of how much behavioral change and adaptation can be influenced using empathy and associated parameters and completely missing on task orientation.
The Reaper Rock: The hard souls who focus on pure accountability with no iota of empathy and kindness is also a common for workplaces where the push for results and numbers in high demand and pressure from the top. While such Rocks are typically pampered by management for enforcing discipline and accountability in the short term, the long term damage to values and culture might often be irreparable. The missing people factor orientation is almost a crime in today’s social construct of justice and workplace behavior.
Not realizing, Management is often blinded by greed of revenues and rare in considering the core requirement of consistent revenues. Remember, revenues are just an outcome of a set of processes and thus focus on the processes can generate consistency of outcomes.
The Capable Coach: The coaching and mentoring approach is today’s ideal leader who can help businesses into higher performance levels by scaling teams through a healthy mix of empathy plus accountability together. Contrary to popular wisdom, leaders do not need to have all the answers; no one person can be all-knowing. But a team which excels in having a healthy mix of knowledge can move mountains faster and better, as we have seen in combination sports like football and baseball. This also ensures knowledge is not secluded but shared for long term impact and benefit of the entire team.
What can a growing organisation do to build People Scaling approach across teams? Finding the Capable Coaches within the teams first. The importance of People Scaling can ensure every team member carry within themselves the potential of a Capable Coach. The benefits of a People Scaling approach for organisations are long term, healthy and robust, ensuring least leakages. So does People Scaling come with no negatives?
People Scaling will also ensure a high element of competitiveness. This might result in a drop of trust among teammates, as all are competing to grow forward. This is a human element, and the good news is, people tend to gather more collaboration if the direction is the same, making up for lost trust. As a factor, trust with no growth solves no equation of success and growth paramount to the organisation. Also, it not that trust is completely wiped out.
The other benefit of People Scaling is it’s importance during pandemic situations like COVID. During the need to scale down operations and manage with skeletal structures, processes like People Scaling offer to fill critical gaps in skills across the teams and not just focus on leadership. So, how exactly does this work? Let me discuss this in the next article to ensure it doesn’t become a lengthy read. To know more about the People Scaling approach, leave your comments or reach out to me at Medium or LinkedIn.