More Than Words…
No, not the 1991 single by Extreme! I’m talking about what you and I need to provide to set the tone in our organizations - especially since we’re far more likely to get what we are then just what we want!
Whether they’re listed in the employee handbook, on a document in a fancy frame that hangs in our lobby, or printed t-shirts we give to all our employees, the values we want lived out by the individuals on our teams absolutely have to be more than words! We’ve got to be responsible for leading by example in the workplace, especially if we want to provide our team members with a reason to care about the organization anywhere close to as much as we do…
So what can leaders do to set a good example for others in the organization? One of the most common things I hear is “I don’t expect anyone to do something that I’m not willing to do myself.” While I respect the sentiment behind that, I’m not sure it’s always possible to display on a regular basis, especially if we have a large team of folks who are counting on us. The reality I see so often is that leaders who attempt this get bogged down in the work they could and should be paying others to do. If a leader insists on taking out their own trash and sweeping or mopping their office floor but doesn’t have time to meet one-on-one with a team member who needs them, they may need to re-evaluate how they’re using their time!
Yeah, I know that’s a fairly lame example but hopefully you get the point… Leading by example isn’t doing the exact tasks we need our team members to do, it’s more about performing at the same high level of expectations within the tasks we’re responsible for. And quite honestly, as leaders, we’d do well to make a practice of exceeding the expectations our teams have of us!
I can think of two great examples of this who I’ve watched closely over the last few years. Both have clearly defined values for their organizations and both are very engaged in the day-to-day operations as well as with their team members. Those two things alone provide an example that their respective teams have bought into, but they each take those values a step further. I’ve seen each of them be very intentional about tying things they do or decisions they’ve made back to those values when they interact with their teams, be that in an individual conversation or in group meetings. Not only are they providing the example through their behavior, they’re not leaving anything to chance when they explain their actions to their teams!
But just like a leader’s time is often stretched too thin to have a hand in every kind of task, few are likely to be able to provide a visual example (or an explanation along with it) for every single person on their team. That makes it even more important to take advantage of the opportunities we do have - because someone is ALWAYS watching.
They See You When You’re Sleeping…?
Whether Santa Claus comes to town or not, we can rest assured that from the moment we accept responsibility for leading our teams someone will ALWAYS be watching the example we set. Hopefully they won’t be watching when we actually are sleeping (because that’s creepy, even for Santa) but they'll definitely be watching if we’re asleep at the leadership wheel! It’s almost like they’re following the playbook Ray Stevens wrote in Santa Claus is Watching You when he said “So where's Rudolph? He's on a stakeout at your house. You can run, you can hide, but you can't get away. Got binoculars focused on you everyday.”
OK, so maybe the folk we’re leading aren’t on a stakeout or watching us with binoculars - but I promise you they’re paying attention…
Think back to what I shared before about my friend Terry. I mentioned the picture of him suiting up to roll through mud and water under a tank in freezing weather but I didn’t explain much about what I had observed personally… Since he was one of those northerners, he was already under more than a little bit of scrutiny from the old timers in the building. He quickly developed a reputation as a stickler for following the safety rules, mainly because he was willing to address anyone who wasn’t wearing gloves, ear plugs or safety glasses. I remember a time soon after he started when he was walking by the press I was running and he picked a metal slug up out of the aisle. One of the main reasons he did this was that those slugs could cut a chunk out of a forklift tire and that was a fairly significant expense throughout the facility. He also understood that he was setting an example for others in the area who saw him; if a manager was willing to pick a piece of scrap off the floor as they walked through, we didn’t have any reason for walking by it without picking it up…
Being the wise ass that I was at the time, I stopped him to point out that he had picked up the metal slug without putting on gloves. Rather than making excuses for why he didn’t have gloves on, he thanked me for bringing it to his attention. That was weird enough by itself but he went on to tell me that he’d make sure he did better moving forward. Interestingly enough, he followed through! I even remember seeing him use a shop ticket to pick up a piece of scrap on one of the few occasions he didn’t have a pair of gloves stuffed in his back pocket. Quite honestly, just seeing him start keeping those gloves in his pocket sent a pretty strong message, one that showed he wasn’t above following the rules and he was willing to meet the same expectations he had for everyone else…
If we want to be the leader who sets a good example for others in our organization, it will always take more than words! Our teams will always pay more attention to what we do than they do to what we say. But I certainly understand how tough it can be, especially when we’re responsible for a large team, to provide a visual example for everyone. That’s where I’ll tie this back to something else our friend Jeff Henderson shared in Know What You’re For, “Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone!” His point was that we may never be able to do everything we want to for each individual we serve but when we do what we can for who we can, word will spread quickly. When we hold one person accountable for choosing poor behaviors, others notice. When we do that while balancing candor with a bit of compassion, others will notice that too! And when we hold ourselves to even higher standards than we hold our teams to, we can develop a reputation for leading by example in our workplace!
But make no mistake, this won’t happen overnight…
There’s No Magic Pill!
Even when we come to terms with the fact that it will always require more than just words as well as the fact that someone on our team will ALWAYS be watching, there’s one more thing we have to accept as a harsh reality: there’s no magic pill for getting our team members to follow us in lock step immediately! Leading by example in the workplace is never a one-and-done task. It will take time, even when we’re exceeding expectations by leaps and bounds, but we can (and should) expect to see results from this over the long haul.
Since I’ve referenced our friend Jeff Henderson a few times here already, I’ll share one more story he told us. A significant portion of Jeff’s career was with Chick-fil-A so he knew just about all there was to know about God’s chicken sandwich. He also had the inside scoop on a few other things their culture was built on… Today, it would border on blasphemy to be told “You’re Welcome” after thanking the person at the drive-through window for our food. In fact, it’s not hard to tell when someone at any other drive-through had a previous tenure at Chick-fil-A because saying “my pleasure” apparently becomes part of their DNA. It’s almost like Chick-fil-A has some sort of voodoo woven into their orientation process that automatically switches the phrases in each of their employees’ vocabulary!
But it wasn’t always that way… Jeff explained that Truett Cathy initially had the idea of telling each customer “my pleasure” during a stay at some high end hotel. Truett recognized how nice it made him feel and believed that feeling didn’t have to be exclusive to pricey lodging; why not feel just as good about being handed our lunch! He immediately started talking about this with his executive team and with the team members of each store he visited - and the rest was history, right? Not at all! Even with this initiative being set by the company’s founder, it took YEARS to become the part of culture that we know it as today. And if changing a simple response took that long for Truett Cathy, how much more effort should we expect to exert to drive behavioral change around the values in our organizations?
In case you didn’t realize it, that was a rhetorical question… It will require significant effort for a long time, but the juice is worth the squeeze - especially when the situational leadership examples we provide are tied directly to the values we hold most dear. When we commit to providing an example we’d love to have emulated by everyone on our teams, and we do it over and over and over again, we should absolutely expect to see that example (and the values behind it) become just as much of a part of our company’s DNA as “my pleasure” has become for Chick-fil-A!
With all that in mind, I’ll wrap this all up with a word of caution for leaders… Just like there’s no magic pill to make any of this happen overnight, there’s also no time that we can drop the ball. Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” I heard my dear friend Rob say something similar once; “You can build 1,000 bridges before you’re known as a bridge builder, but if you ______ just one donkey, you’ll be forever known as a donkey-_____.”
Is leading by example in the workplace tough at times? Most definitely! But that’s the price of accepting leadership responsibility. And if we do this well, over time, the impact we make and the lives we touch through what we do will be so worth it!