We Lead People, Not Cardboard Cutouts

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Forbes, April 11, 2019

by Michael Gretczko


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My wife and I just took our 5-year-old fraternal twins on a skiing vacation. Our daughter is caution incarnate. She likes to ski in a familial caravan — one parent ahead and one behind — and she wants constant feedback about her performance. Our son likes to get a rough idea of the conditions — icy here, snowboarders there — and push off. He doesn’t mind falling and doesn’t particularly care what we think of his performance. It’s astounding how different twins can be.

I’m constantly amazed how my children can uncover insights that allow me to see my role as a leader in a new light. I’m always seeking new ways to create engaged, high-performing teams, and typically, that devolves to some type of employee segmentation, by generation, job description or personality. We’re told that millennials often prefer to work this way, programmers want to work that way, and that Driver and Pioneer Business Chemistry styles want to work yet another way. But if my twins respond best to radically different conditions and parenting styles, can any type of segmentation be granular enough to respond to the individual needs of employees?

I suspect that it can’t. To engage with people on a truly human level — that is, to get beyond the employees-as-interchangeable-assets mindset — we need to be far more responsive to employees as individuals. Read the rest here.