Putting the Human In Leadership

A recent Gartner survey of more than 230 HR leaders revealed that 90% believe that to succeed in today’s work environment, leaders must focus on the human aspects of leadership, yet just 29% of employees report that their leader is a human leader. 

But what exactly does it mean to be a human leader?

Human Leadership: The Basics  

According to another Gartner study, three major traits make up human leadership:

• Authentic: act purposefully and enable true self-expression for themselves and their teams.
• Empathetic: show genuine care, respect, and concern for employees’ well-being.
• Adaptive: enable flexibility and support that fits team members’ unique needs

Human leaders act from a place of service and support—they want to serve employees by enabling their productivity and, ultimately, helping them achieve their goals. 

They let their people’s needs drive their actions more than the bottom line. They are humans first and managers second—recognizing that happy, healthy employees are more likely to help them achieve business objectives. 

In fact, Gartner discovered a 37-percentage point increase in the number of employees reporting high engagement who report to a human leader versus employees who do not consider their leader to be a human leader. This increase is significant since highly engaged employees improve their team’s performance by up to 27%.

Combining the Manager and the Leader

To cultivate human-first leadership at a company, James R. Bailey, professor and Hochberg Fellow of Leadership at George Washington University, suggests looking into how “leaders” vs “managers” are classified at the organization. 

Oftentimes, leaders are viewed as someone in the C-Suite and managers are somewhere in the middle of the org chart. They’re distinct and separate. 

“Where the manager has his eye on the bottom line, the leader has his eye on the horizon. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective,” says Bailey, quoting fellow academic Warren Bennis. 

To explore this idea further, Bailey queried over 1,000 C-suite executives from 17 countries with a simple analogy, asking them to fill in the blanks: “Leadership is to ___ as management is to ____.” 

Many answers included the following pairs: subjective/objective, emotion/reason, values/facts, strategy/operations, change/stability, inspiration/motivation, passion/pay, transform/perform.

The goal of human leadership is not to choose one or the other. Human leaders find a way to bring both the management and leadership ethos to their work; they integrate manager best practices and leadership best practices into all they do to drive better outcomes for their direct reports and the business. 

Developing Human Leaders

However, this transformation does not happen overnight. 

First, it’s critical for employers to demonstrate the change from the top down. Executives and C-suite leaders should focus on honing their management skills, connecting with their direct reports, and bringing more authenticity, empathy, and adaptivity to their work. Merging the leader-manager gap at the top will create a positive shift in company culture, creating the conditions necessary for more managers to become leaders. 

Second, bridging the leader-manager gap to cultivate more human leadership across the company requires leadership development through coaching and training. 

Often, managers are spread thin and have their heads down, focused on team goals and the bottom line. Leadership development creates a space where they can focus solely on building the skills necessary to become a human leader with a productive, engaged, and loyal team. 

To create and scale up leadership development programs that foster human leadership, most companies will bring in an outside expert, like Tina E. Grimes, this week’s guest on America Back to Work, and an award-winning leadership coach. 

To upskill and develop a human leader, Grimes recommends that companies and HR professionals start by having managers complete a self-assessment around their strengths and weaknesses. 

“You have to find a way in,” says Grimes. 

Access more of her expert tactics for merging the leader-manager divide and strategies for developing human leaders by watching or listening to the episode here—and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any more expert interviews.