Fellow Leaders: Please Remember to Be Human!

To be successful leaders our world class, fast paced, high performance companies, we need to BE many things:

• Focused and Aware

• Goal-oriented and Flexible

• Strategic and Tactical

• Collaborative and Dependable

• Employee-focused and Client-focused

• Confident and "Coachable"

• Driven and Patient

• Process-oriented and Nimble

• Ambitious and Humble

• Professional and Approachable

You and I - executives and leaders - we practice and improve all of these skills over time and with great effort and willingness to change. We receive 360 surveys, annual performance reviews, and continuous immediate "feedback" from those around us ensuring we are making decisions and executing our tasks in such a way as to support business stability, increased market share, and employee and client satisfaction.

... And that is all wonderful.

Please, however, ALSO REMEMBER TO BE HUMAN! Our employees need us! Our teams need to know WHO we are. Our teams often spend more time with us than they do their own families (or pets or weekend cycling groups). They do not need another sanitized shell of a leader pretending to care while remaining oddly distant. They do not need a leader who claims to have hired them for their valuable insight, diversity, and experience but operates only in transmit mode. Fellow leaders, please:

• Look your awesome employees in the eyes when they tell you about their weekend!

• Laugh with them, even when (and I would argue especially when) the pressure is high and business is difficult.

• Share with them - Let them get to know you. They are making sacrifices for you. You are demanding quite a bit of your employees - the least you can do is reveal to them who it is they are following into the fire.

• Be present in all of those very human, very real, and often uncomfortable moments that happen between meetings, business meals, and project reviews.

Of course this isn't easy or simple. Of course we must balance our professional relationships with our employees with performance expectations. Of course we will make mistakes along the way.

But the rewards far outweigh the risks. Our responsibility as leaders is not only to perform for the business, but also to have lasting positive impact on our teams. That impact, fellow leaders - the kind of impact which makes us memorable, which makes us significant, which makes us valuable - it happens in all of those human moments between the rest of the to-do lists and meetings.