When was the last time you posted a job ad for a new role at your organization? Perhaps it’s been a while, so the next question might be more relevant.
As a boss or leading manager at your firm, when have you asked your employees to “take initiative?”
Probably a few times, if not on more than one occasion!
Many leaders communicate a desire for their team members to take initiative or be proactive, among other skills and traits that are highly sought-after. It’s absolutely integral to have the self-awareness to correctly define and interpret the words you use to communicate before verbalizing or writing them to your subordinates.
So, what do “take more initiative” and “be proactive” really mean to the listener on the receiving end? In August 2022, Grant Bummer published a blog post titled “The Importance of Taking Initiative and Being Proactive,” writing that to take initiative “means to do something without being told, to take it upon yourself to act based on your own findings. Instead of waiting to be told what to do, you find out what needs to be done and you complete the task yourself.” According to Bummer, being proactive “refers to creating or controlling a situation yourself, rather than simply waiting to see what happens.”
If you can ultimately accept these definitions, can you truthfully say that you want your employees to “take initiative” or to “be proactive”? Could another word be supplemented here that provides a more accurate definition of what action you want your employee to take?
Through communication management practices and self-awareness development, you can learn to become an effective, respected and well-liked leader in your firm or organization simply by applying the following three communication practices that are too often overlooked and are equally paramount to ensuring business growth, success and a healthy, collaborative work environment. These are: civility, accountability and just decision-making.
Civility
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines civility as “civilized conduct” or “courtesy, politeness.”
Incivility then follows to be defined, by this dictionary, as the opposite: “a rude or discourteous act.” Incivility is subjective to the beholder and can involve making comments to an employee such as:
- “Was this done by a 3-year-old?”
- “Are you sure about that?”
- “I don’t see how this is logical. Are you distracted?”
It can also involve behaviours such as tearing up an employee’s papers or throwing them in the trash bin.
Perhaps you’re a growth-driven or revenue-focused leader and care little for the means to your end goal, including the interpersonal causes and effects within your established social organization. That might be morally acceptable to you. However, bear in mind that allowing the spread of incivility to grow among your superiors, partners and members significantly affects “the performance of the business bottom-line,” according to management professor and researcher Christine Porath, and comes with heavy costs and a destroyed reputation.
Porath proved this point in a 2018 TED Talk she gave. In this talk, she shared how she launched an interesting study. She sent a “survey to business school alumni working at all different business organizations and asked them to write a few sentences about one incident where they were treated rudely, insensitively or were insulted,” and the results were that “incivility made people less motivated. Sixty-six percent cut back work efforts, 80 percent lost time worrying about what happened and 12 percent left their job.” Furthermore, performance for witnesses of uncivil conduct decreases by “25 percent.”
She gives an example of how Sysco, the food distributor and wholesaler, “conservatively estimated that incivility was costing them $12 million dollars a year.”
Uncivil conduct coughs up a high price on your reputation, too. Porath also shared how research in Israel has “shown that medical teams exposed to rudeness perform[ed] worse not only in all their diagnostics but in all the procedures they did,” making reference to the extreme circumstance of a patient dying due to a “boss’s uncivil behaviour with his staff before they went into the operation room.”
To learn more about how being a civil leader can help you perform better, visit Christine Porath’s TED Talk here.
We can begin understanding how civility is a behavioural component of communication that, when mindfully practiced, is advantageous to your business growth and your internal organization’s satisfaction and performance.
On the topic of civility, I’ll leave you with Porath requoting the former Campbell’s Soup CEO Doug Conant, who reminded people to be “tough-minded on standards, tender-hearted on people.”
Accountability
In 2019, Joshua Freedman wrote an article titled “Creating a Culture of Accountability: The 4 Checkpoints of Accountable Communication,” which defines accountability as “accepting responsibility for the outcome of your choices.” In this context, we can imagine how good communication in a leadership position should consider the responsibility that also comes with choosing which words to use.
Take again, for instance, the example of telling your employee to “take initiative.” Say your employee takes initiative and proactively tries to answer a client’s technical question by email. You then tell them not to do that again and that only upper management should be responding to the client. Then, a week later, you get frustrated and scold your employee for not sending emails the way you’ve always wanted them sent.
Two problems arise in these two contextual examples. In the first incident, the employee took initiative by the definition previously mentioned in this post. The critical omission on the part of the authority figure in this dynamic is the non-accountability or lack of responsibility, thereof, to choose more appropriate verbiage to accurately direct the employee to the realistic actions that were expected of them.
Maybe you don’t actually want an employee to take initiative, by the word’s actual definition, but rather, you’d like an employee to provide just and progressive counsel to management. The latter could suggest to the receiver of this communication (the listener) that you’d like the employee to provide a fair evaluation of operations and reports and develop innovative ideas and suggestions for the firm, using an active and collaborative growth mindset. This is one interpretation that might align better with your vision of the employee’s job role and the responsibilities you’d realistically like to see.
ChangeFactory’s article titled “Communication; it’s our Accountability,” highlights how “both the communicator and the listener have Responsibility, but only the communicator has Accountability.”
Along these lines, ChangeFactory’s article titled “Communication; it’s our Accountability,” highlights how “both the communicator and the listener have Responsibility, but only the communicator has Accountability.”
In this case, as the leader and communicator, you’re in a position where you’re accountable for the response or effect of the receiving party of your communication, to some extent. While we don’t have the gift of telepathy just yet, you can legally and socially protect your reputation and your firm by expecting what can be termed a “reasonable reaction” to your choice of words.
If there are parameters you intend your employee to work within, it’s your responsibility to take accountability if it so happens that the parameters aren’t communicated in the best way possible and at the right time.
Similarly, if you get upset with an employee for not sending emails or writing draft documents exactly the way you wanted them done, you must take accountability for the fact that perhaps the employee never received clear or accessible instructions regarding this task. Alternatively, maybe they were promised training and could have indeed received it, but was the training quality checked and approved by management?
Further, was there a checklist or a measurement of the employee’s understanding, following the completion of training? Was there engagement and attention to the onboarding process (on your part or a delegate’s part) to ensure that incidents that could cost your firm, yourself and your reputation wouldn’t happen frivolously or frequently? Can you also be responsible for the fact that a procedure or policy to protect the vulnerability of those lowest on the corporate food chain may not exist within your firm? And if an employee asks for a manual or procedure for a task you asked them to comply with, remember that you’re legally and professionally responsible and accountable for the lack of said policies and procedures—if, indeed, there aren’t any.
Taking accountability for the true meaning of your word choices and the resulting effect or actions taken by the listener will hopefully remind you to be more mindful the next time you delegate responsibilities in your company or are seeking to hire a new employee. Be certain what it is you’re looking for and how best to describe that in an authentic and transparent way.
Remember that accountability is a two-way street. Joshua Freedman’s own experience paints a great example of how non-accountable communication can produce negative results. He writes, “When I was teaching, it was a constant struggle to increase accountability for some students. Some kids consistently failed to do their best work, and I told them I was not satisfied with that performance. At the same time, I know that sometimes I read student homework thoroughly, and sometimes I barely looked at it. The result was that I was creating a context of inconsistent accountability—not only was I modelling poorly, I was making the choice to leave ‘wiggle room’ or ambiguity. I can see now that if I wanted my students to be more accountable, I had to be more accountable.”
This is where you ask yourself if you’re hedging! Don’t know what that means? Dive into answering Freedman’s four questions for yourself here to find out how best to increase your accountability as a leader.
Just decision-making
Justice is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “the quality of being just, impartial, or fair” or “the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.”
We can understand just decision-making as a form of thinking communication. The information we receive hardly ever covers all facts and perspectives. As a leader, it’s important to develop the practice of making just decisions that are fair—in other words, objective and impartial. For this to be realized, aligning incompatible data is a crucial ingredient to just behaviours and practices, and ultimately, making just decisions.
Brigette Hyacinth’s LinkedIn blog post, titled “Employees don’t Leave Companies, They Leave Managers” statistically supports the importance of being a fair and just boss by claiming that “75 percent of workers who voluntarily left their jobs did so because of their bosses and not the position itself” and that “a manager who keeps throwing employees under the bus will create an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust. A recent study says that 56 percent of employees would turn down a 10 percent raise to stay with a great boss.”
To pass impartial judgement, it’s important to objectively evaluate the employee’s point of view with compassionate empathy.
A lack of just evaluation prior to making critical decisions for your organization, such as whether or not to assign more responsibility to a worker or to fire them, requires the ability to see a situation from multiple angles and to extrapolate conflicting sources of information. To pass impartial judgment, it’s important to objectively evaluate the employee’s point of view with compassionate empathy.
Alexa Drake published an eye-opening article in 2019 called “Why Employees Quit: 60 Statistics Employers Should Know,” sharing valuable data on why employees truly quit their workplaces, with one statistic stating that “92 percent of employees said that they would be more likely to stay with their jobs if their bosses showed more empathy.” That percentage gives us a stark picture of the liability and costs that could easily be avoided just by being more empathic and making impartial, balanced decisions.
The actions or non-actions we subscribe to are forms of communication and can produce negative results if, as leaders, we’re incapable of justly thinking through our actions. Making a passive unjust decision could look like ignoring your employee’s willingness to take initiative and grow the company with progressive ideas.
An active unjust decision would be to fire an employee after productivity, performance and engagement levels have dropped without first fairly assessing why this is happening or being curious enough to have a real and honest conversation with the employee—and perhaps coming to an understanding of how your role as leader has failed the employee in this regard.
Being a witness to a lack of overall employee engagement or letting go of certain people from your company unjustly could lead to an unwanted and negative reputation for yourself and your company. Remember—people talk.
Mindful leadership brings success
By cultivating these three important communication practices, you can foster a healthier, more engaged and higher-performing work environment while simultaneously contributing long-term gains to your financial bottom line.
Remember to consistently practice civility and accountability with what you say, and ensure that you’re making just decisions. When you do this, your clients and staff will help lift you and your company up to greater success and fulfillment than you could’ve ever imagined.
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image 1: Mohamed hassan; image 2: Yan Krukau; image 3: Andrea Piacquadio; image 4: Engin Akyurt
