Tag Archive for: servant leadership

Practicing Empathetic Leadership

October 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Human Skills/by Angela MacCabe

Hi, and a warm welcome to The Human Side of Business Podcast. I’m your host Ange MacCabe. I am pleased to introduce you to Tatyana Mamut, whom is a tech innovator, board member, and keynote speaker.

Tatyana Mamut is a transformative leader in Silicon Valley who drives innovation by understanding customers deeply and leading through empathy. She is a serial entre/intrapreneur, building successful products at Amazon, Salesforce, Nextdoor and IDEO. She is currently SVP of New Products at Pendo leading the creation of the Adopt family of products.

Tatyana has a PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and a BA in economics from Amherst College. She is a refugee from eastern Ukraine and comes from three generations of Soviet professional women. She lives with her spouse and two daughters in San Francisco.

In this episode of the Human Side of Business Podcast Tatyana and I discuss what is looks like to practice empathetic leadership and how this approach to leadership impacts teams.

Servant Leadership

Tatyana Mamut: What didn’t come so naturally to me, especially as an early leader, was the side of the empathy for the internal organization. Right. Because I always saw, like, when I was younger, I always saw the internal organization as just a means to the end of serving the customer. Right. And I didn’t really appreciate how much love a leader needed to put into their actual team and their actual organization. Because what I’ve learned as a leader is that what doesn’t work is trying to tell people what to do. What doesn’t work is trying to make yourself put yourself on a pedestal and try to motivate people through this strong personality.

What does work? What I found is that some of those behaviors you can have, but people feel a different energy from you when it comes from an act of love. A lot of people talk about this as Servant leadership.

But what is Servant leadership? It’s really about having this perspective that I work for my team. Right. And I am there to really create the environment in which they will flourish.

How Love Translates to the Workplace

Tatyana Mamut: How do you define love in the workplace? What does that actually look like? So, for me, love is an energy. It’s the energy that you’re bringing to every conversation. It’s the energy that you’re bringing to every interaction. And it doesn’t mean that you’re a soft leader and everybody is fine and nobody gets any critical feedback. In fact, love and truth resonate at the same energetic frequency. And so you are not actually loving someone or putting out a love energy when you’re trying to hide a difficult reality. It’s about being open, honest, transparent, right? And do it in a way where you are opening yourself and inviting this exchange with the other person from a place of true caring, of trying to accomplish something together.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Tatyana Mamut: I believe and what I do on my teams is that psychological safety means that everyone feels safe to speak their truth and to point out and challenge each other, no matter who is being challenged. I think any leader who is not comfortable with being publicly criticized by the most junior members of their team is not really understanding the point of psychological safety. Psychological safety means that everyone feels safe to challenge anyone else.

The Function of a Leader

Tatyana Mamut: Many people think that they have the right information and that they are smarter than the leader. I think tech reads this right because in tech a lot of people think that experience doesn’t matter very much. It’s like young people who can figure things out and hack their way to things and we can talk about that another time. But the point is a lot of people, like the people from marketing will be certain that we should do this and then the people from engineering are certain that we should do this and then the people from another team, like customer success are absolutely certain we should do this. And one of the things that as the captain of the ship that you have to help explain to people.

It’s not because we don’t love your customer that you’re seeing. I believe that you are seeing what you’re seeing. I believe everything that you’re saying and the things that the other functions are seeing are equally valid. And we need to learn how to connect and bridge those gaps. And my job as a leader is to take in all of those inputs and steer the ship in one direction because the ship cannot go in four different directions.

For more leadership insights check out my blog: 5 Questions To Ask Yourself To Become A Better Leader

Link to full podcast episode

Are You In Touch With Your Values?

October 18, 2024/0 Comments/in Human Skills/by Angela MacCabe

Intuity Stands For…

Integrity

Emotional Intelligence

Community

Accountability

Equity

Intuity Performance was founded to fill gaps. What gaps you ask? Well really it comes down to ‘people’ gaps. Our leadership team is where we start for effective change. However Intuity Performance’s approach to looking at the people behind the role vs. the role itself impacts all professionals.

It starts with integrity. The integrity to run our organizations based on what we say and act upon. How we carry our business interactions ought to align with what is written on our walls and manifestos (values). Intuity Performance supports this notion with passion. It is so important to have actions that show what culture means. The first step is to really understand what your culture currently is and what you wish for it to be. Having honest conversation with team members along the way keeps engagement alive.

We know based on the new leadership models, Servant Leadership, Accountability Leadership and Win/Win Leadership approaches they all have facets of emotional intelligence. Research tells us that over 88% of successful leaders have high levels of emotional intelligence.

How does this show up in the workplace?

Safe to fail environments, high levels of leadership ownership and efforts to lead from the back.

Community is important in the workplace. We spend over 80% of our waking hours at work or doing some form of work related tasks. Knowing that you are a part of a community with strong roots, support systems and willingness to problem solve is a key component of resilient organizations.

Accountability is a strong predictor of leadership in an organization. Then make the appropriate actions for change. For a leader to stand up and say, ‘hey I messed up, here’s where I went wrong and how I will correct my error.’ That takes solid strength and (normally) is a pillar for high levels of trust and as an outcome engagement in the workplace.

Equity. Organizations that establish and maintain equity in pay, company perks and awards, in diverse voices, and opinions are far more likely to produce higher levels of revenue then those that are not. When equity is present it lends itself to a sense of community.

Intuity Performance exists today to work with companies and individuals that want to look past the role and focus on the whole person performance systems. Ensuring that our business objectives align with our people is the balance between proactive and reactive endeavours.

Want to learn more? Contact us for your complimentary consultation.

Navigating Our New Normal

October 18, 2024/0 Comments/in Leadership/by Angela MacCabe

As we navigate COVID-19 and what our new ‘normal’ will be, there are a few things that come top of mind. Part one of this two blog post series is about our ‘new normal’. Our primary focus is: self-kindness and self-awareness are the roots of managing stressors with positivity.

How we act in response to where we are at with self-kindness and self-awareness can determine our results and outcomes with both professional and personal relationships.

We Are Out of Our Element: Self-Kindness is Key

For some of us, work has stopped completely, or maybe slowed to a ‘work what you can’ from home schedule, to working in a totally changed environment that can be downright scary to some.

Sidebar, thank you to all front line professionals: we see you, we love you, we are grateful for what you are doing for everyone.

In some situations, it is not top of mind that living in this industrial world has conditioned us to have, generally speaking ‘high’ expectations of outcomes and productivity regardless of our environment.

Self-kindness is key more so now than ever before. Self-kindness can take many forms but what I’m talking about is self-kindness first to ourselves. How can we give to our teams, our spouses or our children if we are spinning ourselves?

Now, we must let go of any predetermined notion of what we anticipated accomplishing in the next month, three months, six months and maybe even a year. I am not saying give up on our goals but immediate results and response is the adjustment needed. It’s tough and we are all living it, but just think about how much space and energy we free up for ourselves if we let go of previous expectations of outcomes and all that self-pressure.

These question may be of value in assessing whether realignment with self-kindness is needed:

How are my current self-expectations impacting me?
Do I have current beliefs of outcomes that are holding me back?
What am I doing, right now, to ensure I am kind to myself?

Figuring out how much is in our way or weighing us down is a powerful form of self-kindness and discovery. Minimally, ensuring that we are taken care of through self-care (exercise, sleep, nutritious food and anything else that is a positive change) can allow us to have space for those important things like pivoting, realigning and innovating.

Now is the Time to Elevate our Self-Awareness

Did you know that Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a leading indicator of whether you are a successful leader? Studies have shown that over 87% of leaders who engage with and look to positively impact their teams (servant leaders) have higher levels of EQ and most importantly self-awareness.

So what is self-awareness? In short, self-awareness is the ability to understand in the moment how situations trigger and impact you along with your external responses and how to align your actions with your values. Although many leaders (and individuals) believe they are self-aware only 10-15% studied have been deemed self-aware. Self-awareness is a small proponent but largely important in the grand scheme of emotional intelligence.

Unlike Intelligence Quotient (IQ), EQ can be strengthened, just like focusing on a core group of muscles for strength and endurance.

So how do you start? By doing an EQ assessment(s) for your baseline and looking for candid and honest feedback from individuals you trust. Then you can understand your blind spots and where you want to focus for growth. It is only upon repetition that we can shift our habits and actions.

These questions may be of value:

What would you want to discover more about your emotional quotient (EQ)?
If you were to discover your EQ how do you think it would impact your professional/personal life?
What areas of EQ do you want to learn more about to elevate your professional/personal growth?