Welcome to the new Lighthouse Leadership Weekly! What’s different you might ask? A few things have changed:
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- Beehiiv opens up a number of tools and functionality we’ll be experimenting with in the coming weeks.
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Otherwise, this newsletter will have the same great content you’ve grown to love.
In this week’s edition, we talk about data around abusive bosses, share how you can measure trust without overwhelming your team with surveys, look for your input on our Black Friday deal this year, and a lot more…
Table of Contents
- 🥘 Food for Thought on Abusive Bosses
- ❓️ Ask Lighthouse on Measuring Trust
- ❓ Poll of the Week on What Motivates Your Team Members Most
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🥘 Food for Thought on Abusive Bosses
Adam Grant is a professor at UPenn Wharton, so he frequently shares interesting research at the intersection of academia and the workplace.
Last week, I was excited to see a meta-analysis on a crucial topic: Abusive Bosses.
So today we take a look at some of the most interesting findings from that study (which you can review the whole report here).
1) Bad Bosses make themselves a target most.
One of the most interesting findings to me is that it turns out that people tend to directly retaliate against an abusive boss; it seems that if your boss is abusive, you then respond in kind to them, versus taking it out on others in the company.
"Poor leadership and interpersonal injustice were much stronger predictors of supervisor- than organization-targeted aggression."
When you think about abusive bosses, one of the things they’ll often do is complain about their environment and how everyone else acts. It seems this study reinforces that they’re the creators of their own personal workplace hell.
Or put more simply: Treat people as you want to be treated (or they might just treat you as you treat them).
2) The worst abuse is treating people poorly
Unfortunately, there are many ways for a boss to be abusive. This led the researchers to look at how different forms of abuse impact people:
* Interpersonal injustice (how you treat people): .51 correlation with supervisor-targeted aggression
* Procedural injustice (fairness of processes): .29 correlation
* Distributive injustice (fairness of outcomes): .17 correlation
This “correlation” is the relation between this form of abuse and how much the employee negatively reacts to it, meaning that being mistreated is significantly more important than processes and outcomes.
And if you really think about it, this also makes a lot of sense. While sometimes “the process is the punishment” may be true, that process has to get quite bad before you’ll react nearly as bad as someone who is curt, a jerk, or otherwise obnoxious or inappropriate to you, especially at work.
So remember: treat your team members with respect and show some care for them and you can avoid the biggest reason you could have a tough relationship with them.
3) The most important behaviors to avoid
We’ve already covered one of the most important behaviors you should avoid to have outcomes like abusive bosses get, so let’s look at what else the study mentioned to avoid:
- "hostile verbal and nonverbal behavior": Don’t use sharp and toxic language. This is the easiest for all but the biggest jerks to avoid.
- "overcontrol" or "authoritarian management style": Micromanagement can frustrate people as we talk about often with Task Relevant Maturity.
- "lack of charismatic leadership": As we also discuss often, an inspiring vision, and helping people understand their purpose are powerful, positive motivators that could otherwise counteract many of these other abuses.
If you’re reading this newsletter, I assume you’re probably not abusive yourself (or start fixing that ASAP!), but this list should also empower you to know what to look out for most.
That means as a leader you should:
- Have Zero Tolerance for abusive language & behavior: Given how much damage it does and how it can poison a team through back and forth sniping, you need to nip it in the bud immediately.
- Teach all your managers Task Relevant Maturity: Micromanagement frustrates your A+ players the most, so you can least afford to have a manager of your best teams strangle their team members with it.
- Remind your teams about their purpose + value frequently: It may seem like a small thing, but it makes a big difference to remind your people that their work matters. Bad bosses tend to take all the credit and say little.
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You make a choice every day.
The decisions you make each morning determine what kind of day you’ll have. These decisions then compound day after day and week after week to determine if you’re a good, bad, or mediocre manager.
What actions did you take last week to be a good manager? How many negative things did you do (or forget to do) that you need to string some good days together to make up for?
Take a minute and think about how you can make next week great.
❓️ Ask Lighthouse on Measuring Trust
A reader writes in with a great question:
“Regarding measuring trust in a team, do you recommend any specific methods to consistently gather feedback from peers without overwhelming them with reviews or surveys?”
This manager has a good instinct; sending too many surveys creates a number of problems:
- Survey Fatigue: It’s easy to get tired of taking more surveys, and feel like you have too many other, more pressing things to do.
- Lack of Resolution: If you put something in a survey, and no one responds to the concern or follows up with you, you’re unlikely to fill out the next one.
- Imperfect vessel: A survey gives you a scale (which you may not all agree on…some are the Russian judge!) and perhaps some open-ended text, but that’s so much less than you get in the way of tone of voice, body language, and other signals from a live conversation.
So instead of sending another survey, here’s how to gather feedback and measure the trust you have with your team and peers:
Measuring trust beyond surveys
1) Look for small signs. 🔍
Do some people seem to always avoid sitting near each other, or do the same arguments keep happening? Those are signs of lower trust between them. Use your instincts to know when you need to proactively work on an issue versus waiting for the next survey to hopefully have someone raise the issue.
This is also where learning body language is a tremendous skill to pick up. Crossed arms, leaning in or away, and placing objects physically between you on a table can all signal how your relationship is going…if you know the language of bodies.
If you don’t know how to pick up on this, this book is a great start.
2) Always be listening. 👂
Your 1 on 1s are a great time to measure trust, IF you use them well. Take the time to ask questions and mix them up. If you listen carefully, often their answers (or refusing to answer) can hint at places where there isn't trust between you and your team member, or others on the team.
If your 1 on 1s are in a rut, then try some of these questions. Managers who try them tell us that it’s transformative how excited their team is to be finally asked some of these things. Try a couple in your next 1 on 1 and start expanding the scope and value of your conversations. You’ll naturally build more trust that way.
3) Prioritize this when it matters most. ⏰
If you know promotion time is coming and have some people soft circled, now is the time to go meet some of their peers, subordinates, and others they interact with to check in on trust.
You should know whether they are trustworthy well before you promote them.
And by getting in front of this, if you notice any issues, you can start working on them immediately before you need to decide who you're advocating for. It’s unfair to your team members to surprise them at review time with an issue if you don’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it before it’s on the proverbial permanent record.
This also destroys trust between you and your team, because they’ll feel blindsided and betrayed.
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Make trust a regular part of your discussions and efforts.
The best way to know whether you really have trust between you and your team, and to measure how your team is doing at building trust is to make it a habit.
That means learning how to detect issues through regular conversation and body language, making it a priority to discuss regularly, and avoiding the kinds of behaviors that damage trust.
Through these actions, you can avoid most issues that would avoid trust, and you’ll see results that are more powerful than any number or comment in a survey: the consistent actions of a high trust team.
Does your team trust you?
❓ Poll of the Week
Last week, we asked you about setting goals, and it seems most of you are on a quarterly schedule:
And this week, we ask what you find is the best tool for motivating your team:
Tell us which you prefer for motivating your team by taking the poll here.
