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Law At Work group managing director Simon Nash explains why it is human to lead
MY recent TEDx talk in St Helier was about the leadership challenge to humanise the experience of work.
In a business community getting increasingly obsessed with AI, my feeling is that this will become increasingly important for leaders in businesses that have anything to do with trust, professional service and client retention. That’s pretty much the whole of the business sector if recent conversations at the Chamber of Commerce and Institute of Directors are anything to go by.
Humanising the experience of work promises great return on investment. In work by Harvard University’s professor Jim Hesketh, the statistical links between superior customer experience and quarterly financial performance were clearly demonstrated, as was the correlation between employee engagement and customer experience. Put simply, his work proved what we all knew, which is that clients buy more from people who are happy at their work.
This chimes well with the findings of the great humanist psychologist Carl Rogers who established that people who feel good about themselves generally achieve better outcomes, whether that is in school, at work or in their relationships.
Therefore, the leadership challenge is threefold. You want higher returns – but that only comes from loyal clients who are thrilled with the service they are getting. You want great client experience but that only comes from employees who feel great about the work they are doing, so you are in the business of making people’s experience of their work something that brings out their deepest and best human attributes.
As professor David Maister, also of Harvard, used to repeatedly say: “To obtain superior returns, you don’t watch the money. You watch (and manage) the things that produce the money.”
Leadership, then, is all about creating an environment where people can love their work. Where this translates into affective relationship building with clients, which is also an expression of human love. Where they can forge strong bonds of comradeship with the people they work with, another form of human love, and where they can make a contribution to the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”, in the phrase of Charles Eisenstein.
These four ways in which people express their deepest human nature, the drive to love, make work a core element of the good life.
In modern times, the findings of occupational medicine and epidemiology at a population scale and the data coming from neuroscience and cognitive psychology at the individual level are all lending further support to what the poets and philosophers have known for so long.
But such a grand leadership task can feel daunting, until you realise that making work an expression of love is simply realised in the little acts of everyday life. When you exchange a moment of warm gratitude for the hardworking barista who made your morning coffee. When you take the time to really listen to what your colleague was saying about her mother’s nursing home. When you shut out all distractions for 40 minutes to produce a really good legal opinion for a client – one that wasn’t just technically accurate but was a pleasure to craft and then read. When you tell the story of your business in such a way that people want to be a part of the next chapter.
In the film of The Hobbit, Galadriel asks Gandalf why he has chosen Bilbo Baggins to join the perilous quest. He tells her: “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”
These little acts make up a life of good work. And creating the conditions for these is what makes leadership great.
