CallSource^® Aim Higher

Incidental Contact: Do You Have Meaningful Interaction with Your Employees?

by Dave Anderson, March 12 2010

Leaders are paid to impact others in a manner that aids and accelerates their growth. This being said, how good a leader are you? Please note that I didn’t ask about your title, tenure or years of experience. Those factors can have minimal impact on whether or not leaders positively impact others in a way that aids and accelerates their growth. If you’re a leader that has mere incidental contact with your people throughout the day: “Good morning.” “How’s the family?” “What kind of month are you having?” etc. you’re more likely to maintain people than you are to stretch them. Following are six thoughts on impacting others in a meaningful way versus giving the illusion of leadership through incidental contact.

1. If you spend more time with “stuff” than with people, you have little chance of positively impacting people. Perform an occasional time inventory to determine how much time you spend with people versus the hours you spend each day with “stuff”: phone calls, reports, computer time, paperwork and the like.
2. If the people working for you don’t measurably improve their results over time, you are not impacting them. There is nothing that provides a clearer barometer of your leadership ability and that of your managers than whether or not the people working for you are getting better. 
3. If your people would not rate you as someone who has had a highly influential impact on their lives, you’re guilty of incidental contact. While you can impress people at a distance with your title and power, you must get up close to impact them as human beings. This means you set clear expectations for them, coach them with fast and honest feedback, hold them accountable for results, increase their latitude and discretion and spend time personally showing them what good performance looks like. 
4. If you’re not constantly looking for ways to make your people less dependent on you by giving them more latitude and discretion, you are stunting rather than accelerating their growth. Never forget that a true measure of your leadership is not how well people perform when you’re in the workplace breathing down their necks. Rather, it is how well they do in your absence. Have you created the conditions for people to succeed and produce when you take a day off or are on vacation? Have your managers done likewise? 
5. If you don’t make the time for one-on-one coaching time with your people, you have little chance of impacting them in a meaningful way. One-on-one coaching sessions are one of your best opportunities to impact your people. Follow the five steps outlined in my book, Up Your Business and your one on ones will stay on track as developmental opportunities, rather than descend into punitive and dreaded encounters.

To rephrase an important point I made earlier, one of the top reasons so many leaders have minimal impact on the growth of their people is that they are so busy with processes, paperwork, policies and procedures that they don’t make time for people development. Thus, their organizations are over-managed and under-led, heavy on rules and light on relationships. As a result, people are more dutiful and obedient than they are motivated and committed.

Frankly, an effective job description for you and the other leaders on your team is this: Take the human capital you’ve been entrusted with and make it more valuable tomorrow than it is today through training, coaching and mentoring. You can’t accomplish this via email, memo or voice mail. If your organization is under-performing at this time, it would be wise to stop sitting in your office trying to turn the numbers around, and get into the trenches and turn your people around---then they’ll turn the numbers around! If you are unwilling or unable to execute this essential leadership responsibility, you’d be far better off working with things than you are working with people. Your people deserve better and so does your organization. Now that you know better, do better!

Dave Anderson is president of LearnToLead.  He is an international author and speaker, presenting 120 times annually in 13 countries.  Dave has been a car salesman, general manager and director of some of America’s most successful dealership.  He is the author of nine books, his most recent being, the TKO Business Series.  Dave has spoken at the NADA Convention for nine consecutive years.  He can be contacted at 800.519.8224 or dave@learntolead.com . Source: Dealer Business Journal.com