A critical part of a leader’s role is to build others up. Great leaders are highly skilled at this. Good leaders sometimes give up because they are not yet skilled in communicating in a way that empowers and inspires others. This is a skill worth developing.
“You cannot change a person, but you can change their context.”
~Lori Michele Leavitt, The Pivot: Orchestrating Extraordinary Business Momentum
You can create a safe place in which you and others become aware of how you each see the world. You can adjust how you communicate so that there is understanding of what you say, in the way you intended it, and that you care.
My intention is to speak to leaders, developing leaders and those who support leaders. My intention in sharing this video is not political (given our country’s turmoil from miscommunications and hate, I need to make clear that I am not speaking directly to this). Please watch and listen to JFK in the video below, perhaps more than once, and consider how your own communications might combine power and caring, as he does:
How might we stay open to truly hear and see with an intention of understanding?
I will end this with a recent quote from Seth Godin, a marketing genius who puts “authentic” into the field of marketing. He shares in a way to be understood (not in a way to spin words or stats to the marketer’s own desired outcome). He, in my view, shares with power and caring.
“…78.45% of humans tend to hate statistics because we have no direct experience with the larger picture. It’s easier to make things up based on direct experience instead. The solar eclipse is going to happen whether or not you believe it will, whether or not you have direct experience with previous eclipses.
When we reserve direct experience for the places where it matters—how we feel about the people in our lives, or the music we’re listening to or the painting we’re seeing, we have the priceless opportunity to become a better version of ourselves.” ~Seth Godin
You, the leader, can create an environment that is safe for people to step up, speak out, become more aware of who they are and when old non-serving beliefs are driving unwanted words or actions, and grow.