Jan 23, 2019
What Is Your Tone As A Leader?
We understand tone very easily when we think about voice tone. A soft, gentle tone when speaking contrasts with a harsh, strident tone. What about the tone we set for the workplace and for the team, in our role as leader? Have we decided what the tone will be or is it just what it is naturally? Why would we set a tone and what would it be? Tone in this regard relates to the dynamic between the team members themselves and what type of behavior is required. It imprints on to the team an attitude about how we regard and how we treat our clients.
As the boss, this is all going on in the background, because you are super busy. When you are juggling so many balls in the air at once, you need everyone to get on with what they are doing, because you have no additional bandwidth to be running around after others. Often we don’t set a tone, because we are so very busy ourselves and we just expect everyone to be an adult and behave accordingly. The issue here is your version of adult and their adult may be two different people. Common sense is not as common as we bosses would wish.
When you become a leader for the first time, one of the big discoveries is that others are not like you. You were fully focused on yourself and your own results and just observed others in passing, as you drove yourself to get to the top. You find the team members don’t think how you think and don’t want what you want. If we leave the tone of the organisation to become the sum of the people in it, then there may be no commonly agreed behavior displayed. As the leader, our job is to set the tone.
Excellent! How do we do that? Well, our own behavior is a principal guide for everyone. If we are running around like a lunatic, never on time, then don’t expect others to arrive at meetings at the appointed start time. Also, don’t expect that they will never miss their deadlines either. They see you are constantly missing deadlines, so they assume that is okay around here for them as well. If it is okay for the boss, then it is okay for me.
If you are taking long lunches, skiving off early, arriving late, then you have set the tone for how others should think about their work commitment to the organisation. Losing your temper, yelling at people, throwing inanimate objects around, all now come under the mantle of acceptable workplace behavior by others. Being a childish bore is now mainstream.
How we think about the client also has a tone of its own. Are we talking about milking clients for as much revenue as possible, pushing them into bad deals because we make more money that way, as well as over promising and under delivering? Are we okay with a high turnover of clients, as we burn and churn them? As the boss, what we say and what we do gets noticed.
We have to be aware that everyone in the organisation is a card carrying, certified, life time member of the Great Fraternal Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Boss Watchers. The team are studying us and reading information into what they see. They share this information over coffees, lunches and drinks together, comparing notes, exchanging stories, analysing everything in great detail.
Never forget that we say and how we say it matters. What we do consistently matters. Rather than this happening in some random, day to day fashion, we need to consciously set the tone and communicate it. When we are in the office we have to be dealing with people and problems in a very considered, controlled manner. We have to be positive and upbeat, no matter how we feel personally on that day.
Our research into leadership says staff want to follow bosses who can admit they are wrong, rather than trying to defend the indefensible, through mealy-mouthed excuses and justifications. They want honesty and transparency.
They also want bosses who can praise them in a way that is real. What does “real” look like? Real praise means recognising specifically the exact thing the staff member did well, relating it to the bigger picture of the organisation’s mission and encouraging them to keep doing it. That little list is a long way from a simplistic throw away line like “good job”. That comment is confusing for the receiver. Which one of the many things that they do was good. There was no detail, so they are left wondering, unconvinced about the praise and unmoved.
When we talk about the client, we don’t bitch, moan and complain about them. We are the one setting the tone about how we regard our clients and how we work with them as a team. Instead we talk about how appreciative we are, that they are trusting us enough to give us their business. We are noting we are not after a solitary sale, but we want reorders. We mention that in a highly competitive market, getting and keeping customers is the path to victory. We talk about our true intention being to see the customer’s business succeed and grow, knowing that inside their success, lies our own success.
This is backed up by the tough decisions where we forego doing business with a potential client, because we are not the best fit for them. It means handing back the money, if there was a problem, and not engaging in any to and fro debate with the client about who is right and who is wrong. Money talks and our own people realise what our tone is, by how we partner with our clients, in addition to what we say about how we should treat clients. They believe what they see, before they accept what they hear as the truth. Handing back money hurts but we are building a platform for dealing with clients that everyone can understand and conform to.
So tone could be a random act of delineation or it could be a carefully crafted, internally consistent approach to our people and to clients. It should be something that shows we live all that high sounding palaver behind the beautifully framed glass on the wall, that sprukes the company Vision, Mission and Values. If we don’t set the tone, then someone else will and that may not be the right tone we need, for the organisation to prosper. If we understand that every second of the day we are sending out our take on the tone, to all the boss watchers out there, then we will make sure that we are communicating the key messages. They need to get supreme clarity about who we are, how we work, what we do and how we do it. This is the boss’s main job – set the tone for everyone on how to work together, how to work with clients and then live up to those standards ourselves.