Here’s What Employees Actually Want From a Leader

What employees want from a leader

Training Industry interviewed thousands of professionals in various industries, including manufacturing, entertainment, pharmaceutical, hospitality, transportation and government. It asked them to list the qualities they wanted in a leader. Excellent communication skills and interpersonal skills were highly valued. Additionally, the survey found that people respond to integrity, follow-through, good listening skills and the ability to make employees feel valued.

Here’s a breakdown of five traits people want from their leaders and tips on cultivating these qualities.

1. Employees want leaders who are excellent communicators.

Communication is a cornerstone of inspirational leadership. Excellent communication makes your employees’ jobs easier by setting clear expectations and parameters. The good news is that anyone can improve their communication skills with a little effort.

Jacob Goldstein emphasized the importance of leaders customizing their communication style to fit their team members’ needs and preferences.

“The way that I would like to be communicated with is probably different than how you would, and it’s going to be different still than how someone else would,” Goldstein, founder and executive director of the Leadership Laboratory, explained. “So, as leaders, having those conversations and asking those questions of our direct reports early on allows us to be able to customize that communication to meet the needs and preferred styles of our direct reports.”

Here are some tips for becoming a better communicator:

• Become more self-aware: Reflect on your personal qualities and try to pinpoint your communication shortcomings and bad habits. Once you understand your communication challenges, you can work to improve your communication skills.
• Get feedback on your communication habits: Enlist the help of trusted advisors, mentors and colleagues to help you identify where your communication skills can improve. For example, are your memos frequently ignored? Ask someone you trust if your written communication skills are lacking. Do employees frequently miss deadlines? Determine if your instructions could be clearer.
• Focus on two-way communication: Employee respect is critical, and one-sided communication is not the way to earn it. Ensure you’re engaging in meaningful communication, not just imparting information.

2. Employees want to feel heard by their leaders.

As you improve your communication skills, you can become the type of leader who helps employees feel heard. This can result in a stronger company culture with deeper loyalty and improved teamwork.

Employees who feel heard — and seen — are more likely to stick around during tough times, improving your employee turnover rates. In contrast, employees who feel invisible and unimportant will have less loyalty and are more likely to leave.

Listening has benefits beyond employee retention and satisfaction. Leaders who listen can glean essential insights, valuable feedback, and innovative ideas from their employees’ diverse voices and opinions.

Here are a few ways to hone your listening skills and help your employees feel truly heard:

• Understand your listening habits: Develop a keen awareness of your listening habits and practice behaviors to improve them. For example, do you interrupt your employees when they speak? Do you steamroll past topics you don’t want to discuss? Again, rely on your network of trusted advisors and mentors to help identify how to improve your listening skills.
• Quiet your inner dialogue: Ensure you’re fully present when someone is speaking. To quiet your inner dialogue and be a better listener, schedule time early in the day to reflect and get your thoughts down on paper. Brainstorm solutions and write notes about next steps; you’ll get significant topics off your mind. This practice enables you to dedicate your time and energy to listening to your employees’ needs.
• Listen to understand not rebut: Goldstein cautioned that leaders may focus more on responding to or rebutting what someone is saying instead of genuinely hearing them. “When someone is saying something to us, our minds are often fixated on our actual response — what we are going to negate or add as a counterpoint,” Goldstein explained. “Our effort instead should be focusing on listening to comprehend what they are saying, even if that means thinking about it and getting back to them later on.”
• Focus on respecting people’s time: It’s also crucial to develop an awareness of and respect for everyone’s time — yours included. If a conversation wanders off-topic, bring it back to the subject at hand. Set limits on topics and length to show your team that you respect their time and input. This habit also helps keep your schedule in check and sets an excellent example for your team.

3. Employees want leaders with integrity.

Integrity is a gateway to trust, respect and inspiration. Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing will earn your employees’ respect and set a fantastic example for them to follow.

In today’s work environment, employees can sniff out untruths and fluff. If you lie to, coddle or tell half-truths to your workforce, you’ll likely do irreparable damage to your reputation as a leader — not to mention your company’s brand as a whole.

Here are several ways to cultivate integrity:

• Do the right thing
• Tell the truth, even when it’s not pretty
• Admit when you’re wrong
• Open up about your vulnerabilities

Everyone’s human, and we all make mistakes. A leader with integrity is honest and relatable — and doesn’t have to be perfect.

4. Employees want leaders who follow through.

Excellent people management requires following through on commitments. By making and keeping promises, you demonstrate your reliability and set a great example for your team.

“It’s this idea of, if I commit to doing something, I’m going to follow through, and if for whatever reason I can’t, I provide that rationale,” Goldstein explained.

Failing to follow through on a commitment can be as damaging as telling an outright lie. Once you demonstrate that you only pay lip service to something, you may spend years regaining that lost respect and trust. Following through on your commitments fosters an environment of respect and value that spreads throughout an organization.

5. Employees want to feel valued by their leaders.

Employees want to feel like valued team members whose contributions help the greater good. Here are a few ways to ensure your employees feel valued.

• Credit successes to your team: Great leaders give credit where it’s due. Not every great idea comes from C-suite executives, and business success is a collective effort. Ensure your employees get the accolades they deserve to create an environment where people feel valued for their opinions, thoughts and ideas. Leaders who highlight their team’s successes will be rewarded with their employees’ respect and admiration.
• Advocate for your direct reports: Britney Cole highlighted the importance of advocating for your employees to engender trust and ensure they feel valued. “I would … much prefer to have a leader who I know has my back, and I can trust that they’re going to advocate for me, that they’re going to support me when I ask for it,” Cole, chief innovation officer at Blanchard, said.
• Meet with team members frequently: Employees feel more valued when their leaders take the time to meet with them and hear their thoughts. It can be tempting for busy managers to skip or postpone one-on-one meetings with their staff, but Cole cautioned that this is a mistake. “Take that [employee meeting] just as seriously as a client call because your employees are your clients.”

What employees don’t want from a leader

To be the best leader possible, you must continuously improve your professional and people skills and avoid the behaviors that drive employees away. Here are the top behaviors to avoid when working on your leadership goals.

1. Employees don’t want leaders to give unconstructive feedback.

The best employees want constructive feedback with clear employee performance goals to help them improve and advance their careers. They don’t want leaders to give vague or unclear feedback or, perhaps worse, no feedback at all.

Valuable feedback also goes further. It includes noticing more subtle characteristics and habits that can help an employee go beyond improving day-to-day tasks to find ways to reach long-term goals. For example, a great customer service agent may hit daily number goals, but are they polite? Do they foster loyal customers?

Goldstein advised leaders to avoid focusing excessively on negative feedback without clearly outlining their expectations. “So, it’s creating that crystal-clear target or bull’s-eye of what it is that we’re looking for, as opposed to the easiness of saying what we don’t want to see or what isn’t there,” Goldstein explained.

Feedback sessions should also be an opportunity to learn more about your team. Ask them about their long-term career goals and how you can help them get there. Building relationships can help you have challenging conversations; the practice can also encourage employees to come to you when they’re struggling or feeling underappreciated.

2. Employees don’t want leaders to ignore workplace issues.

Teams often have weak links. For example, some employees have workplace absenteeism issues. Or, they may habitually show up late, fail to turn in paperwork on time or routinely stir dissent in the office.

Instead of confronting problematic employees, leaders may choose to take the easy way out and ignore the issue. They may be uncomfortable with conflict and hope the issue goes away without their involvement. They may even think having a weak link is better than going through the process of terminating the employee and hiring a replacement.

However, these sentiments are short-sighted. Every employee must be held to the same standards to avoid a toxic work culture, productivity losses and accusations of workplace nepotism.

3. Employees don’t want micromanaging leaders.

A micromanager can turn an already complex project into chaos. Refusal to delegate tasks can stifle employee growth, reduce skills development and morale, and make it impossible to reach goals.

Excellent leaders foster an empowered employee culture. Employees must feel ownership over their work and maintain control to produce creative ideas and remain productive. Trust your team to use their strengths to accomplish a project everyone can be proud of.

“We want to make sure that we’re not creating an army of executors, where we as leaders are spending our day saying, ‘Go and do this. Go and do that,'” Goldstein advised. “We want to elevate our direct reports to be their strongest, best selves. So, in order to do that, asking questions, being curious and coming from that sense of, ‘How can I empower my direct reports?’ is a really, really huge skill.”

At the same time, employees may have different perceptions of micromanagement. While a new employee, intern or early career worker might appreciate very specific direction, someone with a high level of experience likely will not.

“You don’t want to micromanage a high performer and tell them what to do when they’re competent at doing it because it’s just going to annoy them,” Cole cautioned.

Be clear about everyone’s responsibilities. Once you step back, the team might exceed your expectations.

4. Employees don’t want disrespectful leaders.

Making your way to the top takes work. But once you’re there, you can’t do your job alone. It’s crucial to treat every team member with respect and empathy.

Participating in unprofessional, disrespectful leadership behavior — such as gossiping, boasting about your pay or making your employees feel guilty about putting family before work — can quickly mark you as a bad boss.

5. Employees don’t want disorganized leaders.

Bosses are held to a higher standard than their teams. They’re responsible for organizing workers and managing projects. Unfortunately, some leaders have messy desk syndrome, are frequently late or lose track of essential documents.

Leaders must take time for self-care and focus on personal and business organization. Bosses don’t have to be perfect. However, their teams should see them as prepared, on task and in touch.

Erin Donaghue and Angela Koch contributed to this article.