How emotionally intelligent are modern leaders in the Post Covid-19 new normal?
As a leader, you have found yourself feeling angry, insecure or demoralised after getting negative feedback. Perhaps you are finding yourself preoccupied with your subordinates’ opinions that you avoid. There is nothing wrong with emotionally investing in your organisation’s trials and tribulations but the problem arises from your work life controlling your feelings and actions of your lifestyle in totality. For example, your work following you home.
In the Post Covid-19 new normal era, putting in place new habits and a mind-set could help in disconnecting from work or help with the process of breaking a cycle of frustration, stress and fighting at work. After all, findings of many studies reveal that bad bosses drive more employees to quit their jobs than a poor salary. A recent Harvard Business Review research study that sampled 13,000 employees’ feedback about 2,800 managers, determined that the trend of “quiet quitting” is not so much about bad employees as it is bad management. Researchers found that the least effective managers supervise three to four times as many employees in the quiet quitting category versus the most effective leaders.
Research data indicates that quiet quitting is usually less about an employee’s willingness to work harder and more creatively, and more about a manager’s ability to build a relationship with their employees where they are not counting the minutes until quitting time,” the authors explained.
A different study conducted by McKinsey underscored the effect poor managers are having on retaining talent. “While in the past an attractive salary could help keep people in a job despite a bad boss, that is much less true now than it was before the pandemic,” the report said. The survey, based on data from more than 13,000 respondents, found that “uncaring and uninspiring” leaders are a major reason people continue to quit their jobs, along with a lack of career development. Flexibility, meanwhile, is a primary motivation for people staying at their jobs. In the modern times, the best leaders are a driving force in employees working from home, according to a study by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business of some 70,000 remote workers, published in January 2022.
According to Associate Professor Jason Schloetzer, one of the authors of the Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business report, sentiments such as the following statement were common in their survey. “We find that folks that seem to be more satisfied working from home are also folks who report that they don’t have a good relationship with their direct supervisor, whereas those folks that have a more favourable impression of their relationship with their direct supervisor report enjoying being in the office more often,”. Schloetzer said the results were “remarkably consistent” among factors such as age, gender, work experience and industry.
What makes a bad leader exactly?
Maybe the bad boss routine is intentional in some cases where a leader makes an employee so miserable in his job that they quit, something that’s being called “quiet firing.” What seems clear is that, despite all that’s been written about it, many bosses continue to undervalue their employees’ desire for work-life balance. Let’s consider what one software engineer at Google told The Financial Times: “It’s common for my manager to blame some of my team’s problems on the fact that we’ve been working remotely for the last couple of years, when in reality it could also just be because of poor management.”
The performance management platform 15Five, surveyed more than 1,000 employees and 500 Human Resources leaders and found out the following: that employee downtime is summarily ignored. The survey revealed that work-life balance is a top concern for employees, behind only pay and health benefits. When Human Resources leaders were asked what was most important to their employees, work-life balance jumped to the top spot, followed by health benefits and opportunities for growth.
Conclusion
Both Human Resources leaders and employees seem to agree that they want employee downtime to be honoured. Asked if they could change one thing about today’s work environment, the leading response among employees as well as managers was to have personal downtime respected, according to the report. Therefore, leaders should continue to explore creative options to resolve the work-life balance and disappearing downtime conundrum, according to the report. One option picking up steam is the four-day workweek in the Western world, with about 60% of Human Resources professionals reporting they will likely shift to a shorter week according to the platform 15Five. Regardless of the threat of an impending global recession and the rise of layoffs in the Post Covid-19 new normal, management that continues to be unresponsive to employees’ needs is likely in for a rude awakening.
