In the book Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow by Tom Rath, he identifies four crucial areas that followers need.
They are:
- TRUST
- STABILITY
- COMPASSION
- HOPE
Get his book here and read about his findings.
While the book discusses business and leadership, these four areas can be applied to basically any area of your life, and if any of these are lacking, you lose your mojo.
Trust
What happens when you lose trust in a person you have a relationship with? It’s easy to get cautious and you may start questioning their motives, actions, or have a fear of speaking up.
Does this inspire you to work harder? Be a better co-worker, partner, or friend?
For some, it may. For most, it leads to disaster. You may end up leaving a job you love or a person you were close to. That is if you don’t have a heart to heart and resolve the issue.
Stability
Like trust, when there’s no stability it’s easy to trigger insecurities. Unless you’re someone that thrives on living on the edge, some of us do after all.
Let’s say your business merges with another, one of the first things it often triggers is “what does this mean for me?”
When you start wondering how your day-to-day business will change and what your role will look like in the new reality, mind chatter can easily take over.
When mind chatter rules, you lose focus and your productivity suffers.
Compassion
Having leaders, partners, co-workers that care about you and show compassion, it builds trust and creates stability, right?
When you’re in an unhealthy environment, where every action is questioned one way or another, you start questioning yourself.
Hope
When you’re surrounded by people that have your best interests in mind, that see and acknowledge what you bring as a person and professional you get energized.
When there are conversations about the future, with leaders that inspire and share their vision you create hope. When you’re in a downturn it provides others with a light at the end of the tunnel.
When you build a work culture where this feel good is nurtured, you trust that person or business, it creates stability, you feel cared for [compassion] and that creates hope even in the direst situations.
What’s the mood of your company culture?
Take 2020 for example. How did your company nurture trust, stability, compassion, and hope? And what have you done to nurture yourself, your customers, your friends, and your family during this time?
My workplace stood by their employees and as a result, we have a company and sales team that is stronger and more bonded than ever. We have gratitude for the choice the company and leadership team made and were able to skyrocket our sales as soon as we could reopen the business.
Many people and businesses didn’t have that option and either furloughed or fired employees. The impact of these choices remains to be seen. Building trust, stability, compassion, and hope will take strong and inspired leadership.
What are your takeaways?
At this particular juncture in time, we have been experiencing a massive global wakeup call. It has brought us all an invitation to really take a look at our lives, at what’s working and not working.
What are your priorities now with business and life? Has anything changed?
If you’re amongst the people who lost business and had to let people go or were fired/furloughed, what actions are you taking now that you didn’t think about before?
Maybe you’re setting aside more money to your savings to ensure that you’re not vulnerable when a job is no longer there. Maybe you’ve committed to spending more time with your friends & family?
No matter what your experience has been to date though it starts with making a choice one moment at the time.
What is ONE action that you can take today to create more trust, stability, compassion, and hope in your life? Start there. With you. Your family. Your friends. Your co-workers. Your customers.
