CQ – The next evolution in leadership

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Hello, I’m Rob Bravo, the host of today’s podcast episode. I’m also the Coaching Director and Head of Wellbeing at Talking Talent.

Today I’m going to be exploring the idea of Care Quotient as an emergent leadership capability – a capability of increasing value to organizations seeking to adapt to a post-pandemic world, in service of more inclusive workspaces and organizational cultures.

I think it’s probably an understatement in the extreme to say that the last 18 months have impacted almost every aspect of society. Nothing and no one has gone unscathed and unchanged through the experience.

To a greater or lesser extent, all organizations and all employees are starting in some ways to experience a degree of ‘afterburn’.

This is a sense of continued disquiet, unsettlement, and anxiety long after a traumatic event has happened. This traumatic event could be at a personal or at societal level. I’m sure no one would disagree in framing the pandemic as a societal-level traumatic event, almost on a global scale.

Afterburn is akin to an emotional hangover, one that’s sticking around for a while – and we know this can impact engagement, hours, and organizations. It will impact performance and it’ll impact wellbeing.

And we see this a lot, with coachees across sectors and industries struggling to find their place in a working world which looks and feels pretty different from what we’ve experienced before.

Anxiety is very real, it’s very present, and it’s pretty hard to shake off.

And it’s this sense of dis-ease which prompted our thinking at Talking Talent to posit the idea of a new type of leadership capability that we strongly believe organizations should be dialing up, should be encouraging, and should be modeling.

Now, this reflects what might be described as the evolution of talent.

Historically, success in business and leadership was predicated around the big thinkers. IQ or intelligence quotient was deemed to be the enabler – or certainly the prerequisite – of success.

Then came the ground-breaking work of Daniel Goleman in the 1990s and the idea of EQ: emotional quotient. Good leaders needed not just be the sharp thinkers: they also needed self-awareness, the ability to bring people with them, and to operate successfully in the field of emotion, working with emotions, and understanding emotions.

Wrongly dumbed-down as ‘soft skills’, this additional element was an important build on the equation: thus IQ plus EQ became the equation.

Then in 2008, when the first big economic crash of the modern era rocked the world, it became apparent that IQ and EQ were not enough on their own.

Successful survival was a marathon, not a sprint so agile leaders needed to be able to develop the ability to sustain personal – as well as organizational – performance.

They needed something else.

They needed greater RQ: they needed resilience quotient. Resilience is the ability to deal with challenges and change and not remain bent out of shape through the struggle. It’s about navigating the bumps in the road, and growing and learning through the experience. So, this new equation – IQ plus EQ plus RQ – held good for over a decade…

But a little thing we’re all familiar with called COVID, fast-forwarded the need for something else.

Certainly, for some years pre-pandemic, there existed a bubble of mental health and wellbeing issues which an always-on world was threatening to burst.

Today more than ever, we need a new intelligence: CQ or care quotient.

This critical leadership behavior encapsulates self care, it encapsulates other care, as well as the energy to invest in both.

Currently as organizations and society recover, we’re risking losing sight of what’s important to us: those forward-thinking initiatives spurred on by continuing diversity imbalances and widening gender pay gaps.

Unless we’re really intentional about how we make systemic much-needed organizational change, they’re not going to happen – especially if we only focus on the critical things or keeping the lights on.

That’s why we advocate a focus on care as a leader for inclusion.

We’ve seen how well our clients have been able to cope with Coronavirus-related business uncertainty where teams and functions have been – and are being – led by good, inclusive leaders. Those who bring to the table an understanding of the importance of wellbeing, of engagement, of belonging, of care.

Stark differences in this style of leadership are only being highlighted in lockdown. But it’s also lockdown where this new style of leadership came of age – is coming of age – in seeing leaders show a high care quotient, with those inclusive leaders communicating more authentically, asking people about themselves and their personal lives.

It’s that challenge of dialing down a focus on the human doing and placing greater value on the human being – and leaders who are curious, interested, and engaging at a human being level.

This includes being aware of people’s pressure points, which are so easy to forget in the office when everyone leaves for the day. It’s much easier to remember when you see people’s setups on camera or on Zoom, and hear their children in the background. I’ve lost count of the number of calls I’ve had in the last 18 months where kids have been photobombing webinars! It’s nice in a way to really connect people at a human level – but stressful, nonetheless.

Lockdown has also enabled leaders to show their own vulnerability – and that’s not something that often comes very naturally. In that way, it’s been a great leveler.

Above all, I think, remote working has highlighted the need to create a much greater sense of belonging and of community.

The next stage in the pandemic will be that shift through the change curve.

We’re already seeing it as places reopen and offices are planning towards welcoming people back in. Some people – and we hear it often in the coaching space – will be experiencing a real sense of grief and loss as a result. It’s kind of a living loss. The people who’ve been enjoying seeing more of their family, of not having to commute or to travel as regularly.

There’ll also be people who are excited about sort of going back to work, reconnecting, having those one-on-one conversations – but they’re uncertain about how phased return and social distancing measures will change the office environment, which it undoubtedly will.

With nearly all – some 93% – of employees reporting being stressed about returning to the office post-lockdown, what is beyond a shadow of a doubt, is there’ll be pain in reintegration.

That’s the afterburn I refer to.

Here, true inclusivity can help mitigate that pain and enable leaders to learn from it.

Previously, the majority of businesses weren’t interested or were barely interested in remote working, not making it a viable offering for the majority of their workers.

Lockdown’s changed all of that.

We’ve lived an experiment for the last 18 months, and many jobs previously not considered okay to be done from a distance are being done fine.

The world’s not ended.

But now, leaders have got to focus on deliverables and not the way of working. That’s particularly because it’s what the next generation wants, the generation that will start dominating the workplace.

And businesses, many of them, have had to make pretty tough financial decisions in lockdown to rebalance. Leaders must be considerate and intentional when addressing any necessary cost-cutting issues born out of what we’ve experienced over the last 18 months.

A lot of companies who are looking at redundancies will – while claiming to be focusing on promoting senior females and supporting them as individuals – they’re the ones that let those very people be the first to go.

It’s a conversation that’s become even more crucial to have around the recent Black Lives Matter movement.

These considerations simply can’t be ignored.

One of the things that was observed during the last financial crisis was the impact that it had on unrepresented groups or underrepresented groups, which were both far more impacted concerning redundancies, whether those are planned or involuntary.

This again presents a real danger to organizations that, if they make the wrong choices or react in a knee-jerk fashion, could lose a decade’s worth of work and progress in a matter of weeks or months.

It’s going to be normal and necessary for most organizations to restructure to some degree as a result of COVID-19. But they must recognize that certain sectors and groups will be particularly impacted, and it’s imperative to do all they can to combat that, to mitigate that risk.

It’s also about understanding the importance of having diverse experiences, skill sets, and points of view around the table.

There’s no way of knowing what the next six to 12 months will hold for any of us, and businesses will need to be reactive.

We heard only with Professor Van-Tam’s interview describing how there is uncertainty around the autumn and winter, and that will extend beyond. But we know that those that have diverse teams all feeding in, all contributing, will be better placed to pivot well whatever the future and COVID may throw at us.

Now it’s those businesses who recognize that their leaders must lead from the front and employ a high degree of CQ, of care quotient, in doing so.

So, how might CQ be broken down and evidenced?

Let’s get a bit practical with it, let’s start with a broad definition.

CQ – or care quotient – could be said to be leaders at all levels in an organization making purposeful and well-informed choices to optimize wellbeing for self and wellbeing for others.

That involves role modeling care as a priority, embedding reliable disciplines, and in the process of doing so, influencing really positive change in the system for others.

Care quotient begins with leaders prioritizing and modeling self-care. That’s step one. The oxygen mask paradox is particularly relevant here. Leaders need to ensure they adjust their own mask first, to earn the right to care for others.

Self-care looks like prioritizing one’s own wellbeing, knowing how important it is as a driver of sustainable performance. You can’t help anyone else if all you’ve got left is a lack of energy.

A huge driver of sustainable performance, and leaders who operate from a place of care, know what’s needed to energize, sustain, and look after themselves at work and in their personal lives. It’s super, super important.

– They have a personal discipline that’s aligned to their unique needs and situation – how they need to look after themselves.

– They embed those positive behaviors.

– They take breaks on a regular basis.

– They limit their meeting hours.

– They uphold reasonable working patterns.

– They know the value of exercise, of sleep, of nutrition.

– They’re also really good at properly disconnecting when on leave, genuinely being in that downtime.

Most importantly, under self-care, leaders will demonstrate vulnerability rather than stoicism.

We know that’s where relationships are forged – through sharing vulnerability. It’s not about being super tough.

With these behaviors developed, practiced, embedded, and good habits formed, then leaders can engage in other care. At the root of other care is empathy: a topic I believe should be taught at schools from a very early age.

When trying to foster a workplace that’s equitable and inclusive for all, it’s imperative for leaders to be well-trained and inclusive strategists. The key to tackling systemic inequality is to nurture empathy. Only through this can we hope to achieve genuine, true inclusion.

Some have called empathy the crème de la crème of all leadership traits, and it’s deeply embedded in the idea of care quotient.

Empathy, as we know, is our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others and to understand what the other is experiencing. The leaders that are more empathetic are likely to be more effective at fostering diverse and inclusive workplaces: they’re interested, they’re curious.

Care is evidenced through empathy, and empathy involves dialogue.

Leaders who’ve got a high CQ talk about the link between inclusion, wellbeing, and performance to their teams. They engage in conversation, they engage in discourse. And that includes check-ins about wellbeing in team and one-to-one meetings – making it a thing.

It’s about creating that culture of inclusion that enables team members to openly share their ideas, their concerns, and their challenges. It’s about encouraging and rewarding positive wellbeing actions in the team. It’s about creating real psychological safety with no stigma attached to experiencing wellbeing issues, mental health issues.

No stigma: unconditional positive regard to team members.

It’s also about giving regular feedback on performance, timely in-the-moment feedback, and particularly focusing on strengths. Strengthening strengths is a really powerful way of ensuring inclusion and solid sustainable performance.

It’s also about showing appreciation for effort and outcomes. I worked for a great CEO before who always talked about the idea of it’s not about input and effort – it’s about output and impact. You’re adults, you know what good looks like in your job. How you do it, and the way you do it shouldn’t matter. What we’re looking at is what comes out the other side: happy clients, good numbers – output and impact.

It’s also about showing appreciation for the effort, celebrating success – and success isn’t necessarily who’s worked the hardest. Success might be someone who has shown care for themselves and for others.

It’s about building trust and rapport with team members at a personal, as well as a professional level – being courageous enough to be curious about how people live and what’s going on for them outside of work. As I said earlier: what those pressure points might be, what are people’s aspirations, what are their motivations. Truly knowing team members.

Inclusion is manifested by enabling every single person to make their best contribution to organizations and to teams.

CQ at other-care level is a very encouraging positive talk to build optimism and a sense of perspective to help with stress helping to build the team’s resilience, their emotional regulation.

It’s also about recognizing and avoiding the subtle and indirect drains on energy. Things like unmanageable workloads and expectations, or that sometimes quite subtle encouragement to take on more, and then even more, the tacit or explicit approval of those who do.

Other care means:

– Banning busy talk – that motif, that badge that’s often worn in organizations – and replacing it with a focus on energy and the outcomes I described.

– Encouraging, and indeed rewarding, team members to proactively manage their energy and their pace so it’s sustainable.

– Introducing pause and stop moments and downtimes in workload, allowing people to recover before ramping up.

Critically it’s about understanding, accepting, and normalizing individual differences. For example, everyone can do things in different ways and that’s okay. There are many routes to achievement of goals.

Best-in-class leaders evidence care quotient even further, they go further. They are about influencing peers and senior stakeholders to promote changes to inclusion goals, to processes, and to practices. They also act as a sponsor or an ambassador for wellbeing initiatives within and outside the organization.

Now, I appreciate that’s a pretty long list of care-orientated behaviors.

But – and – they do work. And where we see it work, there are multiple data sources that talk about improving organizational performance, sustainability, uplifting innovation, creativity, engagement, retention – all of the outcomes that forward-thinking organizations are aspiring to evidence.

It’s not the only answer. But in the world that we’re in at the moment, it’s a really good one to be focusing in on and encouraging exploration and experimentation, with care at the forefront.

COVID-19 has shifted all of our priorities, and the companies that get things right by having those diverse teams, having the right working setups, by prioritizing what’s important, and by leading with care – they stand to emerge from this all the stronger.

After all, it’s going to become much more important for people to be in an organization that cares and champions them.

That’s why we believe we need an evolution of leadership in the leaders of today – whether they’re running a team, a company, or a country.

All leaders have got to practice and preach inclusion with purpose.

Not only that, but they’ve got to lead with a high care quotient.

Otherwise, the people they lead will stop caring about them and the company they work for.

And that will be worse for the business than Coronavirus ever could be. So, things to think about: the opportunity to experiment with this topic of care at the forefront.

That concludes today’s episode.

Thank you so much for dialing in, for tuning in, and for listening.

And please ensure you both take – and you give – care.

Thank you.