LEADERSHIP

What management style marks your organization’s culture? Autocratic or democratic?

Bureaucratic is another common one, especially among larger concerns. A coaching management style can signal an environment where individual growth matters and is encouraged.

Those aside, one that’s gaining a lot of attention these days is a humanistic management style. It goes beyond the requisite “soft” and “hard” skills like communication capabilities, problem-solving and technical capabilities. It marks a boss whose approach is authentic, adaptive and grounded in empathy.

And in a still-volatile workplace environment, cultivating managers who embrace that distinctive style will pay off by creating an optimal employee experience — critical in helping an organization achieve not just stability but growth over time.

Why “human” bosses matter

Employee engagement is key to successful recruitment and retention.

After a post-pandemic plummet, a slow improvement began last year. But Gallup has found that employees, including managers, are feeling stressed and disconnected as companies retool, giving them more responsibility while restructuring teams and cutting budgets.

What helps? Gartner, Inc. has found a 37% increase in the number of employees who consider themselves highly engaged if they consider their boss “human.” Only 29%, though, describe their boss as such. This matters, because highly engaged employees improve their team’s performance by as much as 27%.

When bosses fail to use human skills in conjunction with their soft and hard ones, they lose talented employees and may have difficulty hiring new ones. Eventually, all the success they’ve generated can evaporate.

It takes a special leader with experience and good judgment to know the policy manual and employees, and to recognize that they are not cookie-cutter images. Recognizing people as individuals and treating them accordingly gets good results.

Indeed, Gartner also found that humancentric work design — “flexible work experiences, intentional collaboration and empathy-based management” — is 3.8 times more likely to create high-performing employees who are 3.2 times more likely to stay on with their employer.

What it looks like in practice

A human, more empathetic manager demonstrably and authentically cares personally for all the organization’s stakeholders, peers, direct and indirect reports, and others.

That doesn’t really require a boss to ask workers about their kids’ birthday parties, anniversary celebrations or vacation plans. Still, there’s nothing wrong with well-meaning and unforced interest.

It’s more about building trust in interpersonal dealings through an attitude that combines candor with caring. During review time, for example, it’s about holding people accountable (and, in turn, being held accountable) without discussions devolving into a “whatabout” exchange. In an environment of accountability and caring, the human boss must care enough about people to tell them positively how to improve without attacking them personally in the process.

Fostering a humanistic management style

People can be trained to do accounting or to program a computer. But training people to be good leaders — humanistic or not — is a more difficult proposition.

It takes the ability to understand people and their individual perspectives. The ability to motivate them is key, so is the flexibility to adjust. It also takes an interest in doing all that while, ultimately, working on mindset. And it’s very difficult to change what can be the deeply ingrained conditioning of mindsets.

There’s a growing interest in helping leaders and managers open themselves to a more humanistic way of operating. The focus is on helping individuals understand that compassion isn’t a bad thing and neither is trust. But also important is encouraging a respect for human dignity, along with supporting the imperative to infuse ethical considerations into every management decision.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, leaders really are made, not born. Training and providing continuous feedback will help managers grow more humanistic in their roles. Ultimately, by producing leaders and managers who embrace human skills, organizations will influence improved performance and behaviors as well as engagement in their people. They also will establish a successful model for the future.

Stacey Hyland is the New England employee benefits practice leader at HUB International.