How Moral Leadership Builds Employees, Company Culture, And Bottom Line Results

By Micah Solomon, Contributor

An employee isn’t designed to be treated like a piece of a machine—like a cog or like a bolt. For a leader to treat employees this way is immoral. It also doesn’t make business sense: A bolt can’t stretch to help a customer; it can only be a bolt. But a person, inspired by a leader, can stretch a bit to the right or left to be helpful—and thus build the value of your business.

To put this another way: It’s a moral imperative to make use of your employees for more than just their rote, routine, commoditized labor. To make use of the whole person, the thinking, reasoning, wanting-to-improve-the-company human being that almost all of us are, or at least start out being.

Moral leadership of employees involves, at a minimum:

• Involving them in the design of the work that will affect them
• Enhancing their pride in their work
• Enhancing their purpose, rather than using them only for their function
• Supporting their community and family involvement (however they define ‘‘family’’), in good times and bad
• Supporting their involvement in areas of the company outside of their strict area of assignment

And, most fundamentally, moral leadership of employees involves knowing that it’s wrong to see a worker as ‘‘eight hours of labor’’—even though, if you look at your Profit & Loss report, labor may be classified as FTEs (full-time equivalents). Companies make hiring requests for shift workers this way, never writing the word people: ‘‘We need five FTEs, five FTEs insured, three shifts a day, 365 days a year.’’

People are not FTEs. So it makes no sense to treat them as such. Because, unless you drill the impulse out of them (which many businesses quickly do), employees would rather give you more than less.

Including and especially, more of their thoughtfulness. Be very careful: It’s easy to drive your employees to a state of mental numbness. You tend to have this effect on employees when you only ask them questions that, in your mind, have an already-known answer.  When you define “best practices” without explaining what makes these practices “best,”* and without providing encouragement and latitude to find or create “better than the best practices” where appropriate.

Your employees, in fact, may actually be smarter or more resourceful than you.  And you’ll get a lot more out of the wages you pay them if you anticipate this possibility.

Micah Solomon is a company culture consultant, customer service keynote speaker, and the author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service

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*A quick recap on defining best practices (or standards, as I prefer to call them): Define each of your business standards/best practices using a three-part summary statement format:

1. Why the service is of value (why we’re doing this in the first place)

2. The emotional response we’re aiming to have the customer feel

3. The expected way to accomplish the service

Point three should be formulated in a manner that allows judgment and discretion to be used in all but mission-critical situations. Formulated this way, standards help ensure that every part of your service reflects the best way your company knows to perform it—a prescription that your autonomously performing employees can then feel free to adapt to suit the needs and wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of the customers they’re actually facing at the moment.