The Art of Leading Grieving Employees: Being an Adaptive Leader

September 24, 2020

GriefLeaders is pleased to announce that Businessing Magazine has published an article authored by co-founders, Anthony and Guy Casablanca.

Businessing Magazine is an online magazine for small business owners and entrepreneurs with over 275,000 visitors monthly.

In the article, Anthony and Guy discuss the importance of being an Adaptive Leader when leading emotionally traumatized employees.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

Adaptive Leadership is based on five traits that determine the relationship between an employee and the leader:

• Stewardship is the level of ownership, accountability, and competence demonstrated by the employee. Clearly, in Joe’s case, the employee’s level of stewardship over his role has declined.
• Trust is the belief in the employee’s skills, abilities, integrity, and character.  As a result of the decline in stewardship demonstrated by Joe, Lou’s trust in Joe had declined.
• Empowerment is the amount of authority a leader is willing to give an employee to determine the how of a task or assignment completion.  Because Joe’s demeanor, appearance, and attitude had all declined, Lou no longer felt he could empower his employee much at all.
• Collaboration is the level of sharing of information and decision-making authority the employee earns. When the employee demonstrates a high level of performance on the first three traits, the leader can and should collaborate more. In this instance, Lou felt his only recourse was to direct Joe from one task to the next through a performance improvement plan.
• Communication frequency is the cadence of follow-up, course correction, and approval required. Communication frequency is inversely proportional to the performance of the other four traits. The more an employee demonstrates those attributes, the less frequent the communication cadence required. At this point, Lou felt he had to stay on top of every task. Like he had to give Joe an assignment and then have him check in frequently until completed.

When affected by a loss or emotionally traumatizing event, an employee’s performance will plummet across all five traits and remain low for weeks or even months.

You can read the full article by clicking the link below.

https://businessingmag.com/12095/leading/adaptive-leader/

Anthony Casablanca

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