nerdleader

Today we are going to discuss the role that empathy and agency play in high-performing organizations and the results that high-agency organizations have been able to achieve. As a leader, your capacity to empathize with others and build bonds of trust - two particularly important qualities - is in my opinion demonstrated by your ability to allow others to exercise their own agency and self-determination. In other words, emotional intelligence is extremely important, but it is not enough to understand how certain decisions might impact others or even how your own emotions impact others. Rather, it is about how well you can leverage your understanding of yourself and others to inspire them to follow you of their own free will, aligning their actions and ideals with yours.

Leaders should be magnets. They should attract talent, and they should foster alignment within their sphere of influence – aligning individuals much as a magnet aligns iron filings on a piece of paper. But of course, people are not iron filings. They have their own dreams and wants, and they want to make the decisions that are relevant to their life and work. That is exactly what I mean by agency.

Your team wants to do their best and maximize the returns for their high-priority cares in life – personal performance, perhaps, but maybe income, downtime, etc. Recognizing this is the heart of allowing you to empathize with others and is the rosetta stone of understanding what motivates them. Of course, leaders need to know how to motivate others, but more than that, you should work towards fostering an understanding that others value their agency, they deserve to have it, and they want self-determinism.

I want to share with you a word I have learned recently. “Sonder” – the sudden realization that the people around you are living full, vivid lives, as rich and complex as your own. Have you ever been driving and see the driver next to you, and think about how they are having their own lives, with their own jobs, their own living situation, family, decorations in their house, holiday traditions, etc.? That is “sonder”. Having sonder, therefore, is the foundation you can use to build empathy and recognize your teams’ motivating factors, and that you can build from to create your high-performing organization.

The work done on agency was pioneered as “Self-Determination Theory” by Edward L Deci and Richard Ryan, among many others, over the past 40+ years. It shows that people have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors. When they strive to achieve for achievements sake, overcoming obstacles and solving problems, they are being intrinsically motivated. Public recognition and material rewards, on the other hand, are extrinsic motivations, unrelated to personal achievement desires. Deci, et al., found that extrinsic motivations must be internalized for them to stick. Indeed, extrinsic motivation is, in a sense, a manifestation of proof of internal motivating factors.

In fact, of the three main components of self-determination theory - competence, relatedness, and autonomy - sonder is related to both competence and autonomy. Think about your own work or life situation. You want autonomy at work yourself, and you want to be competent and be seen as competent. Leaders must be able to instinctively recognize that others want these conditions as well.

Deci’s team (PDF warning, apologies!) proved back in 1989 that when employees are motivated by being given autonomy and additional self-determinism, they tended to perform better in the workplace. How much better? Fortune magazine's "Great Places to Work" team found in 2016 that high-trust, high-autonomy companies have 50% less turnover, stock market returns 2x-3x greater than competitors, and net promoter scores "significantly higher" than others. Additionally, the website Business Solver showed that 80% of employees would leave an organization that was not empathetic to their needs and situation.

In the end, your leadership capacity can dramatically improve if you instinctively recognize that other people matter in their own lives and to the people around them. Fostering sonder within yourself, recognizing the agency in others, and fostering self-determinism will allow you to build better, more cohesive, and more appreciate teams. And organizations with strong self-determinism have been shown to have improved organizational performance compared to their peers.