Approachability in Leadership

As part of a Live2Lead event a few years back, one of the speakers shared something they witnessed soon after accepting the top role in a new organization. Many of the executives arrived at the corporate headquarters into a private parking lot, entered through a secluded elevator, and went directly to their offices without having any interaction with anyone else working around them. To say there was a lack of approachability ingrained into that company’s culture would have been a huge understatement! That particular leader went on to share some of the things they implemented, over time, to address that issue and create an atmosphere that fostered approachability in leadership. I won’t share their story here, but we will work through some real life examples I’ve seen as we move forward and we’ll wrap this all up with some things we can each do to make sure our teams know that we’re truly approachable when they need us…

Think back to what we worked through recently about building leadership presence… Do we have any real chance of doing that if the team we’re responsible for leading doesn’t know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they can approach us with any issue that requires our attention or could use our support? (That’s one of those rhetorical questions in case you’re wondering…) In the entertainment industry, they call it stage presence. Think back to the comparison of Bret Michaels and those clowns standing on the boxes ten feet behind their fans that paid BIG BUCKS for their “VIP” package! The difference in presence was significant, I’d say as different as the distance… And I believe that ties directly back to approachability.

Let’s consider what that looks like in a scenario we can all relate to… In the nearly two decades I worked in manufacturing, we had a large meeting each quarter to update all employees on performance and the overall state of the business. This was historically a time where the management team had face time with employees and fielded  any questions they had, questions related directly to the updates that were shared as well as general questions about issues in the facility. Near the end of my time there, we saw a massive change in management team personnel. Several of the new managers had come from the same company and had a very different approach to interacting with employees - meaning they didn’t do it… In addition to keeping the doors of their offices closed the majority of the time, they also changed the structure of those quarterly meetings. They still held the meetings but rather than blocking an hour for each business unit on each shift, they held one 30-minute meeting on each shift where they corralled everyone on the shift into a storage area on the far end of the building (that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter). Instead of accepting questions, like had been done for close to fifty years prior, the plant manager only addressed a handful of questions that had been submitted in advance and screened by his entourage. When the 30 minute timer went off, the management team turned off the lights and left the building…

Truth be told, those meetings didn’t end quite that abruptly - but that wouldn’t have given the employees in the meetings a very different impression from how they really ended. Nothing about those meetings, which had previously been a great opportunity for the management team to connect with employees, gave an impression that any one of those new managers were the least bit approachable! And I’ll let you decide for yourself how it impacted their leadership presence…

As a quick side story, the plant manager running that three-ring circus actually started his career in the same company the Live2Lead speaker shared about, but he clearly moved on (or got moved on?) before that fellow became CEO and turned the culture around!

Here’s the thing, I’m convinced it’s not a matter of who we are or what we’ve been taught to this point. Approachability in leadership is critical, it’s something we can all develop, and our teams will need it in order to connect with us in a way that establishes the leadership presence we’ve looked at leading up to this point. One thing we can do to begin developing this is to make sure we have an approachable personality - so that’s where we’ll pick up next time!