9 Essentials of Steward Leadership Development for Engaged Teams

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5 min read

Today, the term “steward” refers to someone called to look after the passengers aboard a ship – a caretaker.

I’ve found that steward leadership results in engaged teams who are invested in the organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Unfortunately, this is a challenging concept to grasp. Leaders tend to assume a controlling role over their employees – as if workers are a form of capital to be shaped as the company desires.

“I pay these people a good wage, what else could they want from me?”

You can’t just throw money at disengaged teams and expect them to suddenly become productive. Studies show that 60% of workers will consider leaving a position if they feel their work isn’t captivating enough.

Steward leaders, on the other hand, invest in both the financial and emotional well-being of their employees.

Stewards care about the lives and hearts of their crew outside the office walls.

When workers feel valued and respected instead of alienated and reduced to a financial figure, an amazing synergy happens: those team members become the stewards of the organization’s mission, values, and vision.

What is Stewardship in Leadership Development?

In 2013, Julia Kukard, Kurt April, and Kai Peters published an important book called Steward Leadership: A Maturational Perspective under UCT Press.

According to the authors, steward leadership is “a form of leadership that focuses on others, the community and society at large rather than the self.” They explain that a lot of senior leaders tend to adopt a steward leadership outlook naturally as their careers mature.

Mature and experienced business leaders know you can’t force productivity out of people. They know a team needs to feel respect, compassion, and inclusion before they’ll engage wholeheartedly.

How Does Steward Leadership Differ from Servant Leadership?

Under servant leadership, the leader exists to serve the team members. With traditional leadership, it’s the other way around: the team serves the leader.

Steward leadership is different: a steward leader cares for the team members, the organization, and society as a whole. Their actions are done in the interest of growth for the organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Living through example, steward leaders attract talent who hold the same values.

9 Essential Components of Stewardship in Business

Community building, responsibility, and trust within an organization all hinge on these nine components:

  1. Personal Vision
  2. Personal Mastery
  3. Shared Vision
  4. Mentoring
  5. Vulnerability and Maturity
  6. Valuing Diversity
  7. Experimentation and Risk-Taking
  8. Raising Awareness
  9. Delivering Results

Steward leadership, as an attitude, starts with a person who embodies these characteristics.

When you’re out on the water, and things get rocky, what happens? You band together with fellow crew members around a shared vision: getting to shore safely. That shared vision leads to self-governance, which keeps the individual and organization on course.

team building through sailing

A steward leader should inspire trust in team members. No one can put themselves into a vulnerable position without complete trust. People must have faith before they speak up, brainstorm, and offer constructive criticism openly.

Widespread trust empowers team members to adapt their operations and promote the organization’s growth.

Steward leadership can’t manifest without maturity.

It takes maturity and vulnerability to build healthy inter-dependent relationships, rather than toxic codependent ones.

A mature and emotionally intelligent leader realizes they are only as successful as the team they’ve assembled. No single person has the answers 100% of the time.

Emotional intelligence and maturity allow a leader to step back and invest in the people around them, when necessary.

In our blog, you can find countless case studies of companies across the country that have accomplished amazing things through stewardship leadership development. Repeatedly, a caretaker mindset delivers incredible results.

I’ve seen companies on the brink of collapse pull through – and thrive – after transforming their attitude in favor of steward leadership.

Steward leadership begins in the heart. Have you ever seen someone forced into therapy by a spouse or family member? Nothing changes if they don’t have a genuine desire and commitment to change themselves.

To become a steward leader, a person must commit to empathy and encouragement across the team.

Using Steward Leadership Development to Weather the COVID-19 Crisis

John F. Kennedy once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

A steward leader asks what they can do for their company – especially in times of crisis.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen companies do extraordinary things to assist their workers:

  • Embracing pets and children in the workplace
  • Sending pints of gourmet ice cream and essentials
  • $250 Amazon gift cards
  • Asking team members to introduce their kids or pets during Zoom meetings

You can bet the companies who adapted steward leadership principles like these will come out of this crisis in much better positions than others.

Here are a few examples of ways companies have risen to the challenge of stewardship during today’s trying times.

Incorporating Families

Goodway Group hosted a half-hour “Family Fun Friday” so workers could introduce their kids. Jillian Gap, Goodway Group’s People Experience Director, said it included “music, magic, and laughs.”

Everyone could use a lighthearted break, especially taxed working parents.

Other companies like F&B NY, The Media Kitchen, and PubMatic also tried to lighten the mood by encouraging teams to bring kids, pets, or a glass of wine to lunches or meetings.

Wellness Programs

Salesforce took major strides towards worker wellness by launching a series of programs and initiatives. The Thriving Mind benefits program provides mental and emotional health resources for employees and their families.

Meanwhile, the B-Well Together twice-daily broadcast connects industry luminaries with their employees to discuss wellbeing.

Salesforce also made Plum Village’s Zen Meditation App available to all its workers through the Salesforce App Catalog.

Material Support

People can’t concentrate on work when their basic needs aren’t met. During COVID-19, Salesforce and many other enterprises launched employee assistance programs to help lift workers out of survival mode.

It’s never been more obvious that every team member faces a different reality and struggle. Steward leaders know not every worker needs the same help. That’s why you see companies like Salesforce jump into prioritizing conversations and connections.

Stewardship Impacts All of Society – Not Just the Company

Treating workers right doesn’t only benefit the company – it improves society profoundly.

Bob Chapman, the CEO and Chairman of Barry-Wehmiller, views his team members as “someone’s son or daughter, mom or dad, brother or sister.”

He points out that his attitude and treatment create a ripple effect: how we treat our team members impacts how they treat their family at home and everyone in their lives.

Think of it this way: how many times have you seen someone lash out and said to yourself, “wow, I wonder what they went through today?”

Taking a few moments to treat workers with dignity, respect, and care can lead to healthier families, quality marriages, and a more wholesome society.

A steward leadership mindset creates team members who share a genuine investment in the company’s vision, values, and mission. When team members care about all business aspects, engagement improves, and productivity soars.

Learn how to become the steward of your team with Full Sail Leadership’s COVID-compliant workshops.

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The Importance of Timely Communication

5 min read

When I was in college, I had a communication professor who always cared to lecture my colleagues and me on the timeless quality of effective communication.

He’d pound on the podium and say the best form of communication must be enduring, not fleeting. In his words, “communication should stand the test of time.” Communication is considered enduring (or timeless) if it could inspire people across generations. His favorite examples of such communications were speeches delivered in ancient Rome with lessons or perspectives that are still relevant today.

His other favorite examples were

While my communication professor maintained good communication is timeless, my business professors disagreed. They argued it didn’t matter if your communication was timeless and thus theorized that the most important element of effective and useful communication was timely delivery.

Timely communication in your business or organization is key to the success or failure of any endeavor.

Timely Communication is not Just About Minutes and Hours

Timely communication can be defined as communication occurring sufficiently early and promptly. For communication to be truly timely, it should not only be useful but also occur at an opportune time. People in organizations need information early so they can act promptly. Moreover, when communication is timely in an organization or enterprise, its leaders can make the most of every opportunity.

It affords them the needed time to plan and analyze the information. Timely communication can, therefore, be said to help organizations make the most of every opportunity through informed decision-making.

Successful and seamless project management entails effective, smooth, and timely communication between the sales department, the project manager, and the leadership. Timely communication is key to your business’s productivity and bottom line. It’s also the secret of sailing effectively and safely on a racecourse, or simply while daysailing.

Sailing has a unique shared language. Learning that language is paramount to becoming a proficient sailor. Knowing how to execute through that language is even more important for sailing safely and efficiently. The power of shared language truly comes to life on a regatta race course or in stormy waters. To understand this, let’s look at something as basic as tacking (turning a boat so the bow passes through the wind) the boat.

When the skipper of a sailboat wants to tack their boat, the first thing they must do is check to see if the crew is ready to tack the boat. The skipper then gives a command that everyone in the crew understands – one that’s about as old as sailing itself. This command has endured because it is both timeless and timely.

Once the skipper knows their crew is ready, they give another long-standing command, which lets the crew know it’s time to perform certain duties: releasing the jib (the foresail on the boat), shifting positions in the boat, and trimming in the jib. This set of duties need to happen within split seconds of the command for safety and efficiency.

During a heated race, with boats in close quarters crossing each other, the need for effective and prompt communication becomes crucial.

What Gets in the Way of Timely Communication?

If you attend a rudimentary class on communication, one of the things you’d learn is noise is the biggest inhibitor of effective communication. Interestingly, noise isn’t just competing sounds – it also includes distractions competing for the attention of any of the parties involved in a dialog.

Take two people in a quiet room as an example. While there’s a total absence of competing sounds, if one of them were lost in thought, chances are they wouldn’t hear the other person if they tried communicating something to them.

Similarly, an executive may be so focused on their emails or something equally intensive that they miss spoken communication from their teams. This is not a good thing because missed communication sometimes means loss of income opportunities. In other cases, it can lead to threats becoming more real.

When you’re sailing, noise includes not only the sounds of the rushing wind and roaring seas – it also includes distractions in the form of what’s going on in the minds of your crew. I have seen crew members dealing with serious family situations become so lost in their thoughts that they became a danger to the rest of the crew, by not communicating information timely. It was only by checking in with them that we realized what they had been going through. We quickly learned that checking in and caring improved the timeliness of communication.

5 Handy Tips for Better Communication

Here are a few pointers that can help your team develop timely communication:

1. Identify the Team and Know What is on Their Minds

According to an article published in Inc. (July 2016), “the first step to improving communication within a team is to specify just who belongs to that team in the first place. This might sound obvious. But one study found less than 10 percent of 120 surveyed teams were able to correctly identify who was part of their respective teams.”

Beyond identifying who is on the team, it is important to clarify each individual’s roles and responsibilities. Take time to learn what is going on in the hearts and lives of the people with these responsibilities. Doing so can help you capitalize on opportunities or avoid danger.

2. Develop and Practice Communication Procedures

Just like tacking a sailboat, outlining procedures for common communication needs will eliminate confusion by providing employees with a clear-cut plan of action.

It is not enough to create these procedures, send out a memo, and call it a day. You must consistently implement these processes for them to facilitate effective communication. Make sure everyone on your team is trained in these procedures and notify staff of any updates as they arise. Repetition and practice are the mother of learning.

3. Establish Your “Captain’s Hour”

At the end of every race – or at the end of every day of sailing during a passage – we do a check-in time where we discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what lessons we learned from the day. We call it “Captain’s Hour.”

As part of your procedures, it is a good idea to provide employees with platforms where they can share project updates, new ideas, questions and concerns, and so on.

4. Encourage Interaction

Time spent chatting by the coffee dispenser is not wasted. It is an investment in building positive relationships between coworkers.

When your team members know and care about each other, they are more likely to collaborate and share honest feedback.

5. Lead by Example

Model the communication styles you want to see by treating employees with respect, providing and asking for honest feedback, and celebrating teamwork. When you lead your team in these, you’re creating an environment that nurtures enhanced productivity, improved morale, and a healthier corporate culture.

Let’s set up a time to review your team’s communication strengths and connections.

There is no better time for that than now. You will be glad you made the investment when you see the improvement in timely communication.

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To Steward is to Care, To Lead is to Steward

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4 min read

I tell people that I firmly believe that organizations need to approach the human resource function through the philosophy of co-stewardship.

When I discuss this, I get a sense of puzzled agreement. The concept seems to make sense to people, but when you press them on what they think the concept means, often they admit that they are not quite sure.

Sometimes the listener conjures up the idea of a church concept of giving money when they think of stewardship. When they do that, they falsely think that employees should be more sacrificial. This type of definition is only one-sided and fails to take in the management component of stewardship. It also completely misses the identity of the steward.

In understanding the identity of the stewarding company, owners and company team members can thrive together. This can lead to greater profits and productivity for the organization through improved employee engagement.

Blessed to be a Blessing

Life is fragile and temporary. Look down the road when a hearse goes by. There is never a U-Haul trailer following it because the person is taking their possessions with them. In the end, we don’t really own a thing. That’s especially true when it comes to the people that are in our lives. It is even more true if we are team leaders or company presidents. The people that work on our teams are entrusted to us by their family members.

team members full sail

As Bob Chapman of Barry-Wehmiller so accurately states it in Everybody Matters, “I realized (watching a wedding) that the people in our company are someone else’s mother or father, son or daughter”. He went on to say that how he treats the people that work in the company impacts how they treat their family members. This new way of thinking for Chapman led him to form the theory of Truly human leadership.

Bob’s new idea of human leadership took off and has become a hallmark of the Barry-Wehmiller culture for the past few decades. The organization is considered a top place to work not because of the perks that it provides employees but because of the caring and supportive environment.

“When we started caring about each team member, they started caring about each other,” Bob says. Chapman continues by saying, “We genuinely care about the people, and we show it through our actions.” I realized that every single one of Barry-Wehmiller’s team members is like that young lady in the wedding. Every single one of them is someone’s precious child, with hopes and dreams for a future through which they can realize their full potential. The power in that revelation was the realization that the people within our span of care are not objects. Some leaders view their people merely as the function they serve—she’s an engineer, he’s a mail clerk, he’s a machinist—and not as the precious human beings they are. When we realize that people are not objects, they are not tools for our success, we have begun to take our leadership to an entirely new level of understanding.” Spot on advice from America’s Number 1 Steward Leader.

Keeping up with the Gallups

rough seas sailing
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When a storm comes up on the open water, or in our organizations, there are two directions our human nature can take us:

  1. fear and helplessness
  2. or resilience and engagement.

If leaders have communicated vision, and lead with confidence, human beings are amazingly resilient. There is a documented “rally effect.” I have been in many foul weather races where the winds and waves were storming against the boat. It was the grit, confidence, and vision of the skipper that held the team together to safely and successfully complete the race.

Gallup recently published an article that described the four universal needs that followers have of leaders in times of crisis. These needs include:

  1. Trust
  2. Compassion
  3. Stability
  4. Hope

The storm of the coronavirus outbreak has blown uncertainty into our lives. Millions of people are required to work from home and millions of kids are learning their curriculums from home. The blending of work and home-life is even more complicated. All this has created unprecedented stress on employees’ wellbeing.

A key predictor of employees’ well-being is whether each employee believes that the organization is looking out for their best interest.

Gallup research shows that employees ask themselves on a regular basis:

  • Does my leadership have a clear plan of action?
  • Do I feel well-prepared to do my job?
  • Does my supervisor keep me informed about what is going on?
  • Does my organization care about my wellbeing?

These questions can be boiled down into questions of co-stewardship. The employees ask themselves questions about how they are being stewarded (cared for), and they ask themselves if they are prepared for the job and will they do a good job for the company.

I believe that if leaders adopt Chapman’s wisdom, they will find that their team members begin to adopt an attitude that they are stewards of the company’s resources. Team members will become more engaged, waste less time, and accomplish the mission of the business.

Combining this with an understanding of Gallup’s research will lead us to unstoppable, winning organizations. It’s like the crew on a race boat. The skipper doesn’t own the crew, but he is a caretaker of the crew. The team doesn’t own the boat. They are a caretaker of the boat. Together they win!

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Building Up Through Connection or Burning Out Through Incivility

4 min read

There is a dramatic increase in incivility in the workplace. This incivility leads to burnout and lowers employee engagement. Conversely, building up and connecting with team members improves employee engagement and profitability. This article gives examples from corporate America and the world of sailing to help you build connections.

It Starts with Stewardship

As a steward of the people that work on your team, you make the decision every day to either build people up or burn them out. This decision determines whether or not you build healthy connections. If you build up and connect with your team members, they are more likely to be fulfilled at work and in many cases, in their homes. Your decision can improve what was once considered the “backbone of society.” That may seem like a heavy burden to place upon leaders, but it exists whether or not leaders acknowledge it.

Building up and connecting has a dramatic impact on your bottom line

As connections grow, employee engagement rises. An increase in employee engagement results in an increase in profitability and productivity; this improves the bottom line. Taking action to build up your team members can be painless and free of financial costs.

Here are some examples from the business world and the world of sailing regattas.

What Corporate Research Says

Cisco Systems featured a recent article on the importance of something as basic as saying hello to co-workers and subordinates at work. The article talks about how the act of a simple hello led to greater inclusion in other meetings and events within the company. In another body of work, Georgetown professor and author Christine Porath’s research shows that workplace incivility has risen dramatically since 1998.

Porath’s work reports the following information:

  • As incivility rises in the workplace, 47% of those who were treated poorly decreased their time at work.  38% of those individuals said they intentionally decreased the quality of their work.
  • 78% of those individuals reported feeling disrespected. The commitment to their organization dramatically declined.
  • Customer service decreases when employees are burnt out through incivility. In her research, Porath found that 25% of those who felt a lack of appreciation and disrespect took their out frustration on the customer.
  • Collaboration plummets when team members are treated rudely or maligned for sharing ideas. When this occurs, Porath found that workers are “three times less likely to help others and their willingness to share drops by more than half.”

I have seen companies where new top leaders issued edicts and orders before getting to know their people or the culture of the company. Workers that were facing crises and change in their families due to death or illness now had to deal with a crisis of change in long-standing work culture. The story did not end well for the leaders and many employees who provided valuable service left the companies. The wake of their leaving left a void in customer service in their markets. Each week, I hear reports from workers across a multitude of industries. The top leadership walks through the office or factory without the basics of saying hello. There is no use of words like please and thank you, or asking how someone’s day is going.

lessons under the sail

Lessons from Under Sail

Treating people with civility on the open water pays big dividends on racing teams, or when it comes to teaching people the basics of sailing.

I have been a crew member on boats that were designed purely for speed, yet these boats lost races to boats that were designed more as pleasure boats. The sleek design, the carbon-fiber mast, the state-of-the-art electronics failed to make a difference on the scoring sheet because the crew on board were mistreated, and the skippers failed to connect with his crew.

On the well-designed boats, crew members were threatened “not to screw up (by making a mistake).” There was little forgiveness, no encouragement to learn and grow, and no concern for the personal lives of the crew.

The older pleasure boats were a contrast in attitudes, and the attitudes made the difference.

The skippers on these boats truly care about the growth of their crews. When mistakes are made, there is forgiveness and a learning and growth opportunity. On top of this caring attitude, the skippers care about the personal lives of their crew. Turnover on the boats where the crew was not treated with civility was rampant, while turnover on the older pleasure boats was non-existent.

Sailing instructors that treat their students with respect graduate many more students than instructors that have higher degrees of incivility.

Building up employees impacts your bottom line

The bottom line is employee engagement. Employee engagement rises when the team has a greater connection to the vision of the organization, the values of the organization, and when they feel they have a voice in the organization. A sense of having a voice and being psychologically safe to voice opinions in the organization has a dramatically positive impact on the level of engagement. When we build up our team members, we increase transparency and build trust. These two factors also increase engagement.

The facts from Gallup show the bottom-line impact. What would you do with 21% more profitability and 59% less turnover?

Let’s have a conversation about how you can increase employee engagement in your organization. Contact me for a consultation.

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Psychological Safety At Work and At Sea

3 min read

There has been a great amount of research on the benefits of a psychologically safe workforce and how it improves employee engagement.

When engagement improves, productivity and profitability improve, and lost-time incidents drop dramatically.

The process of teaching about psychologically safe workplaces is very similar to teaching safety on sailboats. The skipper’s number one job is to ensure the safety of his or her crew. This article will explore the similarities and discuss how you can apply principles from the world of racing on the high seas to work in your organization.

When team members are afraid to voice their opinion or ask a question, they view their workplace as an unsafe and dangerous place. The moment this happens, employees disengage from the dialog and the vision of the organization. These employees are like the sailing crew member who does not alert the skipper to danger because of fear of how the skipper will react. They put the vessel, and everyone on it, in peril.

Employees that disengage because they view the workplace as psychologically unsafe, can put their organization in jeopardy of losing business. As a result of a disengaged team member, key employees can vanish like valuable crew members to the sea of competitors.

Education and Experiential Learning is the Key

New workers learn their role in an organization best when they feel it is safe to admit they do not understand something completely. They ask questions to clarify their ambiguity. These same workers learn from mistakes when they are coached with care and concern versus condemnation and coercion.

I have been a crew member on racing boats where the skipper and first mate belittled new crew members for mistakes and questions. When the new crew members held their questions or acted timidly due to fear of failing, accidents and dangerous situations usually followed close behind. Their fear and timidity put the other crew member’s lives at risk.

The investigation into the crash of Asiana Flight 214 in July 2013 concluded: “Among the other issues raised by the investigation are some that long have concerned aviation officials, including hesitancy by some pilots to abort a landing when things go awry or to challenge a captain’s actions.”

Three people died in this crash and 200 people were seriously injured.

In 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill occurred due to “a failure to share critical information from their onshore staff, as well as reports from their drilling partner” according to US Coast Guard reports. Sadly, eleven men lost their lives due to this communication failure and almost five million barrels of oil were discharged in the Gulf of Mexico.

Several years ago, I worked for a former three-star Army general. We were having a discussion of a potential move that would take me from managing a territory to working on the corporate staff marketing team. I was asked to name who would be key players on my potential staff and who may need to move on.

Knowing the General had his own opinion, I asked: “Sir, how candid can I be?”.

I will never forget his response when he said “In the military, we have a motto that says ‘lack of candor can kill'” I was then told that total candor is what he expected. This experience would turn out to be one of my best experiences in learning. Second only to the lessons learned while sailing.

The Teams on Course Model Prevails

In December of 2014, the $6 million dollar racing yacht “Vestas Wind” crashed onto a shoal in the Indian Ocean while traveling at a speed of 22 knots (25mph). The crew failed to check “old fashioned” paper charts and simply relied on what they saw on their chart plotter. Most importantly the navigator failed to communicate his lack of checking all the details until after the accident. They knew the mission but failed to share information.

Often sharing information falls apart when there is a lack of trust and respect.

The Full Sail Model

business development milwaukee

The Full Sail model teaches that shared language flows first from understanding and believing in the vision and mission.

Furthermore, it teaches that shared language must be rehearsed and continually practiced to build trust and respect. Once learners absorb these concepts in the classroom, they have the opportunity to anchor the learning by putting the concepts into practice while sailing.

Let’s start a dialog about the communication issues that may be holding you back from creating a psychologically safe workplace. Improving how your team views their ability to share ideas, opinions, or questions can have an impact on profitability and productivity. Contact me today!

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