Your team notices when you see them

The story below is invented but typical. Elin does not exist, and neither do her managers. It draws on things social workers often describe, and it is told in her voice.

I mostly write about leadership from the manager's chair. This time I want to swap seats and let someone from the team tell it. My own thoughts come after the story.

Elin's story#

I have been a social worker for seven years, and I have had four managers. Two of them stay with me.

One of them always had her door open. She said so at every team meeting, and it was true, the door was open. But when I knocked she would be sitting with her phone in her hand, answering emails while I talked. She said "mm" in the right places. After a while I stopped knocking. I sorted things out myself, or asked a colleague.

I don't think she was a bad person. She had too much on her plate. But I felt invisible for three years, and it showed. I got quieter in meetings. I stopped suggesting things.

The other one arrived two years ago. The first thing she did was book half an hour with each of us. She asked what was working and what was heavy. She wrote down what I said.

Three weeks later, in the corridor, she asked about the case I had mentioned, the family where the father wouldn't let us in. She remembered. I remember being surprised.

It's the small things. She notices when I am quiet in a meeting and asks afterwards, not in front of everyone, how I am. When I have done something well she says what it was. Once she said I had found a way of talking to a father that kept him in the conversation, after he had walked out of two meetings before. She said it at the team meeting, by name.

She asks what we think before she decides things that affect us. She doesn't always do what we say. But she tells us why.

Once I missed a deadline on an assessment. I was sure I would get a telling-off. She said, "This went wrong, and we have to put it right. What do you need so it doesn't happen again?" Then we went through my caseload together, and I handed one case over.

I have as much to do now as before. Maybe more. But I don't go home with the same knot in my stomach. I speak up in meetings again.

What I take from it#

I wrote Elin's story because it brings together something I have heard staff describe in different ways. Her second manager, by the way, does what I suggest in A letter to a new manager. What Elin describes are everyday things: being remembered, getting praise that is specific, being included before decisions are made, and having a mistake handled so that nobody loses face.

There is research pointing the same way, although it rests on associations and can't show cause.

In a survey of 25,285 employees, recognition was the factor most strongly linked to engagement among those studied. A large meta-analysis on leadership and staff mental health found that relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership, and a good relationship between manager and employee, went with better mental health among staff, and that destructive leadership was strongly linked to worse mental health.

Closer to Elin's world there is a survey of 309 child-welfare social workers in Stockholm County. Those who found their immediate manager supportive rated their role as clearer and their role conflicts as fewer. It is one survey at one point in time, so it can't say what came first.

Elin says she started speaking up in meetings again. That fits what research on inclusive leadership describes. A meta-analysis of 105 samples found that inclusive leadership went with, among other things, employees voicing their views, and that psychological safety was one of five supported mediating factors. Here too the evidence is mostly about associations.

Seeing someone takes less time than you think#

I suspect many managers underestimate how little it takes, and overestimate how much time it needs. Elin's second manager did nothing remarkable. She wrote down what people said and read it again, said what she had seen when someone did something well, and asked before she decided.

If you want to try something this week, pick someone in your team you haven't had a proper conversation with for a while. Ask about something they told you before. Listen to the answer without looking at your phone.

It only works if you want to hear the answer, and people can tell when you don't.