MC91 Manager Mindset: Loyalty

yeah this would be like one click and now it's three you know it's like there's an element of first world problems here definitely it's an extra but but it does actually quite fit in this whole loyalty thing because actually this is one thing that it's interesting thinking of software that you use constantly and ongoing and how easy or not sometimes it is to leave that software like how much loyalty do you have to a brand or to a product and yeah it just got me thinking of yeah of our topic for today for the loyalty as part of a manager mindset i mean is it a manager mindset or is it i don't know there's a difference between loyalty and complacency yes that's a good one because if i'm using a piece of software if i'm playing somewhere just because i know it could be better but i just couldn't be bothered changing that's different from loyalty i think yes where loyalty is you know even though i might want to change my loyalty will prevent me from doing it because i feel like there's a connection there or that you know i want it to work out i think that's a bit different i think i think it is and i think it's a distinction worth also thinking about in all kinds of contexts so let's um let's say hello to our listeners hello listeners welcome to the management cafe we are well i think it's what our third episode of the season on manager mindsets and when i say we i mean of course co-host team burges who is over in australia we're having coffee online as always and my name is bila orti and i am in london and you're very welcome to hang around i hope we can keep you company while you drink your cafe tea chai latte hot chocolate and we'll be talking for about usually 25 minutes something like this and so so would we say that the manager mindset is one of loyalty or how loyal we are by default i think it's it's one of the traits that you can have as a manager those are one of those characteristics you can think of yourself am i a loyal person is a lot of important to me not everybody has that you know and in fact there are people even who try and train themselves out of it you know that uh it's just business mentality i think it goes against loyalty and then there's a logic to that you know i don't necessarily think there's a right or wrong answer here because companies don't necessarily show loyalty it's a human characteristic you know before about software like you know things inanimate objects don't show loyalty you know if they hang around with you it's because they can't move yeah but humans and animals and so on can show loyalty what you said about some people train themselves out of it i think that's a really interesting one because i mean it could take us somewhere else in the conversation but let's just make a slight detour around this cognitive dissonance of who you are and who you see yourself as and your by default mindset and having to change something a lot of the time to survive and i find this very interesting because when we think about loyalty there's loyalty to what and i think as a manager you can be loyal to your values you can be loyal to your team members you can be loyal to the organization you can be loyal to your manager or you can be loyal to your department and i think that for those people who might have a strong sense of loyalty sometimes some of those might even compete against each other oh yeah so i think that is an interesting mindset we could shift it either way towards loyalty or away from loyalty depending on what's going on you can have that conflict where you might be disloyal to your manager out of loyalty to the organization you know if you felt like those two things were in conflict but i mean i think that it's a nice human characteristic is my view i think loyalty is important that sort of sits alongside trust that if people feel that you're a loyal person if they know that you will uh stand by them and you know there are limits or always there are going to be limits to it but if you're going to demonstrate loyalty i think that it helps support trust there's an element of dependability there and i think as a manager that creates a good environment to work with but i think it's as a manager it's best demonstrated as a one-way street in that you give loyalty but you don't expect it back or demand it back i think probably better wow that's again very interesting because you said so many things one is that i think loyalty can have a dark side and a good side so i don't think it's always good to to be loyal to someone or even something or an organization and this question of if we have that mindset that loyalty is important to us and we should be loyal as as managers but not to expect it back i think that's also like that's that can be hard if loyalty to us is part of a trusting working relationship so i think that's also interesting because that can be helpful too but also i think tim i'd like to just go back what do we mean by loyalty because that's i didn't look for the definition this time but loyalty is having the best interest of someone else at heart or being fully committed to their well-being how would you define loyalty uh okay now i wish i'd done my homework as well but like when i think about loyalty it's it's that support or allegiance like i did google it in the background that wasn't that way didn't come out of my head but um i think that loyalty is where your support is you know like we're talking about before it means i'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt i'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt i'm going to i'm going to stand by them and support them more than someone who i'm not loyal towards but i think that there's an element of uh risk with it that if you just you know you can only display loyalty to people in a super safe situation right like if you're loyal towards your family you know your entire life there might not be a huge amount of risk there if you're loyal towards an employee who you've just onboarded there might be a bit more risk there because you don't know them that well and they might do something that harms that loyalty or that makes it difficult for you but i think that that's that's an interesting challenge right because if you display loyalty in those circumstances it can have a really positive impact it can also backfire well if you if your mindset is to support and have a sense of duty towards someone which is i think some of the definitions i just looked very quickly to see if they gave me anyone online gave me anything beyond loyalty the fact of being loyal because it's saying that but if it's that is that that sense of duty towards someone i think that's mindset and therefore your sense of duty can be to your team and therefore anyone who comes into your team you have that sense of duty towards then trust can be broken that's also interesting what happens if trust is broken as in i don't know it's just something very simple like someone someone new in your team says they're going to do something by a date and they don't do it well that's one aspect of trust that's been broken how does that affect your sense of duty i think that you can continue with that loyalty to them for a while as you try to build that trust back i don't know like always i'm just talking myself into like a rabbit hole of does it matter what one is what's the other but i think it's no but i think i think it does like let's take a situation where um let's say you've got an employee and uh and their performance is struggling right so your performance manager employee they end up losing their job there's a bit of mental gymnastics here i think it's possible as a manager to go through that and still feel like you're being loyal to the person even though you might end up firing them i think you can handle that in such a way that the person it can be separate from the actions or that you can try and maintain the separation and the person can still feel like okay this job isn't working out and you know there's a lot of negativity associated with that but i don't feel that i mean i guess it's tricky for them but i think they can still feel that you that you do support them in as much as you're able to do in the performance of your job there's a bit of mental gymnastics involved in that well it makes complete sense to me because if you're loyal to a person it's going back to a little bit overlapping with the concept of radical candor your loyalty to someone does not mean that you're always nice to them and let them do whatever they want that's not loyalty loyalty supports a sense of duty so you see someone who's struggling and who keeps underperforming actually your sense of duty is to help them to move on if you can't help them to be better i think where it can be conflicting is when the organization might need one thing and the individual needs another and you can't do both i can't give you a concrete example but maybe in this case the person might just i don't know maybe you can't support them because their sense of values means they're behaving in one way whereas the organization is pulling the other way and if your loyalty is to the organization then that will require a behavior we'll take an example where someone's going through some issues that are impacting their performance but it's a you know that it's a temporary thing or you feel confident that it's a temporary thing like let's say they've got a new baby at home and you're not getting any sleep and so uh their performance might take a bit of a hit the organization might not have the capability to wait for that performance to improve you know the organization might say the project that this person is working on absolutely has to be delivered on time requires extraordinary performance blah blah and you're like well you know if we could sit by a week i know everything would be okay they could be in conflict there i don't know quite how you navigate how you navigate that because it's it's tricky but i i mean i would like to think of myself as a loyal person uh and it's a it's a characteristic that i that i like about myself you know it's one of the things i think like you know it's a characteristic i think i'm a loyal person and i'm proud of that and so if i act in a way that i think is being loyal to someone then makes me feel good i don't always act in that way and one of the things i'm conscious of is as a manager it's also led me to make decisions that have not always been in the best interest of the business yeah because sometimes that that's the the dark side of it in a way i mean dark side might be too big is that loyalty and and focus on loyalty sometimes can lead us to do things that are not in the best interest of i don't know the whole or your loyalty to your organization can lead not to the best interest of the people sometimes the loyalty to an individual cannot be in the best interest to something else but and i think that that is i mean understanding like you're saying knowing what your tendency is if your tendency as a manager is going to be and i think that would be my tendency as well and what i've appreciated in other managers or people i've worked for if your tendency is to be loyal to your team members then you've got to be very aware of that and know that that sometimes might be intention with your organization or it might be a strength which will keep you going through the difficult times because sometimes that loyalty to team members is what keeps team members working and what keeps team members who would like to stay staying you hear that so much with um i have a friend who whose manager was really loyal to the team and so in a way it was buffering all the crap they were getting from the rest of the organization but they were fighting for those team members and so that loyalty was very obvious and it helped it helped the team to stay around um you know drove the manager crazy but well and there might be situations you know like you've got you've got the game of your job or the company but there's also the bigger game is going on as well and so it might be that you know in that situation displaying loyalty might harm a short-term or long-term business goal it might work out for you in terms of you know in the longer term maybe maybe it's a relationship which is really important to you for a long long time and and that means more to you than the job ever did but you just don't know you don't know until it happens afterwards you know and the same the other way around i think sometimes when that loyalty is in conflict and you decide to to keep your loyalty to the organization or to the company's goals that can also lead to something good at the other side but it's just messy at the beginning but i think if you're being loyal to a thing as opposed to a as opposed to a person because the thing like a company is not do you look at the examples of like companies don't really respect loyalty people within the company might but the company itself so i disagree i think that well one we always know that the company is made of people so and that usually we do our loyalty is probably to either the ceo who is amazing and we really like and that was the reason we came to the company or our manager or our manager's manager or our team so i do yes the organization itself is a thing but actually it's people and that's the connection but if you want an ecosystem to thrive your loyalty might be to that ecosystem and not necessarily to individuals in that way and also not all businesses are bad i mean i love it i love when with the theater company some people were loyal to the company not just to me of course they were loyal to me because i represented the company i get that but sometimes they were also uh loyal to that and i have been more loyal to maybe an organization than maybe even the person representing it so it's a bit like nationalism you can be loyal to your country even though the country is uh can do bad things sometimes with things yes i think you can be loyal to until you see and the loyalty can be broken when the organization does something that you don't agree with and then you start to question your loyalty i think i think a lot of people are loyal to their organizations i think that i agree i agree you've definitely persuaded me there i wonder whether sometimes we misplace the loyalty that we feel to our manager and that we then feel that loyalty or the loyalty we might feel to an individual but it's not necessarily representative of the organization because i'm just thinking about like you know there's a lot of instances of people who join a company worked for 10 years and they get fired you know and so they've been loyal probably chosen not to take other jobs chosen to turn down money whatever other opportunities stayed there and then ultimately the company's like well go to work and then you go on and that's a really hard thing to swallow like that's sort of the thing that drives me thinking you know you gotta be careful putting your loyalty into an organization that doesn't necessarily uh appreciate it but maybe 10 years is good years yeah or maybe someone else is the same but actually there is a system in the organization whereas every year that someone has stayed there they get a better a living do you know they get a bigger living too or they get a bigger present as a living too it's it's as always if you have if you have people who are thinking about what loyalty means to the organization and if loyalty is important to the core of the leadership team of an organization say they will put things in place that reward loyalty that is one thing if there's a company and well there will be places where they do it i can't tell you one but there will be if you have a team that doesn't really care about loyalty you won't have anything and people will notice it and they won't have people to the organization well coming back to what i was touched on before as as a manager i think you earn the loyalty of the people who report to you you can't expect it you can't demand it you can earn that loyalty through your actions and one of the disconnects that i see or that i've seen like an anti-pattern if you will is where a manager will be upset that they feel someone is being disloyal and they haven't actually earned that person's loyalty you can't that's that i think is a problem if you're expecting someone to be loyal and you haven't i mean i guess there are circumstances where it's reasonable to expect someone to be so some degree of loyalty but i think it's better if you earn it does that make sense of course um and what about the other way around is it okay then should an employee expect their manager to always be loyal to their best interests that's nice it makes a difference but should we expect it or should we also have to earn it as an employee then i think it's a little bit like trust isn't it there's a propensity to be loyal to someone or the propensity to trust someone but actually there's also yeah i think it's also a two-way street it's very difficult when you're managing people and you're loyal to them and then suddenly i tell you a story which maybe is the whole loyalty thing um i remember one of our last performances um at the company and my mother and i bringing back all the sets from the show it wasn't big but lots of bits of pieces into the office you know like 12 o'clock at night after the party i'm thinking hmm yeah it's all very well but where is everyone else and that even though i know i'd be very loyal to individuals and you know maybe shield them from some not very nice things or you know i was very protective and trusting and loyal to them to the group and then going hmm where's everyone and i think that it's a two-way street so one either you know whatever it's human nature that everyone is like yeah i'd love to be part of this but actually it comes down to do anything and there's also there well was this was the loyalty supposed to come from some kind of other actions from myself i don't know it's so i think there's a propensity some people are very loyal by default and they will take on a lot and other people actually no matter how well you treat them if something more attractive or better comes along they'll go when we're talking about it but this is why it's so tricky yeah but so i think that's why as a mindset for me if i try and demonstrate it but not demand it i find that that that approach works better so that if somebody does see the opportunity go on like yeah i'm wishing them well and part of my loyalty is expressed as wanting the best for them if the best for them is something else okay off they go so it's a bit of a balancing act there but the benefit of it you know we're talking about the definition earlier on one of the signs for me of this sort of loyalty is that when we're tested we don't turn on each other we stay together and i've been through circumstances where that has happened and recently gone through circumstances where it hasn't happened and it's awful when when you're going through that and you feel alone you know you feel disconnected you feel that people don't really you know everyone's in it for themselves and no one's really trying to support each other and that these connections are so fragile uh that that makes everything a lot harder yeah because also the loyalty that the utopia here is not just that you are loyal to team members team members are loyal to you and if you want to extrapolate to the organization good if not we're saying the team but also there's that loyalty to the team as well if you are in charge of a team is the loyalty to each other as well in different ways and that is it's very difficult sometimes when we are quick to be loyal to a group to then see maybe that people are not loyal to each other as well it isn't that i suppose it's a kind of bond as well yeah absolutely anything about within that team dynamic if sam is is running late then you know then diane will step in uh and it's not that big a deal you know they'll cover for each other if if they can see that uh that joe's struggling then you know then they'll offer the support because i guess it's sort of tied in with a lot of other things but you know it's a more generous mindset and to a degree you know you know you'll be more giving because you know you have the support coming back so i guess i'm disagreeing with myself it is a two-way bond well if it's a mindset uh it is if it's a one way but it's when it works best is when it's a two-way definitely and then that's the dark side as well of it again is if there's too much loyalty in a team and so you start to cover full things going wrong and things like that that's the the the dark side so exactly like it can creep up on you as well because it's one thing two things you know i'm a loyal person i'm being loyal and then am i actually is my behavior actually enabling someone here because i'm doing this as being a loyal person and what i'm really doing is actually creating or exacerbating a problem yeah and for the manager that is it's got so many sides to it so many like from ethical to personal to then the repercussions of that are so wide yeah well i very interestingly um this is when i was going into claude to get some ideas as well it talked about how loyalty has changed in organizations like let's get the utopian ones that have evolved and are thinking more like whereas before loyalty might mean that you stay with us for all your career and that's what we expect it might be now that we know that people can be loyal to the organization but that doesn't mean they're not going to move away i mean they've got their self-interest self-interest first no matter how loyal you are to your organization probably hopefully you have your own self-interest and that expectation of loyalty meaning different things like i'm i was thinking how do we see that people are loyal is it that they stay and do long hours that's how some people want to show their loyalty as well it's through some these behaviors where it's not actually maybe loyalty is displayed differently rather than how many hours i do for you it's more about how i treat you or how transparent i am with you about my life you're talking before about those like overlapping levels of loyalty that that is really um that's really important that there's a through line between the organization's purpose or you know it's overall what it's trying to do the leadership you know the culture of the organization the managers your manager your team like otherwise you can be disconnected there you know where you might be committed to the to the mission but the way that they're doing it you're not on board with and that how can you be loyal yeah and i think that feeling even at a manager level feeling that loyalty but then how is the loyalty displayed i think that's where it needs to be congruent as well because you can be very loyal but if you display it in ways that are not helpful or that are out of sync that's where culture of the organization culture comes because it could be that you know you can't express your loyalty by hiding uh the accounts and tweaking the accounts so it looks like we're doing wonderfully you know you're still being loyal because actually to share all this is fantastic and that's where we get into issues so um yeah any any questions you want to leave your listeners with uh yeah i think this has been a difficult one for us to cover i think it's um it's been a hard one to pin down i thought it was gonna be a lot more straightforward so i'm curious how how listeners think about it you know is it is it something that you think is really important and do you expect that as managers do you expect that people would work for you yeah i'd like to ask as well how do you where do you see your loyalties being as a manager and as a person actually yes listeners so if your coffee is still a little bit warm and you want to engage in further conversations send us a message managementcafe at gmail.com or go to managementcafepodcast.com and there is a contact form there well listeners coffee is over for us now it's over to you how loyal are you i mean it's just not going to send us oh yeah we're not going to demand we're not going to demand oh yeah we're not demanding loyalty we'll be here for you listeners we are loyal to you thank you for joining us for this episode of management cafe you've been listening to tim bergers and pilar or team remember to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast you use and if you want to get in touch you can do so over at managementcafepodcast.com coffee's over for us now it's over to you thank you for listening you you