When leading through change, all competent leaders, parents, teachers and coaches take one of three approaches.
1: Hug and Love
To protect their team’s mental health, some caring leaders temporarily relax performance standards.
2: Push and Shove
To meet the new challenges, some driven leaders push people even harder to meet higher performance standards with fewer resources.
3: Push and Love
The most effective leaders focus on both high standards and high support.
But what exactly does Push & Love leadership look like in practice?
Accept Past Failures, But Expect Future Success
Just 24 hours after releasing their first AI chatbot named Tay in 2014, Microsoft had to kill it. After trolls discovered how to hack Tay’s learning algorithm, the bot spat out more than a hundred thousand increasingly sexist and racist tweets.
How did CEO Satya Nadella respond?
After publicly accepting blame for the humiliating snafu he wrote a personal letter to the responsible engineers saying “keep pushing and know that I am with you.”
Later that year, those same engineers released a bot named Zo that paved the way for Microsoft’s industry leadership in AI.
Clarify the Reality BUT Spotlight the Potential
Do you know what FDR said before his famous line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”? He said “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth.”
Push-and-love leaders follow this speech pattern:
a) Clarify the Reality
BUT
b) Spotlight the Potential.
Be Transparent About Your Approach
Studies on teachers, coaches, and managers all show that when people receive critical feedback, their knee-jerk assumption is that the feedback-giver (i.e. You) thinks poorly of them.
The solution is transparency.
Tell them in plain terms “I’m giving you critical feedback because I know just how good you are capable of becoming. I want to help you get there.”
