LEADERSHIP
Great Leaders Share Purpose to Overcome Apathy
A workplace cancer that leaders can cause or cure
Curing apathy is now an essential leadership skill — getting others to care, to give a damn about a mission.
“The world is looking for leaders.”
— Michael Horner
This should not be confused with getting others to follow rules. To behave. If leaders simply manage to get followers to sit in silence and beaver away at tasks, until the end of the day, they won't achieve much.
As a leader, I urge you to ask yourself:
- Does your presence overcome follower-apathy at work? Or,
- Does your presence add to apathy at work?
- Do your followers work harder, better, or worse in your absence?
- Could they do the same job without you?
This is woven into an eternal human problem — how motivation influences us to structure our work. The challenge for leaders is how to help employees to do meaningful work, not because they have to or to avoid boredom.
This article will explore apathy, the primary cause as to why 70 percent of the workforce today is uninspired.
Emotional Nutrition
Do you organize your team better than they organize themselves?
People want more than just a continued source of money. Great leaders know this and find ways to ensure that their followers are emotionally fed too.
Those who control salary payments are likely to get workers to behave, yes, but they’ll never get them to buy into a vision.
Salary seekers rarely arrive joyfully-skipping and smiling at the office on a Monday morning.
This means that you’ll get an output proportional to the extent to which you can control others. This is a disposable mindset. Talent is only applied when a shared purpose exists, an emotional contract, a psychological equilibrium.
Situational happiness
Apathy is situation-specific. A happy and energetic person in one scenario can be uninspired, lethargic, apathetic, and very unhappy in another. They change depending on the situation, the environment. There’s a dip in energy, a notable deflation.
Why so?
We know that stress is one cause of apathy.
If followers experience that their effort is often ignored or overlooked they’ll become passive in the face of an apathy inducing leader. A demoralizing situation results in apathy. If it’s a no-win situation, making less effort means that you lose with more control.
Highly competent leaders help their team by delegating, giving control, the autonomy of the situation with their followers. They trust them.
For all humans, an unavoidable punishment or an unpleasant interaction leads to one thing — indifference. We detach.
Excruciating appraisals or repetitive meetings with your boss where no suggestions you make are ever good enough is deflating. Energy sapping. If no valid solutions are forthcoming, then one thing is guaranteed, perpetual apathy.
People become apathetic because they see a situation as impossible, or as something that always happens. They give up. They stop trying to find an alternative and disengage.
Final Thoughts
Not everyone succumbs to the helplessness that apathy brings. One-third of workers figure out how to change their situation by:
- Working to improve themselves, or
- By leaving their employer
That leaves two-thirds, 70 percent in fact, of workers who become indifferent when consistent evidence supports the belief that their efforts are futile.
Great leaders gain from interactions with others when they share a common purpose.
Seven out of ten workers today are apathetic. They don't care. This is a failure of leadership. It has to change.
A leader’s task is this:
- Find a shared purpose and protect it, nurture it
- Provide supporting evidence to show that effort is valued, worthwhile, and
- Ensure that your followers know they’re part of the future
In so doing, leaders can overcome apathy, inspire others, and resonate a purpose in the lives of their people.
“Your job as a leader is to bring out the greatness in others”
— Tim Denning
