Transcriber: Nguyen Binh Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
My name is Dr. Solomon DeFrancis,
and I want to take a moment to speak to you
about connections, relationships, and leadership.
I’ll start by posing the question
What is more important than a relationship?
Can you think of something more important than
the relationship that you have with your mother? With your father?
With a family member.
With your spouse or possibly your children.
Now although we don’t create these types of interconnections
in the workforce,
there still has to be a time that mutual respect is taken
between the employer and the employee.
Now, there’s no specific point in time that you know
you've created a friend or you've created or you've established
an individual to be your leader.
It's a series of conversations, a series of actions,
a series of small nuances and human behavior.
And at the end of it, you have a leader.
On the other hand, when these things are lacking or shortchanged
or not fully developed,
we often look at the person in charge as a boss,
a manager or supervisor.
Now, how does this end up happening?
Is it since the individual didn't take the time to build a relationship,
or is that individual truly lacking the emotional intelligence
and self-awareness and the developing into a true leader?
A true leader needs to have a firm grasp of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is the empathy piece the leaders have and bosses lack.
He understands to acknowledge empathy for colleagues
and our current situation of a pandemic and how it took its toll on individuals.
The rise in mental health and
the disconnect in human in-person interaction.
It allows a leader to put themselves in the eyes,
the shoes or the situation the employees are in.
Now, having high emotional intelligence will enable leaders
to take on the philosophy of individuals coming to work every day trying to do
the best they can and not the ideology that individuals show,
but the full intention of how they can best screw it up that day.
Emotional intelligence also plays
a vital role in with leaders staying in tune with their workforce.
When we lack emotional intelligence,
we start having disparaging margins of interconnections amongst organizations
then seen by products such as
the income inequality gaps in modern society.
With numbers as frightening as
three individuals having more than 50 percent
of the United States wealth
proves that these leaders have lost touch,
have fallen out of touch with the typical workforce.
These conglomerate organizations create meaningful relationships
with their stakeholders, discarding the importance of the reality
of the everyday workforce individual.
When these leaders lack emotional intelligence,
they slowly become the boss, losing all respect and autonomy.
Now, another aspect of leadership that is often overlooked is organizational size.
Robin Dunbar from Cambridge University did an interesting study.
Dr. Dunbar created Dunbar's number,
which states that one cannot have more than a hundred and fifty
meaningful relationships.
Dunbar is a British anthropologist who found early Hunter-Gatherer societies,
modern groupings, offices, communities, factories, residential campsites,
military organizations and even Christmas card lists
stick to about a hundred and fifty individuals.
So leaders need to be cognitive of Dunbar’s number of
one hundred and fifty meaningful relationships and who they are with
because ultimately it affects a leader's values.
So this raises two points.
One being a leader must be cautious of who’s needing their influence.
And does this pose the issue of organizations needing to only have
one hundred and fifty employees?
As we dig deeper into Dunbar’s number
and how it states that an individual has a threshold of around a hundred and fifty
meaningful relationships,
we find this number so critical because of the number of individuals
a leader is coming in contact with daily and the individuals that they value.
As we examine the corporate world,
it has become commonplace in our society that CEOs are extremely disconnected,
which creates substantial social inequalities in society.
Now, suppose we look at the framework of a major conglomerate in business
in the United States.
The CEO of a corporation is creating meaningful relationships
with board members and other influential stakeholders.
An example, the CEO of Amazon and how he focuses on stakeholders interests
and is not in tune with the people carrying out the day to day work,
thus creating a level of disconnect.
They're not taking into account any meaningful relationships with
the ordinary worker.
That level of disconnect begins disparities of inequality
and boss becomes a more suitable title.
Now, this is how wealth becomes hyper concentrated in the hands of few.
Now, let me shift your focus
from the one of the consumer world to the one of education.
By trade, I’m an educator.
And more specifically,
I’m a principal at a challenging middle school.
Now, some say that I’m crazy.
And others say, oh, my God, have mercy on your soul.
In organizations such as education, the framework is similar, in that
an individual at the top, must be cautious
not to fall into the same loops.
Just like the CEO focuses on stakeholder interests,
upper management and education must not fall into the same traps
and focusing solely on data improvement.
At a school site,
Principles first meaningful relationships are with teachers and staff.
The principal must make
a cognitive decision to create meaningful relationships with students.
Failure to do this will create a level of disconnection.
Typically, staff members will make up a good hundred and fifty
meaningful relationships on a school site.
And if you have a student body that serves nearly a thousand students,
when are these relationships being exercised?
So it takes a conscious, savvy leader to understand
that although the one hundred and fifty meaningful relationships
might be with site staff and district office individuals,
the focus still needs to be around student learning.
A true leader makes a conscious effort to build the relationships with
the students and the staff continually.
Sometimes stretching themselves thin, but allowing the leader not to
become out of touch with the actual essential work.
Now the same ideology can be said to a superintendent of a school district,
the meaningful relationships superintendents work through
in organizations start with the executive cabinet,
principals, and staff.
It takes a true leader to take on the cognitive approach,
to be in it for the students in the community,
therefore staying in tune with the district polls.
When this is not done, the superintendent is out of grasp with
the common themes or struggles of the community.
They cannot adequately move the organization forward.
Now, all too often, we see individuals in high positions
holding exacerbated titles, clinging to outdated ideologies
and some desperate attempt of legacy, rather than being conscious for
the greater good.
The best leaders know their limitations and they work on them.
They know their people and they play to their strengths.
They get the most out of individuals understanding that that is how you build
top talent and how you build organizations.
So when we see bosses that hold long titles
but have entirely lost connections to the people, public,
community or everyday individual,
This begs the question, are they true leaders?
In Western philosophy, there’s an adage
“Philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers”,
this demands leaders to grapple over decisions and reflect
on every perspective possible when leading.
Which requires emotional intelligence, understanding cognitive limits
and meaningful relationships from organizational leaders.
I’ll leave you with this leaders or should I say bosses
that fail to evolve in their position have over the years
lost the connections to the people.
So let’s think about this. People are constantly changing.
If leaders do not grow with them, they have lost the true meaning of leadership.
True leaders must always maintain the mindset
[You are either getting better or you are getting worse, but you’re never the same.]
Thank you.