Being a great leader takes time and practice, and a growing share of workers are trying to get better at it.
Search interest in the term “leadership” is at an all-time high, according to Google data, along with related terms like training, best practices, advice on how to lead a team and sources for professional development.
The buzz likely stems from people wanting to lead during a time of rapid business changes due to remote and hybrid policies in offices, global politics, changing economic circumstances and the adoption of technology like AI, says Brian Glaser, Google’s chief learning officer.
Glaser has been a manager off and on for the last 20 years and leads the onboarding, training and leadership development for some 150,000 employees worldwide.
As a leadership expert, Glaser tells CNBC Make It that people of all experience levels struggle with one main aspect of being a boss: delivering “really effective feedback so that people are clear about where they stand.”
Instead, many managers shy away from critical or constructive feedback in the pursuit of being well liked.
“As a leader, being nice is great,” Glaser says. That can lead you to be liked among your reports, but “the name of the game is really to be respected.”
“If you’re not delivering the feedback, you may not get the kind of respect you need as a manager,” he says. This can be tough for first-time managers or someone who’s been promoted and is now overseeing the work of former peers.
But teams can grow stagnant or repeat avoidable mistakes “if you’re only looking to tell people what’s working and not necessarily delivering the hard stuff,” Glaser says.
Glaser’s team is behind Google’s latest People Management Essentials, a paid course available to the public that covers lessons from over a dozen Google bosses about what it takes to be an excellent leader.
Some of the lessons about delivering solid feedback are inspired by sports psychology, Glaser says.
“We know the best athletes are the folks who receive constant feedback from their coaches about how they’re performing, he says. Win or lose, “every time they finish a game, they debrief, they talk about what worked and what didn’t. We believe those same concepts can be applied to organizational life.”
Talking about areas for improvements helps ensure stronger performance outcomes in the future. Athletes including Super Bowl champ Tom Brady and Team USA Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas have discussed that learning from mistakes and failures fueled their successes.
In the workplace, meanwhile, telling a report that “they need to improve can be challenging,” Glaser says, “but we know through good practice, managers can do this, and it really matters.”
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