The Emergence of Fair and Caring Leadership

The emergence of benevolent and fair management

The directive management style is now being called into question. Employees now expect more benevolence and fairness. This new stance does not necessarily mean abolishing hierarchical structures.

The finding is sadly unequivocal: three quarters of employees consider that their boss is “the worst and most stressful part of their job”. If employees are unhappy, it is very likely that their managers, too, do not derive as much satisfaction from their supervisory role as they could. In short, far too many frustrated people!

This shows that the management methods used up to now, essentially based on submission to hierarchical authority, are no longer suitable. They will be even less so in future because Generations Y and Z are highly allergic to any automatic submission to authority. These young people are ready to follow a leader who inspires them, but not a boss who merely has hierarchical power.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless: experience has shown that those who practise benevolent and fair leadership (BFL) achieve a much higher level of engagement from their teams while improving not only collective results but also their own satisfaction. The good news is that the BFL formula is simple and within the reach of any organisation.

Without changing structures

The second piece of good news is that BFL increases employees’ level of engagement by involving them, but without changing structures or hierarchy. This is an important difference from the “liberated company” model, for those familiar with it.

Like the kibbutz model, the liberated company model advocates changing the company’s hierarchy and governance. This is, of course, a choice that suits some people, but probably not the majority of organisations. Despite the fact that the BFL approach requires no change to structure or hierarchy, it also leads to high performance that maximises engagement. Better still, BFL does not need to be rolled out across the whole organisation. Each team manager decides whether or not to implement it for their team. This unconstrained deployment, together with the very good results achieved in Swiss SMEs, is why La Poste in France is preparing to roll it out to its 260,000 employees.

The logic of benevolent and fair leadership is based on a few simple principles:

- Apart from professional skills, what is expected of a manager is that they maximise the level of engagement of their employees in order to ensure collective success.

- For employees to be engaged, they must trust their manager. Indeed, without resorting to force (authority, financial reward, etc.), a manager cannot influence someone who does not trust what they say or do.

- To establish trust, there are two prerequisites: fairness and benevolence. These are the foundations of BFL. How could I want to follow or be influenced by someone who does not seem fair and benevolent to me?

Why fairness? Because most frustrations experienced in companies result from a lack of fairness: broken promises, abuse of power, favouritism, political games, contradictory injunctions, and so on. Even if enforcing it is not simple, implementation with the right tools makes it possible.

“When fairness and benevolence are intelligently combined with the pursuit of performance, they temper the toxicity of the blind race for profit.”

Why benevolence? Because working in an atmosphere devoid of benevolence is torture. Benevolence, which consists in acting in the other person’s interest, should not be confused with mere niceness or a world of Care Bears.

When fairness and benevolence are intelligently combined with the pursuit of performance, they temper the toxicity of the blind race for profit. In reality, because BFL increases the level of engagement, it improves performance. BFL shows that it is possible to succeed without harmfulness.

Putting it into practice does, however, require around thirty tools, which are taught in benevolent and fair leadership courses. As this toolbox visibly improves employees’ level of engagement and performance, the University of Geneva has made it one of the pillars of the new version of its MBA (Entrepreneurial Leadership) and of the CAS in Responsible Leadership, both taught in English.

For French speakers, the entry point is Romandie Formation, which teaches it in its programmes “Benevolent and Fair Leadership in Everyday Practice” and “MicroMBA in Entrepreneurial Management”.