DALLAS—What makes a great leader? The Women In Trucking Accelerate conference here helped answer that question through a breakout session on "leadership behaviors that build trust, belonging, and high-performing teams." Great leadership requires a listening ear, a disciplined approach, and concise communication. 

The framework: From a good leader to a great leader 

We've all heard the adage: "People don't quit jobs; they quit bosses," and a Gallup poll found that leaders affect the engagement rate for 70% of employees. Engagement rates among employees are the difference between an employee who is excited about their tasks and highly involved in the workplace versus an employee who is resentful about their experience and undermines the hard work accomplished by those who are engaged, the Gallup article explained.

So, how can leaders ensure their employees are engaged and satisfied? It's all about the framework, said Delphia Howze, a human resources executive with 20 years of experience.

The leadership framework is a four-step process:

1. Listen
2. Build trust
3. Foster employee experience
4. Achieve organizational performance.

This framework helps leaders understand how to "get to the point of really ensuring that organizational performance is rooted in things that are focused around success and our acumen as leaders," Howze said to a standing-room-only crowd of women leaders.

Listening is the first element in this framework because "you can't trust someone that you haven't engaged with, and you can't trust someone that you haven't had an experience with," Howze said.

Listening is the baseline of the framework because it builds relationships and opens lines of communication between leadership and employees.

Those lines of communication help build trust—the second element in the framework. When leaders listen to their employees, they learn about their needs, their passions, and their struggles. Each conversation adds equity to the relationship. As trust grows, productivity increases. Without trust, productivity drops and costs rise, Howze said.

If leaders listen and build trust, the third element of the leadership framework—fostering the employee experience—is a natural result.

"If you have [listening and building trust] in the bag, fostering the employee experience is very easy because people are more likely to contribute, communicate, and elevate opportunities and ... concerns," Howze said.

Raising concerns is an important part of the employee experience because it helps managers understand organizational downfalls or processes that aren't achieving results. Employees who don't feel heard, and those who don't trust their bosses, are less likely to share these experiences for fear of being punished or blamed for the problem, Howze explained.

Together, these three elements build organizational performance—the fourth element in the framework—which fosters engagement, productivity, retention, and positive employee relationships.

This process does not happen overnight, and using this framework shouldn't be equated to flipping a switch and seeing immediate results. But improving the workplace by just 1% each day by listening and building trust will pay dividends over time.

6 critical leadership behaviors 

The trucking industry is full of great leaders who all exhibit different leadership styles, different decision-making processes, and different team dynamics. But throughout Howze's career, she's noticed a few behaviors that many successful leaders exhibit. While she said there are many, she highlighted six: 1. Listen, 2. Acknowledge contributions, 3. Address challenges with civility, 4. Accountability and humanity, 5. Consistency, and 6. Create space.

As previously mentioned, listening lays the foundation for the employee relationship. But it also informs leaders of what is happening in other departments. Leaders who listen are more informed and thus better decision makers. Questions leaders should ask are:

• “What am I missing?”
• "Will you help me understand your perspective?”
• “What would you like me to consider?” 

Listening "is not passive," Howze said. "It definitely is a leadership behavior."

Great leaders also take the time to intentionally and genuinely acknowledge their employees' hard work or a job well done. Because leadership is about more than the result, Howze said, it's essential to acknowledge the contributions that brought about that result.

This acknowledgment should be more than a pat on the back or a "Good job!" Instead, it should be specific, highlighting the employee's long hours spent on a project, astute analysis that changed the course of a business decision, or the time and effort spent reeling in a customer that you thought couldn't be earned.

"Take time to recognize and acknowledge contributions of team members, of colleagues, in a way that's meaningful and not performative," Howze advised.

Great leaders also keep their cool when addressing challenges, attacking them from a place of civility. This has nothing to do with the message addressing the challenge and everything to do with the way the message is conveyed, Howze said. The fourth behavior, accountability and humanity, also comes into play here.

Leaders must be accountable for their own actions and hold their team members accountable in a way that isn't a personal attack but a way that challenges a team member's negative behaviors.

"We don't soften messages," Howze said. "Truth speaks for itself. If you're going in there with the truth, you don't have to soften the language. What you have to do is make sure the message is conveyed."

Acknowledge the problem while being clear and concise, she said. But this also requires leaders to have all the facts.

Leaders must create the space for employees to come to them with the facts. They must create an open dialogue with their team members to help generate the best relationships and the best results from them. This goes hand in hand with listening.

Great leaders exhibit these behaviors, and they are consistent in every employee interaction. Being consistent is a choice. It's something that's practiced and must be practiced day in and day out for those in positions of leadership, Howze said.

Howze ended her session with a quote from HR professional Archana Singh: "When a real leader walks into the room, it makes employees feel safe, not anxious."

As a leader in this dynamic industry, are you the reason an employee walks on eggshells, or are you someone they can breathe a sigh of relief with? We should all aspire to be the latter.