Association for Coaching and Institute of Coaching, ‘Coaching in the Workplace’ conference, 24-26 June
Knowing how to honour and save face is essential to good leadership, said Maya Hu-Chan, president of California-based, Global Learning Associates.
“I’ve learnt in my coaching of leaders across many cultures that there’s one concept that’s essential to their leadership but also counter-intuitive sometimes: saving face. Face is social currency – it’s the X factor in all relationships,” said Hu-Chan, whose book, Saving Face: How to Preserve Dignity and Build Trust, was published in June (Berrett-Koehler Publishers).
“Face represents a person’s self-esteem, self-worth, identity, reputation, status, pride and dignity. It’s about your whole person, who you are, how you think of yourself, and how other people perceive you. It speaks to a common human desire to be accepted and respected,” she said.
Honouring face involves actions to show respect and admiration, and to preserve dignity for others, such as listening to someone, giving their voice equal time and weight, acknowledging their contribution, providing positive recognition, building confidence and asking them to teach, coach or mentor.
“Essentially we’re sending a message to the other person: I see you, I hear you, you matter to me.”
She likened the process of honouring face as making deposits through words and actions into a “bank account of face”. If we make a “withdrawal”, the relationship can still be saved if there are enough “deposits” but this can take a long time, she said.
She shared the story of a leader client “who prides herself for being highly effective, efficient and transparent” but had unintentionally created a culture of fear, low performance and low engagement by posting critical feedback of team members online, which could be seen by others. “People were feeling humiliated and attacked, and started to hold back, not share ideas and not take risks, and not trusting each other. She took the critical feedback offline and showed more appreciation but it took six months to re-build the culture of respect.”