Acceleration Partners’ founder explains how leaders can balance understanding with doing what’s best for the team.

As Robert Glazer sees it, empathy in leadership isn’t just about “being nice.” It’s about understanding what drives and motivates your team, which, in turn, means taking time to learn their backstories.

“You might find out your super aggressive salesperson who seems over-focused on the commission grew up in abject poverty, and in the back of their mind they’re just afraid about ever going back there and not having enough,” Robert says.

The understanding and empathy that results can head off discord and misalignment in the workplace as he sees it. “Particularly when you’re trying to resolve conflicts and communications, that stuff is there …” he says. “The more I understand someone, the more I understand … what drives them or their back stories, [the more] it does help resolve things and solve some things.”

Robert brings this mindset to his work as founder and chairman of the board of Acceleration Partners, which helps leading brands grow their affiliate marketing partnerships with strategic support and local resources. He is also host and creator of the Elevate podcast and author of the Friday Forward newsletter.

In running Acceleration Partners, Glazer sees relationship-building as a key foundation of achieving company goals. “You need the performance and the objectives, but you also need the relationship,” he says. “Those allow you to have nuanced conversations.”

That said, Robert challenges the idea that a company should operate like a family — an approach that might support toxic behavior. “I’ve actually never liked the terminology around ‘We’re a family,’” he says. “Because actually to me, a family is like, ‘Oh, we excuse the drunk uncle who’s making inappropriate comments at the wedding and things.’

“Because to me that’s always like, ‘We’re family, so we excuse everything,’” he says. “I think a high performing team is the right analogy, right? Teams have trust, teams have chemistry, and you should expect as a player that if you are playing horribly, the coach is going to bring you out of the game because it’s affecting the whole team.”

It’s also important to make sure that the company promotes people who have the capability to lead, Robert notes. Star performers don’t always have that ability, he points out.

“Some of the greatest mistakes in the history of most businesses are promoting the great salesperson to sales manager, the brilliant engineer to engineering manager …” he says. “A lot of people don’t want to lead, and they don’t like it. … That’s okay because you need that staff, but one bad leader can destroy the whole team.”

For that reason, it’s important to measure team members’ performance appropriately as they rise through the ranks, Robert notes.

“When they switch to a manager or leader, you need to evaluate them for their managerial or leadership capabilities and their team’s performance, not their individual performance,” he says. “That’s the job they’re supposed to do.”

These were just a few of the topics Glazer discussed with Chris Benguhe, founder and president of the Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital and publisher of the Social Capital Insider. Click on the link below to listen to their conversation.