Leadership: It’s Not About You
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
The top ten lists of key human (a.k.a., soft) skills that abound in the popular business press frequently include the word “courage.”
I think we can all agree that in a business context, courage does not mean that you’re willing to run into a burning building or otherwise put your life on the line. Instead, we’re talking about psychological courage, or what some would refer to as “fortitude.”
Fortitude is an interesting word and is typically defined as: “strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with courage.” While most of us don’t have jobs where we encounter physical danger, we do routinely encounter adversity and situations that can lead to emotional anguish.
The Search for Psychological Safety
Ever been asked to do something at work that made you feel like you can’t tell your mom about it? Ever had to hold a co-worker or team accountable for substandard performance? Ever had to challenge a superior in public or private? Ever had to admit an error and take responsibility for not holding up your end of the bargain? Many of us would rather go skydiving or engage in some other risky activity than engage in constructive conflict.
These are all situations where it takes real courage to speak up and do the right thing for yourself, your peers, your customers, and the business. For courage to flourish within the culture of your organization, leaders must create an environment of psychological safety. If new ideas or challenges to authority are met with a swift smackdown, then courage will not be fostered. In a smackdown culture, everyone will be looking to protect themselves, their jobs, and their immediate priorities.
Moving Toward a High Trust, High Accountability Culture
Let’s suppose you’re a leader operating in a smackdown culture and are awakening to the benefits of changing tack toward trust, collaboration, diversity, inclusion, and constructive conflict. Moving the culture from smackdown toward “high trust and high accountability” may seem daunting.
The starting point for the journey to change your culture takes real courage and is an application of courage that doesn’t get nearly enough airplay. You see, the easy leadership road that leads to mediocrity is to hire people that look and talk like you and ensure that you remain the smartest person in the room.
The more difficult, but more rewarding path is to find the courage to hire people who have the potential to surpass you, who think differently than you do, and who are willing and able to challenge you.
However, simply hiring team members who can surpass you isn’t enough, it’s essential that you also help team members achieve their potential by continually investing in their development through coaching, mentoring, and formal/informal learning opportunities. This investment must be coupled with making the time and space for learning a business imperative—not just piling learning on top of everyone’s day job.
In addition, the concept of equity should be applied to decisions regarding coaching and development opportunities for your team members. Reserving development opportunities solely for those who fit in the upper right boxes of a 9-box or those who have otherwise been labeled as high potentials (or HIPO’s) should be avoided.
Skill inventory alignment conversations should take place on an ongoing basis with all team members. The purpose of these conversations is to identify skill gaps and experiential learning opportunities to fill those gaps. Having skill alignment conversations with everyone will help avoid unintended discrimination and the inevitable (and unnecessary) team tension that will result between the “haves and have nots” if learning is reserved for HIPOs.
Final Thoughts
Some leaders may bristle at my recommendations - especially the insinuation that many leaders consciously or subconsciously hire team members that they have a higher probability of controlling or moulding into their own image versus those that will challenge them and the status quo.
However, if you take a step back and recognize that most of us are conflict avoiders and carry around a great deal of self-doubt and hidden insecurities, a bit of quiet self-reflection and personal vulnerability will likely uncover episodes and actions that align with management and hiring practices that have led to suboptimal results. From my own personal experience and self-reflection, I can attest to past hiring decisions that were less than courageous.
It takes real courage to adopt a stewardship mindset to leadership and accept that the business and team are not about you, but are instead about (a) driving fantastic customer outcomes, (b) ensuring long-term sustainability and growth, and (c) helping the business’s most valuable asset—its people—thrive in the current and future world of work.
