Leadership: Be the change that you want to see in the world
People used to become managers because of their competence. They would become experts at a task, and then they would be promoted to manage a team based on that skill set. Credibility came from how tasks were performed.
Some things have changed, and some things have stayed the same.
When I worked for the Wales Audit Office, Kelly Doonan shared with us the importance of working to purpose and how different leaders leverage different power bases. Back in the day, power was based in expertise and position, but now we might be managing people who are better at some tasks than we are. It’s not about one person having all the answers. At it’s worst, this feeds into The Peter Principle — where people ‘rise to the levels of their incompetence’ when they’re promoted based on their performance in their current role and not the abilities that are needed for their intended role.
Those power bases outline to me that our workplaces are complex environments. People’s preferred management style will vary from person to person. One person’s handholding and support is another person’s lack of trust. Instead of thinking about consistency of action, we might instead think about a consistency of outcome, for example what might we need to do for each of our team members to feel trusted?
One of the key things that I really took from a recent training course was the importance of keeping things simple. How can we know how it’s best to lead very different people in the workplace? We ask them. We find out what good looks like to them. And it’s a conversation, not a one-off question. We need to mirror the behaviours that we want from our teams — being vulnerable, open and honest.
Authenticity
Another key take away from the course was around the importance of authenticity. With so much discussion around what it means to be a good leader, it’s easy to think that it’s a uniform idea, and that it’s a role to conform to rather than to make your own. Essentially, being something that you’re not is going to take it’s toll at some point. I’m never going to be a command and control leader, so to mirror that set of behaviours will be incredibly tiring for me.
However I have been thinking about how I balance out some of my tendencies since my initial conversation with our trainer Karen. It all comes back to another thing that I’ve learnt from Kelly:
“Do the right thing, not the easy thing”
There is some criticism of Servant Leadership, like in this article, but many of its flaws can be mitigated by asking whether you’re really doing the right thing, and not the easy thing. I’m not convinced that the same is true of a command and control approach.
This quote can also be applied to being open, even when that might be difficult. When we keep things hidden, are we protecting other people, or are we actually protecting ourselves? Our decision to hide something might derive from good intent, but again it’s inauthentic. Everyone wants public services to be transparent, yet its easy to see why they’re not when difficult questions are being asked. As leaders within organisations, we all have a role in changing that.
Curiosity
We spoke about coaching a lot on the course, and how it relates to being curious. Being in a position of hierarchy means that you can easily jump to (or be expected to offer) solutions. It can be easy to default to closed questions because they enable us to steer conversations to a particular point. But using these too early can lead us to identifying solutions before we know what the real problem is.
Open questions are so useful when you’re thinking about how you might move people who are poles apart towards a collaborative solution. I found this set of questions helpful:
- What do you want?
- What is important to you about that?
- Ask a test question (So if x happened, would you be happy with y?)
What was particularly useful to me was that this wasn’t framed as a compromise. In a compromise, no one gets to an ideal solution. These questions help move people to a point where the intended outcome can work for them.
As the legend Larry David said,
A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied
Avoiding the drama triangle
I also found Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle really useful.
The model involves three roles — the persecutor, the victim and the rescuer. As a line manager it’s easy to jump into the role of the rescuer in order to solve problems for people, but what’s interesting about the model is that roles shift within it. By assuming the role of the rescuer in issues between colleagues, we can easily become the persecutor, with the persecutor then becoming a victim.
This is where the role of a leader as a coach is important — that we look to empower people to deal with their own problems, instead of solving them for people. I’m really interested in this on a much wider basis — how public services can empower people too. If our organisations can become enablers for improving people’s lives, then we’ll be in a much better place.
Gandhi was a bit of a legend wasn’t he? I think he nailed it when he urged us to “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”
