What sucks about being a good leader

Dealing with the stress of leadership and management

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

I walked into my office, and the room started spinning around me.

I was firing an employee in five minutes, and it was my first time.

All I felt was panic. I knew I was about to change someone’s life, and for the worse. I spent the next few minutes with my hands on my desk trying to slow my breathing. Then I went to do what I needed to.

It was the right decision for our company. But, letting go of an employee isn’t an abstract event. You are hurting someone you hired, grew, and often like. I knew this person’s spouse and their kids.

Being a good leader can suck, even when you are doing the right thing.

A good leader helps managers handle the emotional baggage of the job.

What emotional baggage is there?

1. Your team comes first: Your comfort and needs take a backseat to what your company and team need.
2. It’s not what you like. It’s what works: Even as a President, most of my work isn’t interesting or exciting. It is grinding every day to drive results and improvement.
3. Your flaws are now public: You have to develop a thick skin, and even then it hurts. Your team often acts a carnival mirror — highlighting and sometimes distorting flaws.
4. Everything you do and say is amplified: Your team will obsess about what you do, what you say, and how you act. Good leaders act as if anything they say or do could be put in a newspaper or on social media.
5. You don’t see results often for months or years: When I was a front-end developer, I could make changes and see results immediately. Now, I look at my performance in quarters and years.

My worst moment as a manager

An employee called me after hours. They called to talk about their performance, fears, and how they wanted to improve.

What I could not tell them was that they were being fired the next day.

I sat on my porch with my wife and had a few too many bourbons so I could sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking that I was about to take away their family’s sole source of money. Was this person going to lose their home? What were they about to have to endure because of what I was doing?

It was early enough in my career that I didn’t know how to emotionally process what I was going through, and what had to happen.

It took me years to balance being a leader with my own emotional health.

Twenty years ago when I was a developer, a bad day meant a website might not load properly.

Now it means making decisions that impact fifty people and their families.

That is a responsibility to be taken seriously, but also a weight to carry. Find healthy ways to process the stress or you will find unhealthy ones.

How can you manage the stress?

1. Are you doing the right stuff: A lot of stress can come from doing your job poorly. Stressed about an employee coaching? Ask yourself if it is because you haven’t managed them well enough.
2. Be transparent with your team: Having your flaws exposed by the team can be painful. The best way to combat that is counter-intuitive: Make them public. Share them with your team so they understand what you see.
3. Share with others about what you are feeling: Talk to your mentors. Be open about what you are going through. You cannot process what you can’t discuss.
4. Take your vacation: Time away from work can help you think more creatively and re-energize you. You team can live without you for a few weeks.
5. Acceptance: Sometimes it is going to be hard. There are days when you cannot improve the situation. You can only focus on handing it internally the best you can.
6. Focus on what you find rewarding: Our attitudes often follow our focus. If you continuously think about what you don’t enjoy, you won’t be happy.

Leaders must also focus on helping the managers underneath them.

No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it. — Jack Welch

Acting stoic and pretending that nothing impacts you creates the perception that leadership is effortless rather than a skill honed and bled for. Creating impossible standards only frustrates your team.

How should you help managers under you?

1. Be open/transparent: Talk to your team about your own experiences. Put your failures and weaknesses on display. Encourage your managers to do the same.
2. Set expectations for difficulty: Ask yourself how this person will feel performing this task. Act as a guide, let them know what they might experience and different things that could happen.
3. Build the right culture: Create a culture with trust where vulnerability is encouraged. Without it, your team won’t be willing to share their challenges and where they need assistance.
4. Put on your therapist hat: Let your people vent to you. Listen to the challenges that they have. If it is appropriate, give advice or thoughts of your own. Spend most, if not all, of your time just listening and understanding their point of view.

Being open, authentic, and vulnerable isn’t easy, but it will pay dividends.

“Other people are going to find healing in your wounds. Your greatest life messages…will come out of your deepest hurts.” — Rick Warren

If you have your own story, feel free to share in the comments below.

There is a lot of content out there.

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I write about software development, and how to run software companies.
Feel free to reach out to discuss either. I’d be glad to talk.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website.

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