Leading from the Middle
“If you want people to join you on the other side of the river, build them a bridge to help them cross. Don’t just expect them to jump in and swim.”
When you hear the word ‘leader’, you immediately think of people who are owners of a company, Presidents or Prime Ministers or even people in senior leadership positions. However, people can show leadership in any role. Like the masterpieces by Leanardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh, there is more than what you see at first glance.
It doesn’t matter what job we are in or where we sit in the hierarchy; we all collaborate and work with people to achieve our end goal. In the majority of cases, 90% of everything we do is people management.
So, just as in those masterpieces, when it comes to dealing with people, we need to be aware that there is more to it than what we initially see. Most of us manage from the middle, with little or no authority but a great need to inspire and motivate those around us.
How do you manage without authority?
My career in Project and Change Management has meant managing teams while not being able to line manage them, which calls for an abundance of persuasion and influence.
I thought I did this well. However, the feedback I got early in my career was ‘Gill is a nice person, once you get to know her’ or ‘She is direct and can be a bit abrupt.’ I was surprised to see that although I felt I was dealing with situations well, people sometimes misinterpreted my approach.
I began to realise that I can’t change who I am, but perhaps I can adjust my behaviours and be mindful of others. I asked myself “What communication skills do I need to adapt to build strong personal relationships and empower self-organising teams without being misunderstood?”
I have discussed this question with people around the office, gone on courses and listened to talks about how people have introduced changes in the workplace.
Over time, I came up with the following list of fundamentals to help me get the best out of people.
Our upbringing is the foundation.
We are all born as a blank canvas. It’s our surroundings and our upbringing that start to paint the picture of how we are in our life. A lot of what we learn, how we behave and see the world, is all shaped by this.
Our experiences shape us.
Like our childhood, our experiences as adults continue to shape us. The encounters we are exposed to are broad and are a mix of good and bad encounters. These live inside us for years to come. These encounters continue to affect our behaviour long after the event itself has passed, and our interpretation of them as time goes on might change as we think back on them.
In his TED talk on The Riddle of Experience vs Memory, psychologist Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of behavioural economics) talks about how even a good experience at the moment could be looked back on as a bad memory later in life.
Our culture is a part of who we are.
We live in a multicultural, multifaceted society. As we travel to work, eat out and go shopping, the people around us all have their own beliefs founded on their personal experiences or their family’s heritage. When you bring culture, gender, race, wealth and many other facets of development and upbringing into the picture, it becomes clear that there is no single, universal, easy way to communicate with everyone. You need to stay true to yourself, yet adapt for each person.
It’s worth reflecting on this statement for a minute: communication is what the listener does. What that means is that although you speak the words, the communication happens when the person you are talking to hears and interprets them. It’s simply not enough to speak and think you have connected.
Words mean different things to different people.
Words can have different meanings to different people based on where they learned to speak. When you hear someone speak it’s easy to make a superficial judgement on their heritage and therefore presume they will understand your words as you intend.
For example, I speak three different languages. Australian English, British English and American English. Why? Because although I grew up in Australia, I now live in London and I have several American friends as well as work colleagues that are based there. Words that mean one thing in one place mean something different somewhere else, whether it is subtly or radically different I need to be conscious of those subtle differences, so not to upset, confuse or offend anyone.
Mental health makes us or breaks us.
A study conducted by Our World Data in 2017 found that 10.7% of the world population suffers from a mental health issue. That’s 792 million people of the 7.6 billion people in the world. At the best of times, it is tough being aware of your mental health let alone that of others. Unlike physical health, it is easy to hide your mental state to the point where you may not even realise you are not coping as well as you generally do.
In short, our lives today are complex. At home, at work, our relationships, social media and personal finances, to name a few, we have a lot going on in so many different dimensions that consume our daily lives.
We are often fine managing individual aspects of our lives, but when they combine with all of the other things going on, the whole can become overwhelming. What is happening in one part of our lives can have a positive or negative effect on others. One way for all of us to get a handle on how we are doing is to use the Mental Health Stress Bucket. It’s a simple exercise to calibrate what’s going in our lives and understand what might be impacting us more than we realise.
We all have our unique skillset.
We are individuals who learn differently. We take on some skills naturally, while others are more difficult to master. We can all name one thing that we will never be good at yet other things we excel at with ease. It’s essential to have an honest assessment of what you are not good at, as well as to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your colleagues. It will help you get the best out of yourself and your team.
Work is just a series of tasks. What makes us unique to other species is the way we communicate, influence and persuade others to take those tasks on. I have found that these four skills help make interactions with my teams and others around the business more effective:
- Being mindful — Take the time to check in with yourself and others. It’s a great way to see where people’s heads are at.
- Understanding your own core beliefs — Knowing these will help you understand why you react the way you do to people and situations.
- Being open and adaptable — While others struggle with change, if you can do it quickly and help them along the way will make everyone happier and makes the transition smoother.
- Unconscious bias — Try and learn what behaviours stem from your unconscious bias.
Theory vs Practicality.
These steps might sound simple enough, but they aren’t easy to apply consistently. I struggle every day trying to not only be aware of myself but everyone I am interacting with.
Do I get it right every time? Absolutely not. Trying to account for those around me while being aware of where my head is at is hard. But the point is I try, and that is the best that you can expect of anyone.
I encourage you to take the time to have an open and honest conversation with yourself and understand who you are. You will find the relationships that you build and then maintain will be better off in the long run, which will make leading from the middle a million times easier.
Leading from the Middle Series
Learning
Mental Health
Self Awareness
The Building of Bridges
