Changing the leadership defaults

Feel like you don’t have the “right” traits to be a leader? The problem’s not you — it’s how we define leadership. Learn how to recognize the cultural norms you’ve internalized — and change your relationship to them.

I started using new software to run my company’s payroll and benefits at the beginning of 2022. At first, it was great — modern, easy to use, thoughtful onboarding.

Until I went to run January payroll with it, that is.

See, this year I officially moved Active Voice to a four-day workweek, where 34 hours is considered full-time. I’m passionate about shifting work culture to be less draining and extractive — to be more humane, collective, and sustainable. Implementing a four-day week for my tiny team was an act of putting my money where my mouth is, and I was so excited to make it official.

But my software doesn’t care about that. The 40-hour, five-day workweek is baked in. It shows up on salaried workers’ paystubs. It screws up my PTO and holiday accounting.

And there’s no way to change the settings. All I can do is find workarounds.

For years, I wrote about software biases like these — the assumptions about “average users” that get baked into our interfaces as “default settings.”

I wrote about forms that required users to select their gender from a binary menu, health apps that assumed anyone who tracks their period is focused on pregnancy, race and ethnicity selectors that forced multiracial people to choose a single answer.

The more I looked at interfaces, the more of these assumptions I saw — and with every assumption, more people who were being excluded or harmed.

I don’t really write about tech anymore — not since I stopped consulting on products, and started focusing on the people who build them instead. But the longer I thought about this particular product feature, the clearer the parallels became. My focus on leadership and team health these past couple years isn’t so different from my work back then.

It’s all about changing the defaults.

People often come to me with baked-in beliefs about leadership — default settings no one’s encouraged them to question before.

Here are some of the ones I hear most often:

• I’m too introverted to lead. I need more “leadership presence.”
• I’m not really a leader, I’m just good at facilitating and getting people onto the same page.
• I shouldn’t need help. If I’m overwhelmed, I must not be cut out for this.
• I have to have all the answers or everyone will know I don’t deserve to be in charge.

Underneath each of these statements is a narrow belief about what leadership means:

• Leaders must be charismatic and loud.
• Leaders have to be at the front of the room, setting direction.
• Leaders cannot show vulnerability.
• Leaders cannot have knowledge gaps.

Of course, these beliefs don’t come out of nowhere. We learn them.

Some of the lessons are explicit: we might be told that we need to dress differently, or that our hair isn’t professional, or that we need more “gravitas” to get promoted. Many are implicit: we soak up norms whenever we look at who’s at the top of the org chart or pay attention to which voices get listened to in meetings.

As deep as some of these beliefs might be, they’re not inherent truths. They’re cultural norms. That doesn’t make them easy to change — they’re deeply embedded in our society, and a lot of people are invested in keeping them that way.

But we can change our relationship to them.

When societal defaults exclude you, it’s easy to start believing you’re the problem — that there’s something wrong with your voice or your body or your brain.

That’s on purpose: the longer you believe you’re the problem, the longer the status quo stays unquestioned, and the less pressure those in power feel to change anything.

But just like I found when I started noticing the assumptions baked into our interfaces, once you start seeing what’s really going on, you can’t unsee it. You start recognizing that the status quo definition of leadership is narrow and biased. That it’s what got us here: to workplaces steeped in burnout, trauma, and exploitation. It got us Slack pings at 11pm and all-white leadership teams and income inequality so staggering it’s hard to even put on a chart.

Maybe it’s just me, but that’s not the kind of leadership I want more of.

Again, simply knowing that traditional models of leadership are broken won’t dismantle the system. But it is the first step. Because once you can see these default settings for what they are — choices that reflect status quo values — you can stop internalizing them. You can stop beating yourself up for not fitting in the box, stop devaluing your greatest strengths just because they don’t add up to some jerk’s definition of leadership.

And that? That’s when everything changes. Because once you stop believing the system is right and you’re wrong, you can start making choices about if and when to conform.

You can feel confident in your strengths, even when not everyone can see them.

You can stop telling yourself you lack “leadership presence,” and start finding out what kind of leader you already are.

Work doesn’t have to be 40 hours (or more!) a week. And leadership doesn’t have to look like those who came before.

We can change all of it. And I believe we will.

So what system defaults have you been accepting? What assumptions are baked into them? Which ones are serving you, and which ones are keeping you small? I’d love to hear about it.

Just not on a Friday — our offices are closed.

This post originally appeared in the February 1, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.