Leaders: Own Your S**t

Imagine you are attending a conference on the topic of responsible leadership. The room is full of leaders and the speaker is polling the audience:

"Hands up if you have a challenge with one of your team at work." (Nearly all the hands go up)
"Keep your hand up if you're frustrated by that person's behaviour and struggling to make headway." (Hands stay up)
"Now, keep your hand up if you think the other person is the one who needs to change."

In your mind's eye look around the room. How many of these leaders still have their hands up? If most of the hands are down you see the other leaders as generally responsible and adaptable to the needs of their team. Congratulations on your great faith in people.

If you're more like me, most of the hands stay up (cynic alert!). In my version the leaders expect their team to adapt and take responsibility rather than being flexible and responsible themselves. Sound familiar?

The bad news is there is no conference. It's just a thought experiment, and this result probably indicates your own behaviour as much as anybody else's. We have a strong tendency to apportion blame to others, and this can be a real issue when it's us that needs to change in order to resolve a problem.

Sure there's some dicks out there, but the world isn't overrun with them - just a small smattering in my experience. Most of the "difficult people" issues I've observed as a coach and leader are actually "different perspective" issues and require no more than good listening and reasonable negotiation to resolve.

Mind the Gap

The point is this: If leaders owning their shit is less common and there are few genuine dicks in their teams, then it must follow that there is a large gap that can only be accounted for by differences in perspective. In terms of responsibility it's a no man's land, where team members are not behaving badly (being dicks) and yet leaders are seeing them as such.

The reality is we leaders usually have some part to play. Often our attempts to correct behaviour can make things worse. We put pressure on people to change without taking account of our own behaviour. When this fails we repeat with more force, escalating in a cycle dubbed "sell, tell, yell." All this achieves is getting the opposition to entrench.

This can only be resolved when we leaders take responsibility for our part. "How" is a matter of perspective and here's a couple of approaches you might like to try.

Assume the Best

Start with a clear head (do something that relaxes you) and then try on the idea that the other person is genuinely doing the best they can based on their experiences, skills, training, cultural background, and point of view. From this perspective ask yourself:

If the other person is truly doing their best and it's still not working, what am I missing, and how am I contributing to the issue?

This is a hard thing to do for sure, but it can be a revelation if you can do it. And if you can't perhaps practicing taking another's perspective wouldn't be a bad idea.

Many years ago, well before my coaching days (but after the dinosaurs died out), a colleague taught me this gem:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.

It's a somewhat cutting and cynical way of saying the most probable cause for someone's apparently bad behaviour is they don't know better, haven't considered your perspective or just haven't thought it through. Part of our responsibility as leaders is to coach, train and mentor people through rough patches like this, so it begs the question: Who's actually failing here?

Role Reversal

With a trusted colleague, take the role of your team member and ask your colleague to take your role. Spend some time briefing your colleague then play out the conversation as it happened or as it might play out in the future. How does it feel to be in that position? How did you react as the other person? And,

What is your role in this issue?

This is a powerful and safe way to understand someone else's perspective. Once you're in character, try and understand what you would need to move forward from their position.