Is Leading About You or Others?

One of the most common approaches to leadership looks much like the standard early education classroom in most any education environment. The bell rings, you take your seat, you are asked to focus on the tasks at hand, you plan and execute your work, you are held accountable for doing and showing your own work, and the bell rings again and you are released to then return the next day and do it all over again. The similarities between many corporate job experiences and the norms of a standard classroom experience are somewhat jolting.

One of the key dynamics at play in this scenario is the fact that we like patterns, those repeatable rhythms of life and work that help us anticipate and get a dose of certainty. We value predictability, repeatability and any system that can give us consistency.

When managers and leaders “run” their teams and organizations in this manner there are some unfortunate results. This modeled approach is the most recognizable and most easily rewarded in many organizations. It is characterized by relative clarity of results, who holds the power, and whose job it is to “fill the order”. It’s great factory work if you want it but it’s driven by a leadership view that is leader-centric at its core. The mission, the setup and the rewarded by the system around leaders, is to get more people to do more of the things that the leader will get rewarded for.

This kind of leadership is inside-out and is not developmentally focused on others. It’s driven by short term targets and an emphasis on individual accountability but also diminished collaboration. This approach is typically less performant and elicits a lot of churn and friction around people challenges. For better for worse, this is a common conventional flavor of leadership is still strongly entrenched today. After all, how else does one expect to get promoted? There is a component of vanity and ego in these kinds of environments.

A less conventional but arguably more successful alternative is the approach where leaders layer their efforts with a focus on others and elevating the performance and contribution of team members that are appropriately pointed to impactful outcomes. The success of leaders, team members, and organizations are amplified exponentially when leaders and managers organize their own role and their available power to enable those entrusted to their leadership. It also means that as a leader or manger you have to know how to shape and direct the kinetic power of the talent within your charge towards the right targets. This is often a dynamic equation to keep rebalancing as opposed to a static set it and forget it prescriptive approach. It means leaders must be strong in reading ever changing situations, adapting, communicating, and influencing others through other methods than power and control.

One of the challenges is that organizations cross up our vocabulary around leaders, managers, people, and the work. Maybe people are to be “led”, and work is to be “managed”. Not the other way around. Often, we conflate or simply invert those definitions. It is common that organizations frequently incentivize the conventional factory method without realizing what it may be costing their organization across performance, work product quality, and talent development levels. If you are a leader or manager, you have an opportunity to make an intentional choice about how your “run” or enable talent you are stewarding.

Which model does your organization reward?

What type of leader do you strive to be?

What will best help your own success take off?