Moments of realisation
The first was on my first day as a senior manager – not just someone who led a team, but someone who lead a service of teams. I was doing the usual first day induction and orientation, being shown where all the different offices and teams were.
Halfway through I realised it felt different but couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it dawned on me. Every room we went into and I was introduced, everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me. Not just glanced and went back to what they were doing, but really looked. And waited.
It suddenly clicked, they were looking at me as The Boss not just a fellow co-worker. Unsettling and something I was bizarrely unprepared for.
The second incident was towards the end of my employed career, actually at my leaving do. A young female manager from the organisation, not someone I’d managed, came across to speak to me. She told me how much she’d admired me during my time there and how that had inspired her to apply for her promoted post. She told me that what resonated most with her was how human I was as a leader, not trying to be perfect and letting the mistakes be seen and acknowledged, not glossed over. It gave her the confidence to stretch herself, knowing that mistakes were ok and that it was the learning & growth that mattered most.
This is when I realised leaders are always in the spotlight. In a much more real way than we think. People watch us, are inspired by us (or not!) and learn from us, even when we don’t think we’re ‘on’.
Are we teaching what we think we’re teaching?
Take an executive leadership client I worked with. He’d recently been promoted to a senior position and having learned the hard way that he could no longer do everything himself, he was starting to practice delegation as a way of freeing up his capacity and developing his team at the same time.
We’d worked through a delegation process – specifying the task, choosing the right person, setting the expectations and boundaries and providing the resources and authority to succeed. He was confident he had all the pieces in place. Yet his team kept coming back to him with problems instead of solutions and he was getting increasingly frustrated. It just wasn’t working.
We explored it more together and uncovered that while he was doing the set-up right, when his team came back to him with questions or problems, his natural response was to ‘help’ by giving them the solution and send them off to action it.
Human nature, like water, will follow the path of least resistance. For his team, they didn’t need to work the answers out themselves as he’d always do it for them. Whether a conscious tactic on their part or not, the result was the same. His time continued to be eaten up with questions and problems – and tasks he couldn’t move on from, and his team weren’t developing. As we talked, my client realised that when he jumped in with the answer he was teaching dependence, not – as he had thought – offering support.
Once he saw this we were able to work on an amended strategy – using coaching to push responsibility back to the team, supporting them to find their own solutions whilst holding the ‘safety net’ as they learned. Gradually the daily questions disappeared and his team built their competence and confidence for more and more challenges.
The moral of the story is – as leaders we are always teaching, just not always what we think we are! Before we jump to blame our teams for their shortcomings, sometimes a look in the mirror and a sense-check on our own behaviours & what we’re role modelling might show us where the real issue is.
Taking action
We’ve all heard that leaders should ‘Walk the Talk’ – what this shows us is that applies as much to the small stuff as it does to the grand gestures and set piece leadership actions. It’s often the small, unconscious actions that teach the loudest lessons and give the clearest instructions.
With your own leadership, take a moment this week to audit your own ‘hidden curriculum’. What are you unconsciously teaching your team through your daily actions? What would they say you value based on what you do, not what you say?
What will you do differently next week as a result?
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Sometimes an outside perspective can help you see what’s been hiding in plain sight. If you’d like support uncovering these blind spots and developing more intentional leadership practices, contact us to discuss executive coaching and leadership development solutions we can provide.
