Managers everywhere struggle to lead teams. These teams don’t produce the desired results, leaving everyone frustrated. A common cause of this problem is managers falling into the trap of thinking that leadership is about them. When this happens, a change in perspective can help them regain effectiveness.
What Is Leadership For?
I once worked with a manager who was exasperated by her team. She could see how they were getting stuck in the same problems again and again. She also had clear ideas of what they could do differently to avoid those problems. And yet, every interaction she had with the team left her aggravated and annoyed.
In one conversation with this manager, I shared something I learned from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). The CCL defines leadership this way:
Leadership is a social process that enables individuals to work together as a cohesive group to produce collective results.”
She thought about this for a while. Eventually, she told me, “This sounds dumb, but I had forgotten that I’m supposed to be focused on the team. I got so caught up in with my own ideas and my own goals – wrapped up in my own anxieties, really – that I lost sight of the fact that leadership is about the group.”
Making It About You
Thinking about leadership as something that helps the group work together to achieve its goals helped this manager realize why she wasn’t being effective. Her ideas for “helping the group” were really about her. Her mistrust of the team came from them working in a way that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. She also realized that what she wanted them to do was focused on achieving her goals, not theirs.
When you are a manager, it’s easy to forget that while you are part of the group, you are not the only – or the most important – part. Leadership is a social process. The group is less likely to experience meaningful leadership if you make things all about you. This is an easy trap for people in positions of authority to fall into. The pressure to “be a leader” can cause them to foreground their ideas, needs, and preferences; and to forget about the group.
Re-Centering the Group
One way out of this trap is to consider three questions:
- Am I helping the group to work together more effectively?
- Am I focused on achieving the group’s collective goals?
- Is this really about my preferences and anxieties?”
The manager I was working with knew that while she intended to improve group performance, that wasn’t the impact she was having. Thinking about these three questions helped her to notice that she was centering herself in her conversations with the team. She hadn’t been asking for their ideas about what would help them work together more effectively. Instead, she had told them they should work in a way that she was more familiar and comfortable with. She had also talked about their performance’s impact on her goals and hadn’t focused on what mattered to them.
She had been so concerned with “being a leader” that she had gotten confused about what leadership was. Gerald Weinberg once wrote that “leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered” to solve problems. That’s what this manager discovered she wasn’t doing.
Once she realized that, she changed her approach. She got curious about team members’ ideas for getting better results. She connected them with each other instead of routing everything through her. And she increased her tolerance for working in ways that were less familiar to her but better suited to the team and its situation. By shifting her attention to what the group needed, she helped them create better customer outcomes with less frustration on everyone’s part.
