Earning the right to lead
It comes up all the time.
"I feel like my teammates are underperforming and I'm always left to pick up the slack."
"Everyone knows the goal, but people are not engaged and aren't putting in the work. What's their problem?"
“It seems no matter how hard I try, the team is getting off track.”
One of the hardest things about leadership is creating the conditions for your team to produce positive outcomes. First you have to define what success looks like. Then you have to develop the roadmap and resources necessary for people to execute. Yet even with all this in place, you might find that the people around you are not giving their best effort. Or worse, they might be checked out and looking for the exits.
It's a bewildering experience for many. The big question that comes up is "how do I motivate people to do what I want?" Most of my clients struggle with this at some point. Some respond by setting up yet another roadmap and goal setting meeting. Others conclude that it all comes down to incentives, so what they need is to design the perfect latticework of reward and punishment. I’ve also heard a CEO say “Maybe I should give more compliments, even though I don’t think it’s deserved.” In all cases, they imagine that once they figure out the magic button combination, their teammates will finally act the way they’d like. What's the up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start of motivation?
Of course, there is no such cheat code. Human beings aren't machines that reliably respond to a predetermined sequence of inputs. There's no magic move that unlocks the game. Treating people as objects in space that can be manipulated toward our own will is entirely the wrong frame and yet one that we get stuck in all the time. After all, aren't all these people I hired here to get my agenda done create our grand vision together? Wasn't that what they signed up for in the first place?
Here's what they actually signed up for: Being a part of a team that would help them get closer to their individual dreams. That's it, full stop. Maybe my dream is to build the great work of my life. Or it could simply be just to put a roof over my head. Either way, before I can ever care about the leader's Grand Vision, I need to trust that being here will help me take care of my own. With luck, maybe we can even connect the two together.
When we forget that the people we lead have their own interior world, one with dreams...hopes....fears...and worries, we drop out of connection with them. Connection means I genuinely feel that you are with me. That you value the way I see the world. That you care about me and that I care about you. That I'm not simply here to do your bidding.
Our job as leader is not a given, it is earned. And each day we earn that through connecting with our people, way beyond a daily standup. We earn it by directing our sense of care toward that person and honoring their humanity so that we might enroll them in our audacious company goals. We earn it by making good on the promise that this is the place where they should spend their one precious life in exchange for moving them closer to their dreams.
At any given point, your team members are asking themselves: "Do I feel this leader's care for me? Do I feel this company's care for me?" If the answer to either of these is no, then you are simply not getting the best out of your people.
If we acknowledge the importance of care, why is it so hard to practice? There are two big reasons:
We might believe that showing care will be counterproductive or
We are in a threatened state that makes caring for others impossible
You might think caring means we cater all our efforts to pleasing our teammates or that all this feeds a sense of entitlement. However, those concerns stem from yet another frame error: that we can only care about people OR care about production. If your story is “showing that I care lets people off the hook for results”, then you will always be at odds against your team. Not exactly a recipe for performance. The way out is to recognize that we can meet others’ needs in order to generate the conditions for superior work. When people feel seen, respected, safe, and that they belong, they are then free to do great work.
To understand how care leads to results, we can look to attachment theory. At a high level, children who grow up experiencing secure attachment with their caregivers, i.e. they have a safe home base on which they can rely, are more likely to explore and experiment with the world around them. Those with an insecure attachment are more preoccupied with the dangers that lurk in their relationships, leaving them with fewer resources to engage with their external environment. A consistently felt sense of care is precisely what creates the conditions of secure attachment, leading to people who can place their efforts on the task at hand.
The other factor is to look at your own internal sense of safety. You can be the most loving person in the world but if you are in a state of threat, it becomes very hard to muster empathy and patience. Can you see how this presents a problem when you’re leading an organization? Our threatened state signals to others that they themselves are unsafe, which infects everyone else they come into contact with. The result is a death spiral where everyone is out for themselves, trust disappears, and dysfunction reigns. The work then is to find ways to continually cultivate safety in ourselves such that we can bring it to others. Maybe that will be a post for another day. But here’s a preview: it involves reconnecting with ourselves so that we can bring compassionate attention to others.
One of the essential jobs of a leader is to recruit and retain the right people to get the job done. It’s also one of the hardest because it inevitably surfaces our stories about what it means to rely on others. If you believe that connecting on a human level will threaten your goals, you rob everyone of the conditions to do great work. But if you recognize that it’s in fact the opposite, you have a fighting chance. So before you conclude that your people problems sit squarely outside yourself, take a look at how you've been showing up. Are you building a company that honors people’s dreams and concerns? Do you value others for who they are, not just what they produce? We live in a world where the most capable people can largely choose where they work. Have you earned the right to lead them?
Thank you to Andy Sparks, Mindy Zhang, and Ryan Vaughn for providing feedback on this post during its writing.