The same skills that propel a woman or man to become a terrific businessperson frequently circle around to bite them on the butt and make them a less than stellar leader. This is a maddening but increasingly common coaching phenomenon: How do you tell someone that what made him or her great is now making them weak?
Coaching this concept is a challenge. Typically the leader hears but rejects the message. Leaders have egos, which guard the fortress of the mind. Unless the ego allows the idea in, the message is rebuffed. Because such a thought involves something the leader believes illogical, it therefore must be false. Few believe a coach who says, “What made you good is making you worse.”
The out-of-hand rejection of an important observation creates a frustrating dilemma. On one hand we’ve pinpointed a very important problem. On the other, the listener rejects the opinion.
This is hard for a coach, because few things are as unfulfilling as watching a person or company you care about tease but not attain greatness. Greatness must be seized; no one can snare it from mid-air it with a hole-ridden butterfly net.
As each of us go about building a career, success comes more readily from some behaviors than others. The ones that work are the ones we lean on and trust.
The problems arise after repetitive success. Responsibilities grow and become increasingly complex. Unfortunately the skills we used while creating that complexity do not seamlessly transfer once surrounded by it. Complexity forces businesses to morph; and as things morph, formerly reliable strengths can steadily devolve into weakness.
In addition to new problems created by mushrooming complexity, the second reason leaders weaken is bandwidth. Bandwidth creates limits; and all of us—regardless how skilled—have limits to our capabilities.
Here are five ways in which former strengths might weaken:
- Denial of blind spots. What used to be a key skill—acute awareness—isn’t any longer. A talented leader knows what has driven him or her throughout their career. He or she relies on those skills. They operate with an assumption of expected excellence. If it has always worked in the past, it will always work in the future. Diminished effectiveness is never a possibility. Egos and assumptions do not allow for blind spots.
- Hearing but not listening. Talents on the rise typically listen well. They apply what they hear in context and make solid decisions. Success changes the ground rules. As success increases so do time pressures, even though time is a finite quantity. As such time is impatient–it insists on being carved up in far more many ways–which means it willingly trades reflection for immediacy. Leaders start going through the exercise of pretending to listen while all too often their minds are made up before the meeting even begins. Tuning out triggers a negative spiral: Less educated decisions breed less prudent decisions. Strung together, less prudent decisions lead to less effective leadership. This is a very big problem, far larger than most businesses realize.
- “Productive” is traded for “busy.” Skilled leaders blast through tremendous amounts of work, usually with an admirable ability to immerse “in the moment” without distraction. This innate ability is a great differentiator between an impact player and a role player. Velocity and volume are trademarks of the impact player. Role players are more easily distracted and create less output. Heaping piles of work create an obvious temptation—shortcuts—justified by the myth of “multitasking.” Multitasking is not the ability to do several things simultaneously; it is a blend of starts and stops that create fragmented attention spans which erode the traditional skill of the leader’s previous strength — his or her single-minded, totally dialed-in focus.
- Decision velocity accelerates. Trading smarts for expediency is never good but this is a widening trend. People have instant access to more information than ever before. The tradeoff is that more information means that proper filtration now takes extra time. Impatient busy people cut this corner. Even if their decisions are more right than wrong, wrong decisions occur more frequently than before. On the way up, great talents rely on smart decisions, not snap decisions. So, once at the top, why are snap decisions a better way to operate? They aren’t. Making them is easy but it is risky. This is a trap too many good leaders fall into.
- Collaboration shrinks, mandates grow. People skills and motivation commonly embody leaders on the rise. Once in charge, inspiring others is traded for telling others. Coaching falls by the wayside, as does the willingness to invest the time it takes to respectfully collaborate. Although time’s taximeter runs relentless, whenever you devalue people’s opinions you devalue your people. When you devalue your people, you drain their inspiration. When that happens, even a proud and energetic, can-do culture will deflate.
Given the frequency of these five maladies, the billion-dollar question is, “What are the best ways to prevent these things from happening?”
Leaders should have coaches and be open to coaching. Absent of coaching, they need to surround themselves with independent thinkers, secure in their jobs, who look at life differently than the boss. This, of course, requires a safe environment of open, honest communication.
Generally speaking, the more actively the leader stays tied to customers and the business, the more grounded he or she will be. The more removed they become, the more isolated they will grow. Engagement, therefore, goes a long way toward helping new ideas flourish while guarding against these five negative behaviors.
It’s important that none of us ever mistake busy for productive. Greatness comes from the productive.