Too many managers who aspire to lead and develop others haven’t learned how to lead and develop themselves. They try to build organisations or provide services that are different from them. These well-intentioned managers try to improve their teams or organisations without improving themselves. Many seem to be living along the lines of Mark Twain’s observation, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
Mind the gap
Here are some examples of these all too common disconnects between organisation and personal performance:
- Pessimistic managers push their companies to be market and industry leaders while blaming external factors like the economy for their poor personal performance.
- Managers with stunted personal growth set strategies to build a ‘learning organisation.’
- Managers produce team and organisation visions, values, and mission statements without having clarified and aligned their own personal preferred future, principles, and purpose.
- A major programme to improve customer service is initiated by managers who boss, direct, and control rather than serving their organisation’s servers. Managers with weak levels of continuous personal improvement implement change and improvement programmes – for others.
- Strict techno-managers (bureaucratic or technical experts) oversee rigid systems and processes while trying to encourage risk-taking and innovation.
- Management groups comprised of turf protecting departmental managers, fight amongst themselves and try to get others to build stronger teams.
- Disorganised managers with poor time management habits set goals, priorities, and disciplined processes for everyone else.
Although they have no personal improvement plan, process, or habits, managers develop extensive organisation transformation and improvement plans.
While avoiding (and shooting messengers of) personal feedback, managers construct extensive performance appraisal systems and talk about the importance of accountability – for everyone else.
Practice what you preach
A team or organisation can’t rise above the level of its leadership. It just doesn’t work.
We can’t build a team or organisation that’s different from us. We can’t make them into something we’re not. Yet I’ve watched countless managers and management teams try. There are two major reasons why this disconnected approach doesn’t work.
First, unless you’re a superb actor, you can’t be a split personality and teach or lead others to do something that’s out of basic alignment with your own habits, skills, and characteristics.
Second, everyone’s ‘phoniness radar’ or ‘BS metres’ are getting ever more sensitive (from over-use). We’re getting fed up with sanctimonious church leaders charged with sexual abuse, fat doctors telling us to get into shape, politicians giving retractable promises to get elected, executives drawing big salaries and bonuses while their company’s financial value declines, municipal transit managers who don’t take their own buses to work, training and consulting companies who don’t practice what they teach, and the like.
I once wrote a scathing note (which was never answered) and quit a speakers’ association because I kept hearing ‘the old pros’ telling people who wanted to get on speaking platforms and tell others how to be successful to ‘fake it ’til you make it.’ (The personal and organisation improvement field has its share of aspiring speakers and consultants who don’t practice what they preach).
We loathe phoniness and crave sincerity in our leaders. If I aspire to be a leader, the authenticity that stems from aligning who I am with where I am trying to take my team or organisation will inspire trust, cooperation, and forgiveness in the people who’ll help take me there. Nobody expects us to be the perfect role model. But they do expect to see a close connection between who we are and the direction we’re pointing the team or organisation toward.
Or they should at least be able to see that we recognise our shortcomings and are working hard to improve ourselves so we can close the organisation-personal performance gap. Otherwise they’ll shrug off all our team and organisation improvement rhetoric and planning with a sense that this is just kidney stone management; it will hurt for a while, but this too shall pass.
Successful team or organisation leadership begins with successful self-leadership. The first step in improving my team or organisation is improving me.
