Superficial Change

One of my goals in writing about leadership is to hammer home the need for a solid structure of integrity. Building a foundation and supporting structure of virtuous qualities is necessary if you want to live (and lead) by principles. Living and leading by principles allows you to be constant and stable regardless of the circumstances. This stability adds calm reassurance to those you lead and enables you to provide an environment in which others can flourish. Does all this sound like a workplace with a respected boss and generally contented workforce? It should.

You’ll notice there was no talk in the previous paragraph about charisma, servant leadership, empowerment, or any other popular leadership trait or technique. There is also the rejection of the “fake it til you make it” concept in terms of leadership. The vast majority of published articles I’ve read deal directly with what I would call superficial change. They espouse changing a behavior or tricking your mind into a particular viewpoint. These changes may be seen, at least initially, as genuine and representative of the sort of leadership qualities that are currently admired. I believe they are a cheap fix with a short term payoff (if there’s a payoff). Sorta like borrowing money from a loan shark to bet on a horse (your friend gave you an inside tip).

Real progress in any sense isn’t labor-free or effortless, nor does it happen overnight. Adopting a popular or trending idea on leading your team is much like downloading a fad diet to lose weight. Over the years you’ve developed a particular taste in foods and a lifestyle with a particular daily activity level. The truly best and most long term effective way to trim pounds and keep them off is to decrease intake and increase activity levels. Gradual modifications in your daily diet and exercise routine will allow you to remain “who you are” only better. As you gradually work to change/improve your personal qualities with respect to leadership, you are able to maintain whatever stability you had to start with, the genuine you, while stepping up your game.

For example, I’m a retentive, control freak. That’s my personality. To ignore or change that would deny who I am and destabilize me. Many retentive, control freaks become micro managers which is an unproductive style of leadership (if you can call it leadership). If I suddenly decide, based on a current trend, to empower my team members to make decisions and control their work without my direct and involved (spelled “controlling”) oversight, I will become an unstable basket case. One of the worst bosses to work for is an unstable wreck, maybe worse than a micro manager. You can’t deny who you are, you just can’t let it negatively affect your leadership.

If your effort, to improve as a leader, goes into building your integrity and setting an exemplary example, you’ll build character. That character can then help you develop ways to delegate without the feeling of losing control. As you observe your integrity example taking hold in your team, you begin to develop a trusting relationship. This trust in them makes it easier to relinquish some control. It is an amazing feeling of stress relief to let someone you trust carry some of your burden of responsibility.

My retentive nature is manifest in my proclivity for organization. I have an emotional experience when I build or encounter something that is well organized and user friendly. However, it’s not everybody’s forte. Basic training in the Air Force required everyone’s locker to be neat and organized (to an exact specification) but that’s a military thing. As a boss you can’t court-martial your employees for a messy desk and you shouldn’t want to. You must build an appreciation for each individual’s strengths. It takes time and doesn’t happen by using some trending leadership “trick.” My efforts were focused, eventually, on understanding the method of organizing used by each individual so I could follow along and appreciate it for what it was (provided it met company standards). If they showed no organizational skills, I tried to avoid assigning them jobs requiring advanced skills in organizing.

A big thing to remember when you have this retentive, controlling personality is you need to know your priorities. There are certain things that I feel require greater organization and control than others. I can more easily relinquish control on lower priority items without feeling the stress of losing control or the urge to retract the delegated control. Practicing this delegation of low priority items/tasks while establishing your communication techniques (unobtrusive oversight), allows you to build a system that keeps you informed of status, like the progress of a project, without micromanaging. Again, it involves more than just a superficial change. Step-by-step and sometimes inch-by-inch, you develop your capacity to delegate. You gradually figure out how you’re going to monitor progress without meddling.

There was one task I took control of before I even had the authority and was never able to bring myself to relinquish control, the duty roster. Scheduling was always of such an importance to me that I was unable to trust that anyone had the right combination of both integrity and skill...because...I have never experienced anyone else’s schedule that wasn’t both disorganized and rife with favoritism. People’s time-off is extremely important to them, almost as much as their pay, so it was always a huge priority for me to get it right. This example probably makes very little sense to people who work weekdays, 9-5, but I’ve mostly worked schedules that included 24/7 coverage with a minimal crew. It was always challenging. Technically, I can’t say I “never” stopped writing the duty roster because I did eventually let go but by then I was a civilian and working a day job.

I’ve only described two negative personality traits and ones I, quite frankly, didn’t just instinctively know I had to overcome. By overcome, I don’t mean diminish or change but redirect so they work to my leadership advantage. The control freak in me learned to exercise oversight instead of micromanaging tasks and my retentive nature learned to organize the workforce instead of the work.

Just to make one more point about the danger of embracing trending leadership tips and tricks. When you read these leadership articles and you look around at the leaders around you, you may not recognize the techniques you just read about. If your boss has a particular personality that tends toward an authoritative leadership style, what would a collaborative work environment look like? It could happen. It may not have the warm fuzzy feel you were expecting but it can exist. If the boss doesn’t try to put on a superficial facade of a different leadership style, the collaboration won’t come off as phony but it may not look like the textbook example either. We all need to learn to play with the personality cards we’ve been dealt and just learn to play them effectively.

Instead of enduring the stress of trying to keep up the facade of a superficial change in our leadership style, we should build that foundation of integrity, embrace the strong points of our own personality, educate ourselves on what makes people tick, and allow time and experience to mold our leadership into something comfortable for us and our team.