It's been a while since I’ve been here - the end of March, in fact. Family illness and bereavement took me away from my desk for longer than I thought. But I'm pleased to be back.
I've been easing back into work over the past few weeks - dipping back into conversations, sitting in on calls, catching up with contacts over coffee. And wherever I look, I'm hearing some consistent patterns of leadership behaviours that keep showing up, regardless of the organisation or sector.
Image: Steve A Johnson,, unsplash
There's the leader whose emotions run them – and everyone around them. One bad morning and the whole team is walking on eggshells. By 10am, everyone's shuffling their entire day – and their own behaviours - around someone else's mood. Nobody says anything, because they don't know what response they'll get.
There's the leader who can talk fluently about strategy, numbers, outcomes and the need for great teamwork, but seems genuinely puzzled when someone on their team is struggling for whatever reason. Not unkind, exactly – they're just unable to find the empathy button.
There’s the leader who’s convinced they know best about something that demands a subject matter expert view – which they just don’t have. And their decisions take the business down a route everyone would probably rather have avoided, which creates unnecessary chaos.
And there's the leader running what looks, from the outside, suspiciously like a power trip. Decisions made to demonstrate authority, and advice ignored rather than solve a real problem. Encouraging division and ‘taking sides’. A need to be seen as right, even when it costs momentum, trust – and people.
None of this has been a big surprise. The Chartered Management Institute and YouGov recently surveyed 4,500 UK workers and managers and found a third have left a job because of bad management and negative workplace culture. Half of those who rate their boss as ineffective plan to leave within the next year. So when I come back to all this with fresh eyes, I can really see the cost of it all. And how needless most of it really is, especially when we’re facing more change and uncertainty than ever.
Teams work around volatile moods instead of doing their best work. People stop bringing problems or ideas forward, uncertain of what they'll get back. Good people disengage rather than challenge someone who thinks they know best or is more invested in winning and getting folk round to their way of thinking (whether it's a valid approach or not) than leading well.
These are not personality traits that people are stuck with. Nor is it the price we have to pay to have ambitious, driven people in charge. But these situations can be avoided if we're willing to look at what's actually happening underneath the behaviour, rather than just managing around it.
I have some thoughts on what's really going on here. For now, I’d love to know if you’ve seen any of these patterns recently? And what are your thoughts on what it’s costing the team (and the business) that have to navigate around them?