Are You In the Weeds without Knowing It?
Unknown to them, quite a few leaders are guilty of what I call “Leadership Offenses.”
These aren’t things that tend to be frowned upon, such as diverting company funds to your Swiss bank account.
Instead, the sentence for a Leadership Offense is that your team doesn’t function well.
As an example, take Jeff, senior VP of a retail company. Jeff was a really likable and hardworking leader who went out of his way to support his team.
He was present in every meeting, coming up with solutions to any problem the team might face. His philosophy was, if you want your team to trust you, you’ve got to be in the trenches with them.
He would be there with them at retail sites for days at a time, even stocking shelves and mopping floors alongside them. Clogged toilet? No problem. Leave it to Jeff, who was more than happy to get his hands dirty for the team.
“Lead by example” was his motto. I’m not entirely sure what example Jeff was trying to set with his hand in a toilet, but there you go.
His motto carried an important truth for him, which is why he repeated it so often. The problem was, he was living it out a little too well without realizing it... and this was starting to reverse on him.
Jeff didn’t know it, but he was guilty of the Leadership Offense I call “Pixel Vision.”
For one thing, he was so focused on the individual pixels, he wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture.
As a result, he missed the forest for the trees in a few key moments... and made strategic blunders that placed extra burdens on the team while they were working on time-sensitive projects.
Team members were also frustrated and exhausted by him. They liked Jeff, but having him there all the time was a little too much. He wasn’t just “leading by example” - he was often doing their jobs for them.
Over time, team members seemed to grow less engaged. They realized any problem that came up, Jeff was going to solve it... so why put the effort in? As a result, they stopped taking initiative and their productivity slumped.
Jeff was baffled and frustrated. He felt his team wasn’t sharing the load the way they should. It seemed, the more effort he put it, the less they did.
When he hired me to come in and troubleshoot, I spoke to the team to try and discover what was happening.
The bottom line was, Jeff was over-functioning and it was causing his team to under-function.
That’s an important point: when you over-function, your people under-function.
He was too wrapped up in the details other people needed to handle. For example, the stuff he was paying his team to do… maybe they could do some of that?
Jeff loved being involved in the details. He was good at the details. But he needed to step back and trust his team more. I gave him a set of strategies to achieve this.
As he implemented them, he felt he could finally stop for breath. He realized he’d been so focused on the pixels, he’d been neglecting the bigger picture… i.e. kind of what he was being paid to do.
He noticed his people actually did pretty well. It turns out, people who are paid to stock shelves and clean floors are actually pretty good at those things.
Weirdly, they didn’t need the senior VP of the company to do it for them… although for some completely mysterious reason, they still insisted Jeff was far better at unclogging toilets than they were, and could he keep on doing that?
In the next post I’ll show you an example of a leader who was almost the exact opposite of Jeff, and the impact it had on his team.
This will help us identify the most common management polarities every leader needs to be aware of… which, by the way, is also the purpose of my new book co-authored with Brian Tracy.
