From Under the Desk of Shane Hipps, War Correspondent
I’m writing this blog post from under an office desk, where a team is taking shelter from a potential ballistic missile strike.
Now, I try to avoid writing about management and leadership issues from literal war zones.
Fortunately (for me), I’m writing from a metaphorical one.
However, the group of people I’m writing about used a lot of war metaphors, so I think it’s OK for me to do the same thing in this case.
They worked at an investment company. They were an extremely smart and talented group of people. They were high performers, earning huge bonuses.
The problem was their boss, Jane.
Jane was a partner in the company. She was an extremely hard-charging and results-driven person. She had strong opinions and no qualms about telling people what she thought about their performance or ideas.
The issue was, her criticism often landed like a ballistic missile, causing collateral damage within a wide radius.
If team members could see flaws in Jane’s plan, they didn’t speak out… just in case Jane set her target lock on them.
The few brave souls who raised their voices found themselves in the direct line of fire. They quickly learned to stop doing that.
They all knew Jane was driven by results, so they became reluctant to give her anything less than stellar figures.
Eventually, one of them even “creatively adjusted” the figures to make them look better.
Over time, her team felt burned out by her. At first, they would deal with this by avoiding her whenever they could. But offices can be pretty small spaces and there’s only so much room under a desk.
Eventually, some team members simply moved on to other opportunities, even though they were raking it in.
As with most leaders who are out of balance in a particular trait, Jane was completely oblivious to all of this.
She didn’t realize, to put it bluntly, she’d been “dropping bombs” on people. Had she known this, her first instinct would probably have been to, like… not do that.
Jane had great instincts when it came to selecting talent and making shrewd investments. She had made the company hundreds of millions of dollars by sniffing out opportunities no one else seemed to see.
She also loved her team and was passionate about rewarding and celebrating their achievements.
It’s just… well, the bomb thing.
The issue wasn’t simply about her language or how she said things. In other words, it wasn’t about finding a gentler and more polite way of telling her people their ideas sucked… although this would have been a great starting point.
Jane was so focused on results, she often overlooked the fact that people are emotional beings and their performance is affected by their emotional state.
To put it another way… when your people are cowering under a desk or hiding behind a whiteboard, it’s possible they might not be performing at 100%.
I encouraged Jane to get curious about other people’s points of view... to really listen, and ask questions that explored why they had their opinions.
Jane was often right, but her hard-charging approach meant she was blind to other perspectives… and sometimes her team was right instead of her.
To her credit, after a number of coaching conversations, Jane started to look in the mirror for the first time and make changes to her management style.
We designed a new strategy for how she communicated. I gave her new verbal cues and rules for how to have hard conversations. It took a little time, but eventually her people began to trust this was real.
With her less hard-charging approach, team members no longer avoided her. They gave her more accurate feedback, which meant she could make better decisions.
Over the next year, the team’s performance hit new peaks... and office desks could finally be converted back from serving as makeshift bomb shelters.
By the way, you might not have Jane’s specific issue. But there are actually over a dozen areas in which leaders can be out of balance. I’ve put together an online quiz to help you identify these traits and discover whether they could be a source of tension and conflict.
