Doubling Down: Why Leaders Do More Of What Doesn’t Work
In my last two posts, I talked about two leaders who had polar opposite traits.
Jeff the VP of the retail company loved getting involved in the small details, but he was neglecting the bigger picture. He was doing the team’s job for them while not getting paid their salary.
Mike the visionary CEO of the real estate company was happy to leave the details to his team... but his focus was so far on the horizon, he became detached and isolated from his people and what they were seeing at ground level.
At the heart of these issues is what I call a “Management Polarity,” revolving around the two opposite ideas of doing and delegating.
Both concepts are important. As leaders and managers, we need to make sure stuff is getting done... but at the same time, we also need the space to make sure it’s worth bothering getting stuff done in the future.
The critical point here is, Jeff and Mike were out of balance in their respective traits.
When leaders become out of balance in a polarity, a common mistake is to blame their people if things don’t go their way.
This leads to the second mistake. They often double down, and do more of what’s not working. In my experience, this tends to be one of the more popular leadership strategies.
This was certainly true in Jeff’s case. When he showed his people the best way to stock shelves, productivity fell. His instinct was to do even more of this, because maybe they hadn’t yet fully appreciated the deeper nuances of how to align boxes and tins into neat rows for shoppers to see.
The more Jeff “helped,” the more frustrated team members would get. They felt Jeff was micromanaging. Productivity continued to plummet.
This was perplexing to Jeff. What more could he do for them, to show them the way?
When I broke the news to him that team members were angry and frustrated, he was pretty irritated.
“How could THEY be angry?” he fumed. “I’M the one doing the work they should be doing. Plus, they aren’t doing it to MY standards when they do. I’M the one who should be angry!”
As I worked with him, he began to see how his pattern of behavior had been backfiring. He was able to calm down enough to stop punching holes in the wall and start seeing what was really going on.
He had been on the verge of demanding they step up, but in more colorful language I won’t repeat here.
In my experience, trying to motivate angry and frustrated people by telling them they are doing it wrong... combined with expletives and insults involving relatives, has a tendency to, like... not work.
Instead, I suggested he take a step back… and intentionally create gaps he knew they could fill. I didn’t mean more physical holes in the wall. Jeff himself needed to fill in the ones he’d already made, or at least paper them over with a few big motivational posters. I meant, actual gaps in the work he was doing for them.
Also, leaders who like to be involved in the small details tend to be perfectionists, and Jeff was no different. I encouraged him to accept 90% performance at times, which is still an “A” grade.
This gave the team space to up their game. But they couldn’t improve if Jeff was always demanding 100%, which was usually on the lower end of what he expected.
To be blunt, I was really just helping him let team members do their own jobs, and to a high standard instead of a perfect one.
The ideas I gave him weren’t exactly rocket science... but when leaders are out of balance in a specific Management Polarity, they often need a few simple techniques to help them realign.
To give you an analogy, if you’re driving along and you veer too far to the left, you probably don’t need to pull over and take a 6 month course on “The Art Of Not Driving Like a Moron.” You just need to know how to turn the wheel a little to the right.
However, this is also why it’s important to familiarize yourself with the 7 Management Polarities, which are conveniently found in my latest book co-authored with Brian Tracy… so you can avoid steering too hard to the left or right in any of the polarities, and causing problems in your team.
