Your Needs vs. Your Team’s Needs
Over the previous five blog posts I’ve focused on the Leadership Languages every leader needs to know.
Hopefully you noticed they actually come in pairs. Each pair revolves around a key aspect of leadership. This is important, as I’ll explain in a few moments.
For example, take “Connection” and “Boundaries.” These pivot around the relationship between you and your team, and where the border should be between work and personal life.
Maybe you think there shouldn’t be a border. This is why you’ve scheduled another “team building exercise” like the one last week… which turned into a group therapy session where each person in the circle shared their deepest childhood traumas, and there was a release of pent-up snot, tears and hugs.
Which was all great, until the HR violations started stacking up.
Or maybe you do have personal boundaries. Big ones. Like, maybe you have a number your team can contact you on 24/7 if they need to discuss their personal life… which you’ve redirected to a pizza restaurant somewhere in Canada.
OK, I’ve picked over-the-top examples here. Obviously, how you handle the balance between connection and boundaries won’t be quite as extreme.
The important thing to know about Leadership Languages is: we can also think of them as two poles in a polarity.
The curious thing about polarities is… both poles are necessary. For example, you can’t have a North without a South. I’ve tried, and the results weren’t pretty... let’s just leave it at that.
With polarities, there isn’t a “right way” or a “wrong way.” Both poles are valid and necessary to a certain extent.
If your primary Leadership Language has been “Connection” up until now, the urgent need is to become aware that some on your team may require the language of “Boundaries”... which is the opposite side of a polarity around relationships.
Now, only the people on your team can tell you whether they need to hear the language of “Boundaries” or not.
I can’t do that part for you. All I can do is raise your awareness of this potential need... through allegedly insightful, well-written and borderline funny blog posts like this one.
But once you’ve discovered your own primary Leadership Language and that of your team… it’s important to ask them follow-up questions.
Find out why a particular language is helpful to them, whether they feel they’re getting what they need... and if not, ask them what you can do about it.
For example, if you discover that many on your team value “Connection,” you could ask them:
“In what ways is personal connection helpful for you in your work? Do you feel you're getting what you need here?”
If they don’t, you can ask something like, “Are there any specific ways you can think of that might help me create more meaningful connections with the team?”
Pro tip: Notice the last word in that question is“team” rather than “you.” Often when you’re asking a team member what they need, they may want to appear needless. When you ask the question this way, it allows them to safely project some of their needs onto others.
By the way, once your team takes the quiz, I give you specific follow-up questions you can ask team members, based on their responses to the quiz.
The follow-up questions will help you explore how to engage with your team in ways that matter to them… and that probably doesn’t involve too much in the way of snot and tears.
