Good Authority. Jonathan Raymond
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looks like in practice, using examples from things that had happened that day. He started embodying accountability instead of talking about it. He required others to think, do, and adapt without his oversight, at every chance he could find.
This was anything but a cakewalk for Mike. He would show up on our call week after week and report on how it was going. Like all real change, his was often a case of two steps forward, one step back. But, at some point, he crossed a threshold. The team realized that the new Mike was there to stay. This wasn’t a cakewalk for them, either. It wasn’t as comfortable to work there anymore. When you’ve been working for someone for a long time, you get used to their style. Out of self-preservation, you quickly learn what riles them up and what calms them down. You use your strengths to compensate for their weaknesses. The team had to re-learn how to operate with the New Mike, and they didn’t always like it. But when we talked with them (which is part of our approach, we don’t work with CEOs without working with their team), we started hearing about how they appreciated having clarity and knowing where they stood. And they reported a feeling they hadn’t had in a while: inspiration. They looked forward to coming to work with a sense that the business was going somewhere again. And Mike hadn’t uttered one word of theory or made one big speech. He just stopped being the guy who was afraid of the past.
And, as Mike found out, when you change your leadership style, disrupting these long-held patterns of authority, the people on your team will be confused for a while. However, in my experience, most people will also see the upside and use it as an opportunity for growth, because you’re finally alleviating the burden they’ve been living with for a long time. And then there will likely be a few people on your team who, for whatever reason, are at a place in their lives where they are looking for stability and not growth, with its more dramatic ups and downs. They will be more reluctant to make the pivot. The key is to remember something you’ve probably already experienced multiple times in your career: When someone on the team discovers that where they are is not the right place for them, and decides to move on, it ends up being a win for everyone.
What Mike had been doing, until he started changing it, was what we all do in one form or another. It’s human. It’s natural. It’s reasonable. As children, and for all the years of our lives until and even after we find ourselves in a position of authority in our career, we rely on the authority stories that we internalized in the formative moments of our lives. The task of becoming a Good Authority is to find these stories, to understand how and why they got there, to respect the truth and lessons they contain—and then to let them go.
That’s the journey. It’s a journey that leads to a profound new space that is less cluttered by the pictures of the past—where you can listen to the people on your team in a new way. When you clear out your own baggage around authority—which is what Part II is all about—you will automatically start noticing that baggage in others. You’ll start to see it and hear it and be able to help people discover how the things they’re struggling with—accountability in themselves and others, taking creative risks and drawing that out of others, focusing on the important details and being able to train that in others—are all sourced in the most important management tool there is: the human heart.
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The Employee Engagement Fallacy
People are people, so why should it be
you and I should get along so awfully?
—Depeche Mode
The road to a disengaged team is paved with good intentions. Nobody sets out to make their employees overwhelmed, stressed-out, and miserable. Well, I suppose there are a few people like that out there. But, by and large, and as hard as it may be to accept, if you get to know even the most horrible boss you’ve ever met, there’s a good-hearted person in there, someone who cares about the well-being of others. The problem is they have internalized a set of powerful unconscious ideas about: (1) why people don’t do what they ask, and (2) what tools they have at their disposal to change things. I call this pair of ideas the Employee Engagement Fallacy.
Forbes contributor Kevin Kruse defines employee engagement as: the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals.” The abysmal numbers you’ll find in magazines and newspapers demonstrate the effects of the Employee Engagement Fallacy. According to Gallup, seven out of every ten workers is either disengaged or actively undermining the efforts of their organization. Yes, you read that right. You’ve probably also read countless articles, blog posts, and books filled with tactics to change that. But what you haven’t read about—what’s shockingly absent from the discussion—is tracking the other side of the relationship. What about manager engagement?
In other words, the Employee Engagement Fallacy is assuming that the lack of engagement is the employee’s fault. That there’s something missing over there in worker-land. Without taking employees off the hook for personal responsibility, isn’t it odd that we put the onus on the person on the vulnerable side of the power dynamic? The solution lies in turning that around: In order for your employees to engage, they need to have somebody who is engaging with them.
Where did this strange and obviously unproductive fallacy come from? You didn’t learn it in school. It’s not in any corporate training manual I’ve ever seen. It’s a belief that you picked up along the way without ever intending to, an idea that comes from a time before people knew what we now know about meaning, motivation, and what people are looking for from their professional lives. This false belief expresses itself in what I call The Five Employee Engagement Myths, each one of which is well past its expiration date:
1 “I can’t find good people.”
2 “Nobody cares as much as I do.”
3 “I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway.”
4 “I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems.”
5 “We just need better systems and more communication.”
Not only are all these myths untrue, but turning them around is the lynchpin of changing the way you manage, lead, and, in the process, change the lives of the people around you. Let’s relegate these myths to the past so we can embark on the rest of our journey with clarity and purpose.
MYTH #1:
“I can’t find good people.”
You meet good people all the time. You’ve interviewed and hired them. You brought them onto your team, excited and hopeful about the personal qualities and skills you thought they could add. And then something happened after they started working for you. What was it? How did they go from being an exciting new hire to a consistent source of frustration?
What’s probably true—not always but far more than we admit to ourselves—is that you didn’t invest in that good person when they arrived. You didn’t give them the training they needed, or challenge them on the behaviors you noticed that you wished they would change. You didn’t show them what the DNA of your business is through specific examples, so they could get a personal experience of what you mean by care and why they should care in that way too. Most importantly, you didn’t hold them accountable in small increments along the way to give them boundaries around what needed to change and by when.
This doesn’t make you an evil person, and you shouldn’t use it as an opportunity to put this book down and punish yourself for all the mistakes you’ve ever made. Let’s not do that. I invite you instead to be honest and real with how it’s been, so you can change it. You picked this book up to stop managing people the way you’ve been doing. Sobriety is step one.
When it comes to that very personal kind of manager engagement,