3 Leadership Mistakes - honor your duty as a Leader

As a Leader, you are busy. You are doing your best to balance your work and whole self with your duty as a leader to serve the work of your teams and their whole selves. It can be hard to balance those two, to stay present to that duty and to follow through on it.

For any fans of The Crown, the moment when Princess Elizabeth has just become Queen Elizabeth 2, her Grandmother, Queen Mary, gives her advice on her duty that captures your responsibility as a Leader:

'...duty calls. Your people will need your strength and leadership. I have seen three great monarchies brought down from failure to separate personal indulgences from duty. You must not allow yourself to make similar mistakes. And while you mourn your father, you must also mourn someone else: Elizabeth Mountbatten. For she has now been replaced by another person: Elizabeth Regina. The two Elizabeths will frequently be in conflict with one another. The fact is The Crown must win, must always win.'

Here her Grandmother is honoring that, while her own needs and wants will always exist and be pulling her attention, that her duty is to ensure that the Crown wins, that she must serve first and be the symbol her people need. Gone is the luxury of 'personal indulgence' and now duty calls. This is no different for any leader who seeks to support a 'people-first' approach in their work.

You will always have your own work, your own needs and desires, and while you certainly can and must do that work well and execute that which matters to you, the leadership of your team must always be the top priority, and the primary focus of your energy. As a leader, it is no longer your needs first, it is those of your teams.

It's hard, you're busy, and it's easy enough to get caught up in the day to day and not even realize that you've slipped and may not be supporting at quite the level that duty requires of you. A great leader is focused in their duty to support, guide, and empower. All of these duties require intention and presence. There 3 mistakes that leaders make that are signals that this duty and intention may not be happening.

Being too involved

The micromanager's special. This is a big one, especially for newer leaders or leaders who have not yet cultivated their leadership instinct. The intention is often good, and one that may feel like it's being helpful, but micromanaging is not the same as support. When a leader is too involved, what is meant is that they're imposing their exact expectations, process, and ideas into the flow of support.

This is incredibly limiting. For starters, it takes up way too much mental energy for you as the leader. You're essentially executing the project or task yourself without doing the actual work. It positions those you lead as mere executors and doesn't allow them to be empowered.

It also cuts off the creative process. A leader that is too involved, and being too specific on the how, when, and where that the work is getting done, is restricting and limiting the creative capacity of those that they're leading. They draw a period at the end of the discussion on their contribution and unintentionally cut off all other contribution.

These challenges not only make it feel suffocating to work under, but take away from fulfillment when the team isn't allowed the space to be empowered, to advocate for their own needs or perspective, or to make the work their own and to make their own mark. They're left at the mercy of the specific perspective of their leader.

Over time, a leader that is too involved creates a cycle of dependency where their team no longer even tries to bring any of themselves to the work, and in which the process is wholly reliant on the leader expending all of their mental energy on the work to ensure that it gets done. This is a lose-lose path to no where.

Not being involved enough

This is a common leadership trap. You are so busy day to day that you attempt to support, guide, and empower by a series of 'fly-bys'. You are checking in, you're aware of the work on the plate of our teams, you know that the work is valuable and it is important to you as well. But, you're not really involved to the extent that you're able to support your teams at the level that they need.

There are a few ways that this manifests or ways in which it may signal to you that you may not be involved enough. Often times work in which you are not involved enough with as a leader will tend to drag on, or maybe it feels like it doesn't have any clear ownership. Or, perhaps you maybe just aren't that interested in the work personally so it's dragging on because you're not as involved as would be helpful.

A good gut check is to ask yourself what substance you have contributed to the task or project. If you find yourself giving approval when asked, or going through the motions without engaging, you may not be involved enough. Any moment where you don't have any specific feedback to give, you're likely not involved enough.

For example, someone on your team asks for your thoughts, and you respond 'looks great' without really thinking about what they've presented or asked about. Any moment when you, as a leader, find yourself without a comment, is a signal that you may not be thinking about it enough and by proxy not putting yourself into support as much as duty requires of you. If you don't have anything to say you probably need to think through it more.

This can be made worse at a given point where you do put yourself in more, realize that there are significant changes that need to be made, and then have to almost railroad the work that has already been done to switch gears. This not only adds to the waste of your time but to the time of the teams that you support and signal sthat their time is less valuable than yours.

While this approach often mimics elements of great leadership, it lacks substance. Where substance is lacking support is lacking. This results in timelines extended while your teams await and have to follow back up for the support they need, and it puts your people in an elliptical pattern of back and forth that takes more time than if we just put ourselves in to support the way we need to from the start.

Not being involved at all

Your teams will often have a lot of work that they do that they are solely responsible for, that may not directly correlate to a core objective that you have or may have been a project or task that is relevant to their function, but that they have initiated on their own. It may feel like empowerment to let them own this work without 'bother' but empowerment and autonomy are not the same thing.

When going back to duty, the core of that duty is to stay connected to the totality of the work. No matter what your teams have on their plates, they rely on your presence as Leader to support, guide, and empower them to follow through and get the work done. Even when it is work they've initiated, you must sense into skills they may need, knowledge that would be helpful for them to have, and provide relevant support and follow up as needed to help them achieve this goal or work for themselves.

This is the work that can really spiral unchecked. It often will get pushed farther and farther back in priority as work 'relevant' to the leader continues to dominate and overtake. Back to the concept of fulfillment, this work can turn from exciting to heavy within your teams when you're not involved and leaving them to it. You must support all types of work with the same level of duty.

What is the ideal?

The goldilocks approach, Leadership that is just right, will help you lead with more intention. Leadership involves support, guidance, and empowerment, but what exactly does that look like to find that ideal balance?

Support is making sure that your teams have the skills they need, that they have any relevant background or context for their work, that you are connecting their work to their broader career development, that you're giving them the tools and resources they need to follow through.

Support given in balance to duty fundamentally knows when these elements are in place, and then steps back to provide the space for our teams to take on the work and make it their own while you stay connected.

Guidance is so important once you do work to cultivate space and support in balance. Guidance looks like giving in the moment feedback, but not dictating terms. It may also connect specifically to where your teams are in their developmental process or how it relates to their specific growth opportunities.

The very important distinction between guidance and micromanagement is that guidance continues to anchor around the vision for the work by leveraging and tuning into our teams unique talents and strengths. You're guiding their capacity not your expectations and way of being for the same work.

Empowerment is allowing their flavor into the work. When you are supporting and they're set up properly, and you're guiding to make sure they're staying on the correct path, your continued presence and intention without taking over allow them the space to make the work their own.

A core element of cultivating fulfillment in your teams is creating the space for them to be allowed to make their mark. Your support and feedback should not be limiting but uplifting. This can be scary, because it also allows our teams to make mistakes.

Great leadership provides the perfect balance of grace. You set them up well, you stay connected to guide, and you give enough space to grow but not so much space that you're not able to catch them should they start to fall. This connected awareness positions us to be our best leaders and to serve our duty as intended.

As you continue your day to day evolution of personal growth, and work to better support your team, use this awareness to serve as a gut check to how well you're serving your duty as leader. As with the Queen so it goes with Leaders, the Crown must win, must always win. Our teams and our capacity to create great Outcomes hinge on this duty.