What my absence reminded me about leadership

My page has been a little quiet for the past two weeks because, on 20 August, I had a left knee replacement.

Whilst I had obviously given some thought to the physical preparation beforehand, if I am honest, it was the professional preparation that occupied far more space in my head. How long would I actually be “out of it” for? What would happen if someone really needed something? Would an opportunity be overlooked because I hadn’t seen it? Would projects stall because I wasn’t watching?

I eventually calmed myself with the reminder that I have very capable people working alongside me and, in any event, my work is mobile. My laptop would be right next to me when I came out of surgery.

I clearly had a somewhat optimistic view of what “coming out of surgery” was going to look like.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much the procedure would throw out my entire nervous system. I couldn’t consciously see much of what had been done because my leg had almost disappeared underneath extensive bandaging and icing devices, while another machine intermittently squeezed my feet to ward off blood clots. But although my conscious mind couldn’t see what had happened, my body certainly seemed to know.

For days I battled nausea, blurred vision and a lingering feeling that I simply wanted to cry. My brain wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders either, so the laptop beside the bed turned out to be rather less reassuring than I had imagined it would be.

But as I started coming partially back online, an interesting observation came along with it.

I noticed that most things had carried on without me. People had made decisions, solved problems and kept things moving. There were, however, some things that hadn’t moved quite as easily, and what caught my attention was that the difference didn’t seem to be capability. We are talking about very capable people here, people who are eager to learn and grow.

My mind notices patterns. I don’t really know what to call this ability or where it came from, but once I see one I find it very difficult not to follow it. And somewhere in my slightly overmedicated and confused mind during that first week of recovery, a pattern began to emerge.

I started wondering whether, for some of us, identity and role performance become entangled.

In other words, when doing a good job becomes knowing that someone else thinks you did a good job.

I’ve spent years encouraging people who work with me to make decisions. Our leadership philosophy across the companies around mistakes is fairly simple: learn from them, don’t spend your life trying to avoid them. If we never get anything wrong, we’re probably not stretching ourselves very far.

And yet I have noticed something that doesn’t entirely disappear simply because a leader says, “I trust you.”

It can show up in very small ways. An email is drafted but needs to be checked before it is sent. A task is completed but needs someone to confirm that it is right. A decision could quite reasonably be made, but is brought upwards for approval anyway. Or perhaps there is an unconscious confidence that a manager will catch anything that has been missed before it becomes a problem.

Individually, none of these things is particularly significant. In fact, they can look like conscientiousness.

Here is the thing, though: repeated often enough, two people effectively start doing one person’s work.

I used to think this was mostly about fear of making mistakes. But that explanation has never quite satisfied me because I see the pattern in environments where people are actively encouraged to make decisions and where mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn.

So, lying there with little else to do besides contemplate my knee, which hurt like... well, you can fill in that gap yourself, my businesses, and whether my medication had perhaps made me a touch more philosophical, I began wondering whether something deeper was happening.

What if the reassurance isn’t only about the work, but is also about the self?

Perhaps we sometimes borrow our confidence from other people

Many of us derive at least some sense of who we are from what we do professionally. We feel capable because we perform well, valued because our contribution matters and confident because there is evidence that we know what we’re doing.

There is nothing particularly strange about that.

But what happens when the evidence we rely on doesn’t come primarily from navigating the demands of our role ourselves, but from another person repeatedly confirming that we’ve navigated them correctly?

My next step when I notice a pattern like this is usually to look at existing research to see whether anyone else has noticed it too, and whether they have gone deeper where my own thinking might have simply gone higher.

It turns out research comes surprisingly close to what I was observing.

As far back as 1989, Jon Pierce and his colleagues introduced the concept of organisation-based self-esteem: essentially, the extent to which we come to experience ourselves as capable, significant, and worthy through our membership in an organisation and the role we perform within it.

That caught my attention because it suggests that the relationship between our work and our sense of self may be considerably more intertwined than we consciously realise.

Self-determination theory, developed through the work of researchers including Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and subsequently applied specifically to work motivation by Marylène Gagné and Deci, adds another layer: our psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, and the distinction between motivation that becomes genuinely autonomous and motivation that remains dependent on external or internal pressures.

Gavin Slemp and his colleagues took this further in a meta-analysis of 72 studies involving more than 32,000 people. They found a strong positive relationship between leaders supporting autonomy and employees experiencing more autonomous forms of work motivation.

And this was where my reasoning took an interesting turn.

It would be very easy for me to write an article about people who need too much reassurance from their managers.

But here is the million-dollar question: what if the manager is part of the pattern?

If someone continually brings their work to me for checking, perhaps they haven’t yet learned to trust their own judgement.

But I also have to ask whether, somewhere along the way, I have inadvertently taught them not to.

I can tell someone that I trust them to make decisions, but if I then routinely catch the mistake, rewrite the email, improve the wording, refine the idea or provide the final approval before anything leaves my desk, there may be another message underneath the one I think I am sending.

“I trust you to do this. But don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s right.”

And that is where leadership becomes much more interesting to me.

Because perhaps dependence isn’t always something only one person brings into a relationship. Perhaps, sometimes, it becomes a system that two people unconsciously create together.

The person being managed gets the reassurance of knowing there is a safety net. The leader gets the reassurance of knowing things are being done correctly. Both feel safer. But neither necessarily grows.

And two people end up doing one job.

The employee doesn’t get to experience the full cycle of using judgement, making the decision, living with the outcome, reflecting on it and adjusting next time. And the leader remains so deeply embedded in the process that their own capacity slowly disappears under everybody else’s work.

Which brings me back to the knee replacement.

Perhaps I was asking the wrong question before surgery

Before I went into hospital, the question worrying me was:

What happens if people need me and I’m not available?

Two weeks later, I’m wondering whether the more useful leadership question might actually be:

What happens if they don’t?

Because surely one measure of successful leadership must be that the people around us become progressively less dependent on us for the ordinary decisions that belong within their roles.

And, if I’m going to be completely fair in following this thought through, there is an identity question for the leader here too.

Being needed can feel rather good. We become the person who knows. The person who fixes. The person who catches the thing that everyone else missed. The person whose judgement people seek.

Perhaps the employee isn’t the only one who has to become comfortable with greater independence. The leader has to become comfortable with becoming less necessary.

And that may be considerably harder than saying, “I empower my people.”

So, my post-operative conclusion, assuming the medication has now sufficiently left my higher reasoning alone, is that perhaps the question isn’t simply whether we give people enough autonomy.

It might be whether we give them enough opportunity to develop the internal evidence that tells them they can trust themselves.

That means allowing judgement to be exercised before it is perfect. It means letting some decisions differ from the ones we would have made. It probably means allowing the occasional email to go out that we could have worded better ourselves.

And, most uncomfortably for those of us who like being helpful, it sometimes means knowing the answer and choosing not to provide it.

I am still thinking about this one, and perhaps that is why I wanted to write about it rather than wrap it neatly into a leadership lesson.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Have you ever found yourself relying on someone else’s approval to know that you’ve done a good job, or, as a leader, discovered that your own helpfulness may actually have been preventing someone from developing confidence in their own judgement?

References

Pierce, J. L., Gardner, D. G., Cummings, L. L., & Dunham, R. B. (1989). Organization-based self-esteem: Construct definition, measurement, and validation. Academy of Management Journal, 32(3), 622–648. DOI: 10.2307/256437.

Gagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(4), 331–362. DOI: 10.1002/job.322.

Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H., & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-determination theory in work organizations: The state of a science. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 19–43. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113108.

Slemp, G. R., Kern, M. L., Patrick, K. J., & Ryan, R. M. (2018). Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review. Motivation and Emotion, 42, 706–724. DOI: 10.1007/s11031-018-9698-y.