So much of the time, we just live life as if we are on autopilot and, as leaders, we lead as if we are on autopilot much of the time.
Leading the relationship with yourself is about engaging your conscious mindset; 90% of the thoughts that we think today will be exactly the same as the thoughts we thought yesterday. Now, if you are a leader or a manager who is just repetitively thinking the same thing, what in fact you are doing is allowing subconscious programming to drive some of the most important decisions that you require to make. So we are evolutionary hard-wired to achieve certainty by reaching a judgement about a person as quickly as possible. So if a leader has a new member of the team beginning, then fairly quickly, usually within hours, if not within days, the leader will start to form a fixed view about how that person is. Now this really can be quite toxic for relationships that leaders have with their team members, because if they have labelled a team member as a work-shy or someone who is careless, then that will be what they tend to notice, because that will be what they will look for subconsciously of course in every interaction.
Now, because they are getting what they look for, confirmation bias, the most common cognitive bias, then that will trigger certain thinking in them and all of that is a, sort of, ‘so what’, but ‘so what’ is that that drops down into their behaviour and so if a leader has got into thinking through labeling an individual, then that thinking is going to be leaking all over the place. Why not choose, instead, to switch the label from that person as a XYZ to switching the label to say, “OK, they have also got some great attributes and so what I am choosing to focus on as a leader is the attributes that they bring to the role.” So, if you know as a leader that the way in which you relate and connect to your team members is the single aspect that will determine the degree to which they are motivated, then that should be the incentive to test your thinking, and to try and choose thinking that is much more likely to engage and connect and elevate this relationship to its optimal level.
I talk a lot about authenticity in The True You, because I think it is vitally important for leaders and managers to be conscious about the extent to which they are authentic. The key motivator for staff is the sense of connection that they have with their line manager, with their leader, and one of my favourite all time quotes is David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest said “You will become way less concerned about what people think about you when you realise how seldom they do,” and I think that is so true.
We unconsciously worry constantly about how we are coming across. What do they think about us? We are on the lookout for how people respond to us and we immediately assume it is about us, but the truth is, it is most often about them. They could be thinking about something entirely unconnected with what we are saying.
And so for leaders and managers, if they have a habit, as many of us do, of trying to project an external identity and working hard to come across in a particular way, then the suggestion is that there is something else, something hidden, that they don’t want to show and my view of that is that is a complete waste of energy. If connection is a key motivator, then no connection, no meaningful connection, is ever achieved between a leader and a member of staff through this external identity, because it feels fake and if you have ever worked for leader who was inauthentic, you will know exactly what I am talking about. It is really hard to respect them. It is really hard to feel any depth of connection with them. Team members are not concerned whether you are fallible or not. They are concerned whether you are real, whether you are authentic, whether you are connecting with them and if they get a sense of that, they are much more likely to be engaged, to be inspired, to be motivated by you.
Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, 1998).
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