How do you know if your behavior is helpful or harmful to your people? Even with the best intentions at heart, you may end up doing more damage than good.
You may put people first, care about them and try to ensure they get the best environment to do well and unlock their hidden potential.
But good intentions don’t always translate into the right behaviors and practices. You may unintentionally act in ways that get in the way of your team’s learning and growth.
A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.
— Thomas Edison
You need to pay attention to how you communicate, set expectations and push your team to achieve excellence. You need to ask questions to determine what’s working for your team instead of making assumptions.
To do this, watch out for these five behaviors that can bring your team down instead of lifting it up:
Becoming a rescuer
Many things can go wrong in a team—unclear requirements, dependencies that take longer than expected, ad hoc requests, unforeseen obstacles and challenges.
All these issues can block team members from progressing on goals and meeting committed delivery timelines.
It’s in such moments that many well-intentioned managers lose sight of when people really need help and what kind of help is appropriate to provide.
They may think it’s their job to rescue their team—as soon as an issue shows up, they jump right into it and try to save the day. Constantly rescuing encourages their team to stay helpless and continue being a victim instead of taking responsibility for themselves.
Instead of promoting dependency by saving others, become a coach by enabling others to think for themselves and act on their own. Shift from promoting dependency and control to empowering them.
A coach provides encouragement and support. They believe that everyone is capable of solving their own problems. They empower people to explore, discover and set their own path by seeing them as creative, resourceful people who are capable of taking decisions, making choices and solving their own problems.
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When you feel the need to jump in and save the day, stop for a minute and ask yourself:
- What are the implications of acting this way?
- Do I really need to step in or can I empower others to take responsibility and sort out their own problems?
- How can I develop others?
Next, use the art of inquiry, show curiosity and listen intently to support others in discovering what is best for themselves. Ask these questions:
- What would you like to see happen in this situation?
- What can you do to change it?
- What’s preventing you from solving this problem?
- What solutions have you tried?
- What information do you need to move forward?
- What more can you do?
- Why do you feel this way and what can you do to change it?
- What might you be missing?
- What other alternatives are possible?
- What do you need to do next?
- What is getting in the way of achieving your goal?
- What one step can you take towards your goal?
Advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.
— Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit
Your good intentions to rescue your team promotes dependency and does more harm than good. Accept others are capable and give them a chance to solve problems on their own.
Acting as a shield
Work environments can be brutal especially when people lack respect for others’ time and productivity. Too many meetings, conflicting requests and information overload can damage a team’s productivity. Without getting an opportunity to focus for long durations without interruptions, employees can’t produce quality work.
Interruptions are destructive to productivity. The more a manager can absorb trivial and unnecessary interruptions, the better work their team can produce.
It’s natural for good managers in such environments to act as a shield for their people—protecting them from getting overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them and keeping them away from anything that might distract them from doing their work.
However, what starts as a healthy protection and good intent can often turn into toxic behavior that’s destructive to a team’s growth. When managers don’t know where to draw the line, they tend to go overboard with it.
By not knowing how to separate healthy interactions from unhealthy ones:
- They block their people from getting the necessary exposure.
- Their team may acquire technical excellence but fail to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution or delegation.
- They create strict team boundaries with a “my team” vs “your team” attitude by treating their own team’s goals as primary and everything else secondary. This breaks down collaboration necessary to achieve common goals.
Instead of trying to over-protect your team from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, coach them to manage their own time well.
To avoid this mistake:
- Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like.
- Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.
- Encourage them to go beyond team boundaries to acquire knowledge about other teams and functions.
- Tell them to make decisions aligned with the larger interest of the organization and not just their teams.
Your good intentions to act as a gatekeeper only hurts your team. Stop shielding and start empowering to help them move forward.
Trying to be their friend
Caring personally is an important attribute of good leadership. It makes employees feel valued and respected. But it’s often easy to cross this line by entering into the friend zone.
Managers in friend zone:
- Try to play nice to protect their team from getting hurt, but not speaking the truth prevents their team from learning about areas where there’s potential to improve.
- Don’t share bad news with the worry that it will impact their team’s motivation and morale.
- Refuse to set boundaries around information that’s safe to share and topics that are off limits.
- Let their personal liking for someone interfere with their ability to be fair and unbiased.
- Try to avoid disagreements and conflicts to protect their relationship.
Managers are not friends, nor should they act like one. Their good intentions to care for their team can get in the way of effective communication.
Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for. It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results
— Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor
Balance care personally with challenge directly to avoid becoming a friend. Set hard goals. Communicate feedback as they need to hear it. Share bad news to help them become more resilient.
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Mistaking perfectionism for excellence
Driving excellence should be every manager’s priority. But what if they mistake perfectionism for excellence?
Managers may assume that people who are at the top of their fields are perfectionists—that they don’t ever settle for good enough.
But this isn’t true. What makes them stand out isn’t perfection, but knowing which flaws to accept and which to let go. Their work may appear to be impeccable, choices extraordinary and they may come across as supremely confident, but behind that perfectionist outlook are hidden many imperfections that others tend to overlook.
There’s a fine line between healthy striving and setting goals that make you and others miserable. The drive to excel is not the same as the drive to perfect. They are two very different things. Excellence is about utilizing your and others’ potential to seek a great outcome. Perfectionism is about obsession to the point of being self-destructive.
Your good intentions to unlock your team’s potential by mistaking perfectionism for excellence could be self-destructive.
Unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable.
— Adam Grant, Hidden Potential
Adam says there are three things that perfectionists tend to get wrong:
- They obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees.
- They avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones.
- They berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.
To let go of perfectionist tendencies:
- Know when it’s important to push for the best and when to settle for good enough.
- Learn to accept flaws that are necessary to move ahead.
- Pay more attention to large problems. Don’t neglect them at the cost of tweaking and refining small things to the point of obsession.
- Make your team’s goals precise and challenging. Specificity will help your team know when they have achieved their goal and it’s time to move on.
Make excellence, not perfectionism as your goal and your team will have more success along the way.
Not aligning goals with aspirations
People come from different backgrounds, experiences and expectations. They have different goals, needs and aspirations.
Managers may mean well when they assign roles and responsibilities to individuals or push people to achieve certain goals. But making assumptions about what their team members want is a deadly mistake.
What if they don’t want managerial responsibilities and would rather be an individual contributor?
What if they value work-life balance more than a promotion?
What if they prefer problem solving over designing opportunities?
People are unique and so are their wishes. Putting everyone into the same bucket or imposing your expectations onto them can lead to low morale, frustration and a sense of estrangement.
Wide gap between goals and aspirations can make them withdraw with the feeling that no one understands them. They may feel misunderstood, powerless and hurt which can lead to resentment and anger.
Having personal boundaries and preferences exploited can also erode their sense of self-worth and make them feel that their needs and desires don’t matter.
No amount of coaxing or pushing can help when people lack intrinsic motivation.
If intrinsic motivation is high, if we are passionate about what we are doing, creativity will flow. External expectations and rewards can kill intrinsic motivation and thus kill creativity.
— Frans Johansson, Medici Effect
Intrinsic motivation is the key to growth and managers can tap into it by understanding their team’s aspirations and aligning it with their goals.
Some questions to ask:
- What worries you the most?
- What are you most passionate about?
- What did you do last month/week that made you feel happy and satisfied?
- What makes you feel frustrated or dissatisfied?
- What’s your biggest concern?
- What kind of work gets your attention and what kind of work do you avoid?
Inquiring about their personal choices does not mean that you need to fulfill them all. You can’t give opportunities that don’t exist or give only a certain kind of work to them. However, knowing what they value can help you strike the right balance between business objectives and individual goals.
Don’t assume you know what people want. Ask them explicitly to avoid imposing your expectations onto them.
Summary
- A manager’s goal shouldn’t be to act as a hero by jumping into issues and solving them for their team. Acting as a rescuer only promotes dependency and prevents your team from learning to solve problems on their own. Instead of a rescuer that promotes dependency, empower them by acting as their coach.
- Trying to save your team’s time is a good goal. But you can’t get your team performant and productive by acting as their shield. Protecting them prevents them from the exposure required to build new skills. Instead of acting as their shield, coach them to manage their own time.
- Teams who know that their managers care for them perform well. But there’s a difference between caring for someone and acting as their friend. Playing nice prevents you from sharing critical feedback, setting boundaries and encouraging healthy disagreements. Care personally and challenge directly to strike the right balance.
- Obsessing about every small detail, playing safe and trying to avoid mistakes comes from the desire to achieve perfectionism. But perfectionism slows things down and makes it hard to achieve bigger and better things. Instead of perfectionism, shoot for excellence.
- People have different goals and aspirations. Assuming you know what they want can lead to confusion, frustration and misalignment of expectations. Ask, don’t assume to match business objectives with individual goals.
