More Or Less, Here’s Four Insights To Help Your Leadership
Life is a journey of more or less.
We’re constantly calibrating, re-mixing, and fiddling with the various amounts of ingredients and elements in our life. We’re all in the lab of life every single day. It’s one of the most dominant ongoing conversations we have with ourselves, as we constantly ruminate on what we need to do more of and what we need to do less of.
In the work context, it’s even more appropriate. As a leader, you know that nothing is static and the imperative to re-contract your behaviours and thinking is a muscle that gets some form of workout every day. We need that pliability to be the situational and adaptive leaders that our organizations and people need. Sometimes, we need to be more directive and set clear destinations for our team during times of pressing and spicy challenges. Sometimes, we need to be less directive and allow our people to make their own mistakes, uncover their own a-ha moments, and help you see things that you might be a little blind to from your leadership position.
Here’s four areas that I observe require some more of something and less of something in leadership right now. Some have been more active in my mind lately as we face economic headwinds in the work world, and existential threats to some of the foundations of what we believe to be right and just in society. Hopefully, these are a few places you can set your gaze to find more harmony in your leadership.
Less Answers - More Questions
OK, let’s start here. When I first started my coach training in 2018, I was gripped with remorse and regret on this one. I re-ran countless scenarios and past experiences in my leadership where I felt compelled to rush in with the answer, for a multitude of reasons: prove my value, save my team from some discomfort, or move as quickly as possible to the next fire. Oh baby, how wrong was I? In leadership, we need to first reach for the question jar to really understand a situation, get the right context, and set a platform for co-creation of answers and solutions with our teams. The invitation is to “stay curious just a little bit longer” and resist that panic rush to the answer. Today, I constantly nudge my clients to hold that tension and ask more questions, let their natural curiosity have some breathing room, and show their value where the question mark is more powerful than the exclamation mark. As we like to say, leaders today don’t need to (and can’t) have all the answers; but they do need to have all the questions. Those best questions are the shorter, open-ended ones that lead to long answers and the information you need to move forward with clarity and confidence.
Less Talking - More Listening
Coaching has reprogrammed my brain to be constantly observing the conversational dynamics around me. Whether it be a small client meeting or in a workshop of 60 people, I’m always monitoring who’s hell bent on talking, and who showed up with listening as their purpose. Unsurprisingly, listeners are the strongest contributors to every conversation. They pay attention to what’s unfolding, they reflect what they’ve heard with clarity and purpose, and they nail their thesis to the church door with conviction when they have something of huge value to say. They win the most without a doubt. As my close colleague Catherine Ducharme loves to say, “we have two ears and one mouth for a reason.” It’s one of the most powerful rules of life to follow and such an easy equation to evaluate how you are showing up as a leader. If you are talking more than ⅓ of the time, then maybe it’s time to pivot to a listening stance and see how much more effective and insightful you are for your team.
Less Perfection - More Prototyping
Near the start of the pandemic, my great friend and mentor Della Smith laid down this beauty; “right now, nobody can pay the price of perfection.” True dat Della! Even though we’ve (mostly) moved past that era, I think this insight is more relevant than ever. Taking small risks, prototyping ideas to discover their potential, and being willing to “try before you buy” is how we get to the great ideas and innovations. Waiting for perfection is like standing on the corner for a bus that was never going to pick you up…it was never even on the schedule! So you can wait as long as you choose for the perfection bus to come (BTW, it’s really not coming), or you can choose a path of prototyping where action, thoughtful experimentation, and healthy disruption are happening.
Less Volume - More Purpose
A few months back, I wrote about how we should never let volume be a proxy for value in our work. This blog serves as a great container to offer up that message again. For generations, hard work has overrated and good work has been underrated. Sheer effort, throughput and resilience are not going to win the day. As a leader, every action you take, every priority you set, and task you tackle has to be done with a clear purpose. Before making the decision to “grind it out” and “double down” on something, hover above the challenge/task and ask yourself some clarifying questions: What’s my objective here? Why does this matter to my team? Why does this matter to me? What value will this create? What does better look like when I’m done?
And, in a moment of mild coincidence, the previous three offerings in this blog are the tools you need to do to find that purpose. More questions, more prototyping, and more listening get you to the clarity you need to make sure you are doing the most purposeful, impactful work you’re capable of.
Not to disappoint you at the end of this blog, but I don’t have the magic recipe of “exactly more of this” and “exactly less of this” to guide you forward. Becoming a better leader is found in the increments, the experimentation, and the self-discovery…and it will never be perfect. But you can commit to getting in the lab every day in search of always improving and adapting through a little more of this and a little less of that.