The idea of leaders being like parents, and their direct reports being like children, came up several times in recent conversation with leaders we work with. All of us agreed with that being complete nonsense if a leader wants to create a self-sufficient team.
Because the structure of most businesses has roots in the military or other hierarchical organizations, leaders were conditioned to treat their direct reports as unthinking machines who needed constant supervising and direction to ensure corporate goals were met.
As demands on leaders’ time increases and the complexity of our business environments, internal and external, grows exponentially, we’ve reached the limits of a “leader-as-a-parent” system for organizations that plan to scale. Even solopreneurs hiring administrative support will fail to scale if they believe they must be parental in their oversight of their only direct report.
Just like we want to retain and grow our clients, we also want to grow and retain our team members. By thinking of the latter group as kin to the former, our behavior will shift.
For example, it’s unlikely that we would miss a recurring meeting with a client or not do a pre-call plan for a visit with a prospect; however, from listening to salespeople sharing challenges with their leaders they say that they’ve had multiple experiences with leaders who skip coaching sessions or who show up to performance reviews unprepared. Unsurprisingly, those salespeople were more focused on looking for opportunities outside their current organization rather than selling their current company’s services.
Often ideas for improving ourselves or our business sound simple, but aren’t easy to implement or sustain. Treating team members like clients is both simple and easy because we already have a reference group (our current clients) from which to draw inspiration.
In both cases we’re interacting with other humans so the tools (pre-call planner) or processes (creating recurring meeting invites for progress reviews) that we use for one group can be shifted over to the other group.
The less easy part is keeping in mind that we lead groups of individuals who have their own hopes, fears, dreams, communication styles and worldviews so we must account for those we are already accounting for those with our clients!
With unemployment very low (as of publishing) and top performers (rightly) commanding more power to make requests of their employers, poor leaders will focus on compensation levers to motivate and retain. Successful leaders will focus on treating their team members differently, which will be a win for them, their team and their organization.
Until next time…. go lead.
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