Dynamic #1 of Friendship Leadership
Hurting leader finds hope in science.
“Your leadership style might be causing you pain.”
There are 5 dynamics in Friendship Leadership Theory that each bring pain if you find yourself on the wrong side. While these dynamics are personal, they don’t stop there. Even if you are a well balanced leader and make strategic decisions among the potential styles, the dynamics of Friendship Leadership are probably in the culture of your team or organization.
Here is the first one to look to in you or your environment:
Look for this key symptom: Resistance to real delegation.
This resistance highlights a key tension in Friendship Leadership: the tension between lack of trust and evidence-based trust. Most leaders I work with cite a lack of trust as the reason they do not delegate. This lack of trust may not be openly stated. Still, they feel anxious when things are out of their hands and feel a need to check in constantly. They only delegate the less important things; most commonly, they never actually think of things to delegate.
Something has given them a reason not to trust. It is blame. Blame lives just beneath the surface of a lack of trust: Fear of receiving blame and a desire to hide from it. Leaders avoid blame by refusing to delegate to avoid any errors. They also avoid blame by casting it on others, circumstances, and even quietly on themselves. If they delegate, they can’t ensure that all is done in blame avoidance. If they delegate well, they won’t be able to cast blame on the incompetent and only their failure will be visible. Either way, the lack of delegation keeps us steering clear of clear and substantial delegation.
As a recovering Friendship Leader and a self-proclaimed “nice guy,” I used to avoid blame at all costs. This didn’t mean, though, that I was living on the right side of the dynamic. I practiced a third style of blame avoidance: blind trust. Instead of delegating clearly, I cited expected professionalism, experience, or other irrelevant attributes to justify my resistance to delegation. I took a “they should know anyway” attitude.
Evidence-based trust is the antidote to blind trust, blame casting, or blame avoiding.
It was on a walk in a Pacific Northwest forest on a damp Spring afternoon. I had just started my coaching career, and many of my early clients struggled with delegation (many still do today). My hiking partners were both high level leaders in their organization and wonderful engineers. As we stepped over exposed roots and worked our way up rocky steps toward our view of a waterfall, we diagnosed the causes of our struggles with delegation. We applied science and realized that agreements were our research tool. Making clear verbal agreements with the people we worked with was identified as key to relieving the pain of this first dynamic of Friendship Leadership.
Here is the science experiment we designed:
Identify something you resist fully delegating.
Identify one person you can delegate this to.
Call a meeting and make a clear agreement about what each of you will do as this person takes on the task or project.
Agree together to circle back and check on the status of the agreement at an appropriate interval (Note: I did not say to check on the status of the project or task. The real nature of accountability is interpersonal, so this check-up is a personal check on the agreement you have made together)
Just yesterday, my client was stumped on his inability to delegate. In his long tenure at the bank he works in, he has consistently risen through the ranks. As a Sr. Director, he is now stuck. It is painful. There is too much to be done without delegation, but his lack of trust and fear of blame, as well as secret blame of others, is keeping his mind on work every waking hour of the day. He asked for coaching around delegation and wanted some quick tools and techniques he may not have thought of. When I pointed out his lack of trust, we began working together toward crafting some clear initial agreements to give him evidence-based trust. There was extreme leadership-pain-relief in that one call. This has happened hundreds of times.
Try it!
Gratefully,…Dr. Jeff
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