Don’t Protect, Support.
Friendship Leadership Series - Dynamic #3
Protection is another form of the Friendship Leadership Style. (If you have been following along, this is the third tension to manage).
I am a pleaser, and I love to protect people even when they don’t ask for it. Several years ago, I had a team member struggling in their personal life. I took it upon myself to make sure they left early, that they weren’t invited to meetings they didn’t have to attend, and kept them out of e-mail cc’s and slack channels they didn’t need to be a part of. Imagine my confusion when they came to me angry and feeling marginalized. I wasn’t just confused; I was actually a little hurt. It seemed they didn’t see the incredible effort I took on myself to protect them. I took on the heroic role of protector, and I am sure you see the problem: they didn’t ask for it!
This incident, combined with others, my studies in Psychological Capital (More on this toward the end of summer), and thousands of hours of coaching, have helped me understand the important difference between protection and support.
As teenage friends, most of us set out to provide protection and companionship for those closest to us. The friendship “pact” is that we will take the side of our friends when things get rough. We want to be the kind of friends who heroically take the side of our friends and see them do the same for us. Stepping out in protection of a hurting peer creates a deep sense of gratification as we “fulfill our responsibility” to side with them.
Protection is important. As leaders, protection isn’t bad. The problem for me and many of my leaders is that we overuse it and impulsively protect instead of managing the tension between protection and support.
Let’s Look at the problems impulsive protection can cause:
Protection undermines delegation <> Support Empowers Delegation - Too many people think of delegation and “task offloading.” We think about the portfolio of work and look to offload the responsibilities for that work to our direct reports. This is an important part of delegation for sure. When we protect, we actually remove an important part of the process. We keep our people from interacting with the actual systems and people inherent in the organization. They actually get a false sense of reality and work in the bubble we create. This is exhausting and causes us to maintain the bubble and also will bring a reality shock when we aren’t there To protect.
If we support instead, then our people don’t just learn to fulfill the projects and tasks we give them but they also build the skills to navigate the people and systems that create a more empowered delegation.
Protection undermines people development <> Support trusts your people - What skills do your people need if they were to do your job? Good leaders want to grow and promote our people. Protecting them means they won’t learn the skills to take our position or a position like ours in the organization.
In my second major leadership position our growth was exponential. As is the case in most start-ups, the cash wasn’t keeping up with the staffing demands and internal promotion was our best scale-up option. Promotions were happening quickly and I was promoted and asked to promote a team-member. They were shocked when they stepped into my job.
I had protected them from the “boring” meetings, the intense boss, the customer issues that arose, all to keep them focused on their work. They were completely unprepared to take on the role. We lost momentum as I had to step back into my old role and do what I should have done earlier: supported them in the actual system they worked in.
Protection creates a feeling of entitlement. <> Support generates appreciation - This tension is a stronger version of the one just above. When we play the hero, we start to believe we deserve loyalty, appreciation, recognition, and special privileges. It is natural when we sacrifice so much. The problem is that we aren’t primarily friends and these perks of the Friendship Leadership style rarely emerge.
When we support, we begin to generate appreciation of the gifts and talents in our team members. The appreciation can even become a small dose of awe when we see them heroically managing the systems we would have tried to protect them from.
Protection creates silos <> Support creates integration - Protection insulates. It creates a bubble. The bubble doesn’t just keep your team from experiencing the system but also keeps the system from knowing and interacting with the actual people in your team. A key component in bubble creation is blame. Good leaders rarely speak blame but we sure think blame as we protect our people.
People attribute siloing in organizations to function but often it isn’t only function but it is leaders who are practicing a protection oriented Friendship Leadership Style.
People are stronger than I think. In the past two weeks, I have coached several clients to let go of their protection style for their team and support them in all the hard things coming to the team. They experienced peace, appreciation, and a much more productive team.
How did they do it?
They invited key Direct Reports to the hard or boring meetings as partners. In the past, I would not want to waste team members’ time with these things, but bringing them empowered them.
They created a team mindset that was not of blame but of innovation around the roadblocks the system had created. One leader had been waiting over a year for the tech team to digitize a core function in his business. He invited the team into a blame-free brainstorming session on creative ways to work around the problem.
They identified one or two successors on their team. They then identified key skills to function on their level and, with them, built a plan to help their potential successors develop those skills.
- Dr. Jeff
Note: It is important to say that this Protection vs. Support tension is just that. It is a tension to manage. Protection is sometimes necessary. I hope that raising awareness of this tension will empower my leaders to be more intentional and strategic in their choices.
