Episode #304: The Leader Player Conundrum

When we are promoted into leadership positions or when we are running a small business, there is no luxury option of just being a leader, focused solely on working through others. We have to both lead and produce. As a first time leader, this can be extremely dangerous. Often our career trajectory is shot down because we blow ourselves up. We fail as both a producer and a leader and then we get shown the door. Usually, we are promoted and left to our own devices to work it out, because there is no training on how to be a leader.

As the player, we are comfortable and as the leader we are feeling out of our depth. Naturally we gravitate to where we feel the most comfortable and capable. We were chosen as a leader because we were the best at our functional responsibilities. The best accountant or IT specialist, the top sales person etc. We distinguished ourselves through our ability to produce results.

The trick here though is all we had to worry about were our own numbers. These were targets which were reasonable and achievable by one person, if sufficiently motivated to go get them. When we become leader the number is now much bigger. It is the combined production of the whole team and we have much less control over the achievement of the goals than what we had before.

The team are average producers by definition. If they were above average, they would be the leader instead of us. So we don’t inherit a team of star players. We have to make star team out of a bunch of disparate individuals. They differ in terms of knowledge, intellect, motivation and levels of engagement. We rapidly discover that what floated our boat to get ahead, is of little to no interest to them. “Just do what I did” as a rallying call to the troops, falls on deaf ears.

In the first year, we keep the player component going, carrying the team. The problem is the targets go up and in the second year despite our personal heroic efforts, the targets are missed. Now we are on a watch list by the big bosses. We have become even more desperate. We now start working harder and harder to get the numbers up, but the rest of the team keep turning in mediocre performances. We have had no time to coach them, inspire them or lead them, because we have been too busy doing. The target numbers go up again and after continued unsatisfactory results, we are replaced at the end of year three. The cycle starts over again with a new face walking in the door.

When we are running our own business, it is our baby and we are fully committed to make it work. We are busy doing everything. Because it is a small business, we cannot afford big salaries for top performers, so we have to hire B and C players. Because we are the boss, we can get access to the big bosses over at the client’s firm, so we naturally want to parlay that Into business. We don’t delegate that to anyone else. We are also supremely busy, so we have very little time to pour into developing the team members. We are constantly fully occupied with doing our own work and checking that others are doing theirs.

In both cases, if we swing too far either way, then bad things happen. We wonder where is the right balance between our own input into results and getting the team to create their results. When In doubt we gravitate to what we can control directly and leave everyone to their own devices. We can only work so many hours a day and there is a limit to how much we can produce. This means that however valiant our contribution, the business just never makes it. We either get fired as the leader and replaced when we work for someone else or if it is our company, it just doesn’t seem to grow.

What should we be doing instead? We have to focus on what is the role of the leader? Managers manage processes. Leaders manage processes and build people. This is easy in theory, but not so riveting when there is a lot of pressure on us to produce results. Building people takes time. They don’t produce much at first or they get to a plateau and don’t keep growing. If we want to break out of this deadly cycle, we have to invest In the future. That means delegating tasks to our subordinates and spending time coaching them. Both of these activities take us away from what we feel we should be doing, which is precisely more doing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result.

Delegating is usually frowned upon because it doesn’t work and we conclude “it would be faster if I do it myself”. That is true the first time, but if we keep doing it ourselves then we will never free up the time to work on only the things that we can do. We need to invest the time to sell the delegation to our staff, and then keep coaching them through the execution.

When we spend time to coach our staff we give them the capacity to replace the results we normally have to produce. This starts to tip the scales in favour of more leading and less doing. It doesn’t come immediately, but if we don’t start, it will never come. Here is a hint - don’t start with the worst producer, when you start coaching. This is the natural temptation. Even if they double their results, it is usually not all that significant compared to what the top producer is pumping out. The scale growth opportunity is with the people producing the bigger numbers. Spend time getting them to get even bigger results and the numbers flow.

Work your way down from the highest to the lowest producers and actually in reality, you will probably never get to them. Better to start at the top end though, if you want to influence production. None of this is easy or quick and headaches abound. Just when you think you are getting somewhere, your top people quit and go to the competitor because they can pay more money. You feel like you are in a game of snakes and ladders and after grafting your way up the ladder, you slip on the snake cast down toward the bottom again. This is business life!

Time allocation is where we make progress. Start allocating more time to develop others and pass the work off to them to free yourself up to do more coaching, more thinking, more strategising, more innovation. If we can do that then good things start to happen.