“What do you do about the meeting after the meeting?”
That’s a question I was asked recently in one of my Q&A sessions held after a corporate training event I conducted recently. I’ve been rolling that question around in my mind ever since, not because there’s anything particular unique about it. On the contrary, it’s because of how familiar the underlying answer I gave to this question is to another workplace problem I was asked about.
This other question surfaced during a working session I had with another leader a few weeks prior who wanted my thoughts about something he referred to as the “dour face syndrome”.
In this case, this leader shared how the Great Recession had hit his organization hard, but over the past 3-4 years, they had not only turned things around, but the company was growing at a faster rate than before. As he put it, “we had not only returned to greener pastures, but the grass was now better than it had ever been.”
But every day when he went to work, all he saw were “dour faces”. So one Friday afternoon, he decided to throw a company BBQ party, where employees were given company T-shirts and baseball hats:
“Everyone was having a great time, laughing and playing these various games we had set up around the company parking lot. It really seemed to turn things around. But then, come Monday when I walked in the door, those sullen faces had returned and I found myself once again leading a team suffering from dour face syndrome. So what am I supposed to do to get rid of these gloomy faces and the negative mood it creates?”
I’m sure some of you can probably relate to this anecdote with your own version of a “dour face syndrome.” What’s interesting for me, though, is how both these scenarios reflect a misplaced focus on the part of both leaders. And that is how they’re trying to cure the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause.
In both cases, these leaders were focusing on behaviours that garnered their attention as being problems that required immediate correction. And while they may succeed in putting a stop to these problematic behaviours, they haven’t dealt with what’s the underlying cause that lead these behaviours to show up in the first place.
And sadly, this narrow-focused approach is a lot more common than we might think, even amongst the most well-intended of leaders.
After all, in our pursuit to “get things done” – or in some cases, to just get through the day – it’s easy to limit our focus to those symptoms churning on the surface of our organization. That we look for that magic pill to silence issues that distract us from the work we’d rather spend our time doing.
Unfortunately, all this serves to do is shift our efforts to healing symptoms that affects us negatively, as opposed to the real pain points that affect our employees in terms of how they view their role within our organization, and with it, what they’re willing to contribute.
In other words, if we are to be true in our leadership, we can’t make our focus be about what bothers us, but rather the adverse conditions impacting those we lead [
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Granted, it’s almost a commentary of our times that examinations to understand the deeper causes behind the issues we see bubbling on the surface are often met with resentment, under the guise that doing so only serves to divide than heal and unify.
Perhaps one of the ironies I’ve found in these conversations with these leaders is while they understand their job is to map out the long-term view for their organization, they fail to recognize how this is informed by the realities their employees face today.
Indeed, a leader’s ability to chart their organization’s path forward is connected to their ability to understand the current reality of their employees [Share on Twitter].
That it’s only through understanding what challenges and obstacles your employees are grappling with that we can better understand and deliver what they need from us to move forward.
That’s why we shouldn’t simply gloss over negative outlooks with pithy, motivational quotes or inspirational chants. Rather, as I shared with a group of leaders a few weeks ago, sometimes we need to let our employees know that it’s okay “to own the suck.” To be open and honest that things are not great; that we’re frustrated and maybe even doubting that we’re on the right path.
Of course, when we accept the truth about what’s going wrong today, we have to be honest about our part in doing something about it [Share on Twitter].
That as much as we might treat the symptoms that garner our attention, we also not hide behind the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or what our organization is about. Especially if we don’t want to end up gathering dust as yet another name on that list of organizational has-beens.
It’s a problem that as leaders we can’t afford to disregard, especially as we continue to operate in an environment where things are not only moving faster than before, but where there’s a growing tendency to view the world in terms of how we choose to see it, as opposed to how it really is.
That narrowing of our collective viewpoints is particularly dangerous for leaders of today’s organizations as, with this impeding war for talent that’s now creeping upon us, it’s critical that we demonstrate that our leadership is not limited to what’s important to us, but to what matters to those we have the responsibility to lead.
The truth is our leadership should be about resolving the issues that prevent our employees from delivering their best, and not simply the things that get under our skin [Share on Twitter].
Only then can we move from a state of perpetual reaction, of racing to put out one fire after another, to truly embracing the vision that binds our collective efforts together and what we need to do next to make that vision our new reality.