People leadership, the art no one has mastered, and nor should they.
The notion of being an effective leader of people is something that I’ve been exposed to my entire career. As someone who’s always been motivated by helping others better themselves, and truly feeling rewarded by seeing something I’ve helped lead work effectively, I’m always intrigued by leadership experts who promote how to be a more effective leader of people.
Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about leadership in general here, I’m talking about how to lead people. Recently I sat through a workshop which was presented to a group of senior members of our team and admittedly, sceptical from the start, I watched as our team were exposed to what I could call right method, wrong scenario leadership. The expert was exactly that, an expert, but lacked context and understanding of the situations we as agency folk find ourselves in on a daily basis. High-pressure, high-speed environments, up to our eyeballs in deadlines and constantly chasing that bottom line.
During the session, one of our senior team members made a point that she felt she could be too abrasive sometimes and that the workshop was making her re-evaluate her approach. I candidly asked “why are you abrasive?” to which she replied, “because I’m generally stressed about something and I need people to work faster and harder at it.” The expert used this as an opportunity to highlight the importance of reiterating the need for the task to be done faster and to a higher quality to the team members in question in a way that would elicit a positive response. I sat thinking “the moments that have taught me the most are the moments where I realised I’d done something wrong by being told in no impolite terms, I’d f*cked up”. We learn from mistakes, but not if we’re wrapped in cotton wool and told in a way that was found in a textbook.
Understanding the personalities at play is part of work, it’s part of life, it’s what makes us the diverse, interesting, fun environment we’ve come to be, and I felt obliged to make a point at the end of the session that no leadership course should seek to create carbon copy leaders out of us all. There is certainly no textbook way of approaching leadership outside of one consistent that I’ve known to be true across them all. Communication.
From the moment we’re born we’re taught how to communicate as people. When we’re angry society has taught us that raising our voice effectively demonstrates anger, when we’re sad we may speak less and become reclusive, but it’s different for different people in different situations. Emotions influence our communication style and the best thing we can do as leaders is to help people understand how to react to emotion and deal with it sensitively, both upwards and downwards.
In the same session I spoke about above, we listened as we were taught how to have conversations that resulted in someone essentially being bollocked or fired. Similarly, we explored how to have conversations that positively reinforce behaviour, both times a similar question came up “how do you say that without being condescending”. It was a theme I have found to be relevant throughout every people leadership course I’ve studied, in the search to become a better ‘textbook’ people-leader you arguably become a robot, reciting what you’ve been taught syllable by syllable. The thing that makes us human, is lost in the process.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for leaders to be arseholes and for you to think I’m all for abrasiveness. I simply think communication between leaders and their teams merits understanding that emotion needs to play a part at some points. When we expect our teams to be passionate, enthusiastic, and happy, we can’t scold them when they show us frustration, stress, and anxiety. As effective leaders, we must grasp how we lead our teams through these situations, similarly when we are frustrated, anxious, or stressed we should be allowed to articulate that in a responsible manner to teams so that they understand that we too are human, not robots.
