Sample chapter 4

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How can I do a
good job when
what’s expected of
me changes every
five minutes?
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By the time I was leading teams, I had enough formal and
informal training and coaching to spew out at a moment’s
notice what I was ‘supposed’ to do to be a good leader.
I needed self-awareness, I needed to listen for deeper meaning
in people’s words, I needed to reward and motivate people in
ways that were important to them rather than to me. I knew what
to do. But in the day-to-day trenches, it just didn’t translate into
what I actually did.
Then one day, out of the blue, I realized that I was actually
pretty crappy at leading anyone who didn’t have a personality
and work style exactly the same as mine. That was a problem
since I had a team of all different types of people coming to
work in the morning and expecting me to lead them!
The Enforcer
How to Discover Your
Leadership Advantage
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On that day, I was sitting at my custom-made desk in my
nice corner office, decked out with all the trappings that were
designed to shout, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m a good leader’, when
I received an email from a supervisor who worked for me – a
woman named Liz.
I could see from the subject line that it was just a routine
email about a project we were working on for our theme park
business, and I opened it expecting a mundane update.
I was busy and I wanted to get the email off my desk fast so I
half-heartedly skimmed it to find just the vital info that I needed
to sign off on it for the team to move forward.
A funny thing happens when you put yourself on management
autopilot because you’re busy. You tend to get bit in the butt.
And I certainly did with that email.
It was long. Much longer than a routine update needed to be.
It was a back and forth correspondence between Liz and a
woman who worked for her. And they weren’t updating me
at all. In fact, it became clear that I wasn’t even the intended
recipient.
Instead, they were complaining to each other bitterly about
this ‘idiot boss’ they worked for who was making their lives
miserable.
I realized I had a leadership problem among my managers, but
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I had no idea who the heck they were talking about because
they only referred to the infamous boss as ‘The Don’. And the
only Don I knew was Marlon Brando in the Godfather.
They were pretty clear that if ‘The Don’ knew how much work
went into each assignment, she wouldn’t dole it out at 4pm and
expect people to stay to finish. And if ‘The Don’ had to do this
herself she would understand what we were talking about when
we said that it wasn’t going to work.
Back and forth, back and forth. The complaints went on for
pages. I had to find out who ‘The Don’ was.
I called Liz down to my office but I kept reading as I waited for
her, trying to figure it out. She got there, my focus was still on
the computer screen. When I heard her heels clicking on my
hardwood floor, I told her to have a seat across the room on my
suede couch.
I swiveled my chair away from my computer towards Liz, who
was sitting there, pad and pencil in hand ready to take notes
from our meeting.
Then I hit her with it. “Who’s the Don?”
A funny thing happens when you put
yourself on management autopilot.
You tend to get bit in the butt.”
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Instantly, I could see the blood drain from her face. The jig was
up; I knew the email was about me.
I was ‘The Don’.
Despite the fact she looked like she was about to faint and I felt
like I had been punched in the stomach, I had to ask:
“Ok, Liz, why do you call me ‘The Don’?”
There goes that blood draining again. She stuttered a lot but
finally copped to the fact that an assistant on her team was
terrified of me, so much so that if she saw me walking down a
hall toward her she would jump into the nearest office to avoid
walking past me.
And, never one to let an opportunity to yank someone’s chain
pass, Liz and her email cohort decided to stoke the fire by
telling the poor girl that she was right to be afraid of me; that I
was so hardcore that if she didn’t do her job perfectly I would
make her ‘sleep with the fishes’.
“Yup, that’s why we call you ‘The Don’.”
It was the first time that I realized that my
natural leadership style was not going to
work with everyone.”
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All of that training and coaching down the drain! I was not only
failing to connect with the people who were working for me, I
was scaring the beejeezus out of them!
It was the first time I realized that my natural leadership style
was not going to work with everyone. It was a style that I was
comfortable with and had helped get me into a leadership
position. But it wasn’t going to work anymore – at least not all
of the time with all people.
The natural biases of my ‘Enforcer’ archetype, left unchecked,
had wreaked havoc on my team.
I didn’t understand my own frame of mind – that was created
by years of unique experiences – so I couldn’t begin to make
sense out of the fact that everyone didn’t see things exactly
as I did.
Despite all of the training that told me to motivate people by
appealing to their self-interests, I lacked the self-awareness to
see that my own biases were preventing me from having any
empathy for people with different values and ways of thinking.
I was on a single-minded ‘Enforcer’ mission to create a team
with high performance and I missed the fact that the people
around me might have other missions motivating them.
As a leader, I needed to be absorbing the anxiety of the people
on my team and, instead, I was seemingly the one who was
bullying and persecuting them for not being replicas of myself.
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This leadership thing was clearly not going to be as black and
white as I thought it would be.
While being ‘The Don’ didn’t achieve great results in the
example above, it was nonetheless a vital advantage in my
getting to that level of leadership fairly quickly. My natural style
was an advantage for me in terms of confidence, accountability,
delivering high performance, and being fearless.
However, those qualities also created a bias in my perception
of anyone I didn’t see as having high confidence, high
performance, and was anything less than fearless. That bias
in turn affected how people who weren’t natural Enforcers
saw me.
Instead of a high performer, non-Enforcers saw me as
a perfectionist. Rather than confident, I was overbearing.
I wasn’t accountable, I was unreasonably demanding.
Depending on our own natural style and our unique
experiences, we have a bias that means we see the same
thing differently. Understanding what your natural style is in
combination with how other people see that style is the first
step in turning it into your advantage.
Your natural style is where you deviate from average. It’s where
you have the possibility of not just being better than most, but
find the potential to be absolutely the best. It’s the most natural
part of your personality and has shaped your behaviors from
the time you were a kid. It’s what probably made you feel a bit
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like a misfit at a time when you so desperately wanted to fit in.
Now, it’s what makes you stand out.
When you are operating in your natural style people look at you
as if you are freakin’ Houdini. You’ll hear people comment that
‘they don’t know how you do that’ or ‘they don’t know how you
do it so fast’. It’s often others that spot your natural style before
you do because it’s so easy and effortless to be there that you
don’t think it’s anything special. But it is. Not everyone can do
what you do effortlessly.
Every archetype comes with its own natural advantages and
biases, and should be managed accordingly. But achieving
the self-awareness to identify your archetype doesn’t happen
automatically.
We often don’t see ourselves as others do and that impression
we make on people really does matter.
To paraphrase musician and business mogul Jay Z, ‘We all have
genius level talent, we just have to find out what it is, then apply
it in a way that supports our genius.’
When you are operating in your natural
style people look at you as if you are
freakin’ Houdini.”
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Nicknames like ‘The Don’ are language shortcuts people use
to communicate with each other to say ‘Hey, we’re both getting
the same vibe from this person. We know what to expect
from them’, and if you’re lucky enough to find out what your
nickname is, you will have found a short cut to identifying your
natural advantage.
Otherwise, try these exercises to help discover your
leadership archetype:
Rather than shrugging off compliments in mock humility,
pause to consider the good things people say about you.
These are clues to the natural advantage that you already
have in play.
List all the day-to-day tasks you find effortless. Examine this
list for competency or behavior patterns that match one of
the 10 archetypes discussed in chapter two.
Ask people to describe you in three words. Like a nickname,
this will reveal the key advantages and biases of your natural
style.
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Understanding your natural biases
empowers you to leverage them in your
favor in the right situations, or override
them when they will hurt you.
Chapter 4: The Enforcer