Are You Leading or Parenting Your Team?
Why can’t people just do their jobs?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a leader share this lament in a session. Or this one:
It’s like high school again!
These leaders wonder why their people won’t do what they want them to do. Is it their team? Is it their leadership? What’s really the truth here?
Both can be true. As a leader we often get what we tolerate. So if we have whiny children that we’re leading and we feel more like a parent than a boss I’d suggest that you’ve adopted a parenting style of leadership. The bad news is that if you continue to parent instead of lead, you’re going to have children or, worse, problematic adolescents. Who wants that?! The good news is, it’s very fixable.
First, we need to become aware of who we are. In my experience I’ve come across three kinds of parental leaders:
The Permissive Parent Leader (PPL)
The Controlling Parent Leader (CPL)
The Vacillating Parent Leader (VPL)
None of these are successful in the long term and all three of them are stressful and require considerable time, work and energy. Here is a description of each type:
The Permissive Parent Leader (PPL)
The PPL struggles to maintain structure, set limits and hold people accountable. This results in their people behaving more like dependent children. Their people are often seeking out the PPL to answer their questions or explain again what the PPL wants from them. In short, the PPL often ends up either doing the work themselves or spending way too much time holding their direct reports hand and walking them through the process again. These children often want to tell the PPL all their personal problems to explain why these are keeping them from accomplishing their goals. They just need a little more time. Only time doesn't fix their performance problems. The PPL is frequently frustrated, overcommitted, stressed and working toward burn out or maybe just another meltdown. They can’t figure out why explaining the problem to their people doesn’t produce results. In fact, they’re usually explaining the same problem time and time again while wondering am I crazy? After awhile, the tired PPL begins to believe the only solution is to start over with new people who will give them what they want, which unfortunately, does not usually happen. Instead they just end up on the same Ferris wheel experiencing the same exhausting patterns.
The Controlling Parent Leader (CPL)
The CPL is the typical micro-managing type. They often use anger and frustration to lead their people. They may reach out five times a day asking where are you at with this project...are you going to be late? Or they want their people to report every detail to them so they know things are getting accomplished. Once again, they don’t typically get the results they need or if they are able to get results, they’ve had to expend an inordinate amount of energy pulling and pushing their people up the proverbial hill in order to get them to produce these results. The CPL also experiences a high level of stress and dissatisfaction in their role.
The Vacillating Parent Leader (VPL)
The VPL is on a pendulum. They swing from PPL to CPL depending on where in the cycle they are. They prefer to live in PPL but when they’re aren’t getting the results from their people they switch gears and move into CPL (usually when it’s getting close to a deadline and they’re going to be on the line for a deliverable). The CPL typically gets angry, frustrated and demanding. They become passive/aggressive attempting to guilt their people into performing. I’ve witnessed some of them crying, like an exhausted parent, imploring their people to please get their work done! They are probably the most stressed of the three because they continually change their strategy to try, often unsuccessfully, to make their people perform.
All three types of leaders typically experience significant and costly turnover; wasting valuable time, talent and energy. Many times these leaders undergo physical and/or mental health problems due to the stress of leading this way.
Moving Beyond a Parenting Leadership Style
The good news is, there is a way to move beyond these parenting styles of leadership! The first step toward a solution is to begin practicing self-reflection in order to build the muscle of self-awareness. Asking yourself questions like:
Which style do I most consistently identify with?
What are the results/behaviors that I do and don’t want from my team?
What is one step I can take this week to help me grow in self-awareness?
Beginning to identify the answers to these kinds of questions can help you and your coach work toward personal and leadership growth strategies to change the approaches that are undermining the results and behaviors you want.