At some point, every leader discovers there’s something their team won’t tell them. Mine came early.
Where it started
The first thing Geraldine wrote on the board was ASSUME. All caps, nothing else. She was my favourite university lecturer, and in our very first class she said:
the biggest mistake you can make in market research is to assume.
I thought about her often in my first leadership role.
The boss I thought I was
I thought I was being a good boss, doing right by one of my team. That we had good rapport. Then I heard on the grapevine she’d been telling people otherwise. Not in polite terms.
She’s a b*tch. Avoid working with her if you can.
More than once.
I was shocked. Not because it stung (though it did) but because I’d had no idea.
What she wouldn’t tell me
We all keep secrets at work, especially from our boss. Not necessarily significant ones. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay quiet than to risk it. I’ve done it too.
She assumed that if she told me, I wouldn’t do anything about it. She might have been right. But she might have been wrong, and that possibility was worth something.
What the grapevine knew
Rather than hauling her over the coals, I remembered Geraldine and got curious instead.
The pattern became clear: the grapevine got busy every time I gave her a stretch assignment. She was scared she couldn’t do it. Rather than tell me, she acted out.
The signal was there the whole time. What took me longer was understanding what it meant, what was really going on, and what I wanted to do about it.
The conversation that changes things
She could have handled it better. But as her boss, it was mine to deal with.
I told her what I knew. She turned beetroot and apologised. Then I told her what I was seeing: it happened every time I gave her a stretch assignment. Once she could see the pattern, she could name it. To her credit, she owned it. We agreed to work more closely until she had it nailed.
I also told her I gave her those assignments because I knew she could do them.
It was true.
The condition
I thought I knew how I was landing. I was wrong.
She thought she knew how I’d respond if she told me the truth. She was wrong too.
We’d each built a picture of the other and never checked it.
That’s not a failure of this particular relationship. That’s the condition.
The more senior you are, the wider that gap tends to be. The people around you know what you want to hear, and the cost of saying otherwise. So the picture you’re working from has been edited before it reaches you. The higher up you are, the more heavily it’s been edited.
No matter how well you think you’re leading, someone will be keeping a secret from you.
Image by Antenna from Unsplash.
