Creating Chaos to Coach

A bizarre leadership trait which on the outside looks noble but on the inside is quite fickle, it can do more harm than good.?

Consider this, most of the sophisticated and deadly weapons were invented or designed during World War I and World War II.?As and when a threat or skirmish happens between two warring groups or countries, the respective parties tend to invest heavily in developing weapons which they use against each other. Now comes the best part of this story, what do they do with these weapons and technology when there is no war? Well the tendency was to provoke each other, create an atmosphere of unrest and then put the weapons to use. In simple terms, if you have a weapon don’t let it stay idle. Do something so that you can utilize it.

Let’s now switch to today’s corporate world. Something similar is happening and it is ruining the lives of many.?

Sathish, a senior project manager in a manufacturing firm talks about one of his engineers. He says, “I noticed Arthi was time and again committing blunders while designing the project plan. I wanted to put an end to this. I the next 4 months I spent almost 3 hours every day with Arthi, looked into every small detail she was capturing and corrected her at every step. The result, she is now able to create a picture perfect project plan. My approach to get into every detail of work she was doing paid off”. Sathish’s face beamed with pride as he explained this. He goes on to say “I feel this approach is best suited to ensure we deliver error free work. I feel it’s the best way to manage team members”. I’m using this approach with the others too. In the last 45 days half of Sathish’s team have put down their papers. One of his top performer lodged a formal complaint with HR about Sathish’s behavior and how it’s impacting the team. What went wrong?

Remember what happened when there was no war and no opportunity to use the weapons? Yes an atmosphere was created so that the weapon could be used. Yes, Sathish created a weapon when there was CHAOS. When Arthi was dishing out erroneous project plans he came up with a practice which worked well. After which, that behavior of micro managing people got so deep rooted in him, he was subconsciously wanting to deploy that and when he did not find an opportunity, he created an environment of CHAOS. He started picking up on small errors, starting pushing tougher deadlines, ended up having frequent showdowns and all these so that he could deploy his most loved weapon which worked wonders for him. What was once a tool to help someone succeed, ended up becoming a deterrent to employee engagement.?

In many of my coaching discussions and leadership workshops recently, I have noticed that managers are facing an unprecedented backlash from their teams. They are unable to understand why their behaviors are turning counter-productive. As I probed deeper, I found that the tendency to deploy a practice or framework without a rhyme or reason is the culprit. In some cases the issue is beyond one or two people, a business unit seem to have leaders demonstrating this habit of CREATING CHAOS TO COACH. Setting up an atmosphere which can be conducive to allow them demonstrate a trait which then turns out to be harmful.

A deeper reflection of one’s leadership attributes is the key. It’s important that leaders practice restraint and take a step back and let their teams do their job. The proof of the pudding is not in what you did to make them succeed, it’s about what you dint do let them flourish. Think about it!