Leader, Master Thyself

I recently met a business leader friend of mine, who had quietly sent me an SOS over HR people challenges in his organization.

Years back, we had worked together leading different teams, and connected well over leadership values. We shared common interests in people development with beliefs like trust your people and empower them to believe they can handle any problem. As times passed, my friend and I moved on to different companies, now and then exchanging glad updates about our various (ex)team members and the heartening progress in their individual careers.

So imagine my surprise, when he told me that his HR was hopeless, that he was grappling with intractable people issues, so could I help him sort them out in a paid assignment? What could have gone wrong? I immediately told him that I was curious to understand this, so paid or not, I was ready to engage. Then he brought me into the company and formally introduced me to his people as a coach. And what an interesting experience it turned out to be!

I met all the managers. I connected with their teams. I circled huddles and bisected one-on-ones. And assessments and deep dives later, I emerged with a disquieting realization. The issue wasn’t with the team, it lay with the leader – none other than my own friend! He was unable to find anyone trust worthy enough to leave them well enough alone to just do their job. So, he resorted to micro-managing his people, getting involved willy-nilly into every issue they were tackling – whether mundane or mission-critical – proffering advice, laying down approaches, setting micro-deliverables, ordering solutions in every meeting, all this without engaging with the real problem at hand. He was creating excessive advisory traffic, walking over invisible departmental lines, and bullying everyone to abide by his diktat. As a result, morale, engagement, and inter-departmental relations went out of the window.

People impose themselves on teams that report to them for various reasons. Some are venting their own insecurity; some need ego strokes; a few have personal issues spilling over at work; quite of lot of them have bias against their people; some are wary of some past baggage; some have inherited a trust deficit when they were promoted. Reasons are many, but if the leader doesn’t sort her/ himself first, it’s the entire department that will unravel pretty soon.

This outlined another problem that was festering alongside the leadership issue. Most of his people were baulking at giving him feedback for fear of his wrath. They only worked to please him, not to serve the organization. In my view, HR here was ‘spineless’, devolved to being ‘Yes men’ to the business leader.

Ideally, HR is meant to be the conscience keeper of the business leader. Its mandate is to guide people to purpose-driven excellence, coaching people to develop into leaders. And HR knows that leaders need more intensive coaching than most! If there’s anything that sets apart leaders from the rest, it’s the ability to handle difficult conversations and bring about win-win results. To wit, HR is nothing but the tough work of having tricky conversations in the service of organizational and humane values.

So here I was, with the context for my involvement overturned, and thrust into the delicate position of having to tell a good man intent on finding a solution that he was the problem himself. That he was so busy trying to be perfect that he couldn’t see how wrong he’d become.

My friend needed an urgent injection of truth, and his organization merited a break from the boss-driven, exhausting efficiency treadmill. As I mused over how to help my friend find his way out of the thicket, I harked back to my Guru, HH Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi’s wise words on the matter. Let me paraphrase:

A leader should become first her own leader, experimenting all her beautiful ideas upon herself, so that she should know how she can manage herself before she tries to handle others.

A leader should be very active, efficient, prompt, forgiving, generous, respectable and loving. If she is not respectable, then respect cannot be demanded. (Team) Members will respect her and trust her automatically, because she manifests respectful qualities. A leader should never try to enhance her own credibility by diminishing that of others, but must always build up a democratic style of leadership that is a collective one and should not assemble ‘Yes men’ or coteries around him and should not give false praise. Everyone must have access to the leader in person, in case there is a problem.

And here’s how I took the bull by the horns, and lived to tell the happy tale.

To begin with, I told the head of the HR department to stop being a pushover. I reminded him that the HR Head’s primary responsibility was to coach such leaders to develop and sustain a fine inner traffic of mind states between self-awareness and empathy in dealing with their people. To spot and head off tendencies to micro-manage people and cut hierarchies in pursuit of results or power trips. To remind leaders that past results are no guarantee of future gains, and with changing workforce, to mindfully adapt styles and methods of leadership.

To clear any illusions, HR is not an easy job, being perhaps the most fearless of all functions in a mission-driven collective. It is an adventure of values and diplomacy. Every day. When you speak up, you risk the job, no doubt, but that’s the work of HR. So it is not for the insecure, or the paycheck-obsessed.

Next, I did a coaching session with my friend. It was a testament to his integrity that he soon recognized what a bad leader he’d become, and with some inner work, he quickly set about corrective measures. He also told me that he missed my frank advice that he had taken for granted in our past together as colleagues.

We then designed and launched a Mentor Coach program in the organization, keeping with our belief that coaching is an integral part of any progressive organization that wants to last long and prosper. The process was that the mentor coach’s responsibility was to coach managers to become better leaders. A critical feature was to make sure feedback was development-based (remedial), and not linked to performance appraisal. Keeping with that spirit, the mentor coach would conduct a skip level meeting, not by the one-over manager or someone senior within the department. This released some toxic pressure that was locked in the organizational system.

Depending on the organizational culture and contextual needs, we know there are different types of skip level meetings. We chose one that was coach driven. However, we combined the second and third one in the list below:

1.????Conducted by Coach – an independent person, with no stakes in the appraisal of the manager. Any feedback generated from this meeting is used only for a development journey, so that the manager is also equally interested in the process and outcome. He/ she then follows the collective approach, helping build a democratic style of leadership.

2.????Conducted by Coach, Manager Present – however, the manager’s job is only to listen to what the team says. Rule is, he/ she can’t say anything during the meeting, but only observe and absorb. Basis feedback, the Coach and the Manager can work on a remedial/ development journey.

3.????Collective – Team member meets Coach, Manager and Leader. Member brings concern areas and all work towards resolving them. This is a collective effort, building relationships, focusing on the big picture, helping chart the Member’s career growth.

Predominantly, we see HR conducting such meetings, typically with management trainees, with the business leader observing. Minutes of the meeting are noted and shared with all. This model, though, has various pitfalls, such as bias coming from the team, manager, HR or in case of any past baggage for any individual. We chose to avoid this model completely.

With the initiative taking firm root in the organization, people began to adapt to the new level of leadership style through rank and file. People who wanted to be bosses but not leaders resigned and moved on. Today, team leaders attest to a strident sense of empowerment and improved productivity within their teams, with negativity mostly weeded out. There is more respect, and consequently more energy, coursing the company’s hallways. Open conversations brought tough learnings, but with self-aware and empathetic colleagues to fall back on, team leaders and members made changes for the better.

Change begins with oneself. All becomes well when, like the Buddha says, irrigators channel waters, fletchers straighten arrows, carpenters bend wood, and the wise master themselves.

?

?

?