The Three Levels of Leadership - Scouller Leadership Blog » Responsibility and Leadership
Responsibility and Leadership
Over the last five years, many leaders have told me stories about performance issues with a colleague. In essence, the person isn’t performing well and the leader is unhappy about it. I’ll usually ask them what they’ve already tried and they’ll either tell me they haven’t raised the issue, or they have, but they’ve used vague language and not said what they really wanted to say. Either way, the underperformance continues because they’ve avoided the problem.
When I ask why they typically say, “I can’t do or say so-and-so because he/she will feel hurt or they will lose confidence.” When I probe further, the truth eventually emerges:
- They don’t want to tell their truth because they are afraid of the other person’s reaction.
- And, at a deeper level, they don’t want to feel bad about themselves – they don’t want to feel they’ve done or said something unpleasant and thus feel they’ve been nasty.
This is a common dilemma for leaders. But what’s the way out? This matters because if the leader doesn’t act, he or she isn’t leading.
There’s more than one solution, but here I’ll suggest one insight that clients have found useful. It’s the difference between the “responsibility for” and the “responsibility to”.
You see, every leader has a responsibility to their group, team or organisation to do the best they can to provide leadership. This includes talking honestly with people when their performance undermines the group’s potential or results. But in talking honestly the leader has a responsibility to the other person to say what they want to say skilfully, powerfully and respectfully, without ducking issues, while trying to hold a two-way connection.
But here’s the key point: the leader has a responsibility to the organisation and the other person to be open, but he or she does not have a responsibility for the other person’s reaction. Once you’ve discharged your responsibility to the other person as best you can, he or she is responsible for their reaction.
When this insight lands, it can transform the leader, especially if he or she understands why we migrate across the invisible border between “responsibility to” and “responsibility for”.
In my view, “responsibility for” is a psychological distortion of the leader’s legitimate “responsibility to”. So a deeper understanding, I find, makes it less likely they’ll get caught by the “responsibility for” trap.
So why do we get caught into taking responsibility for others’ reactions to us? Usually because there’s something negative (often unrecognised) that we believe about ourselves.
For example, we may believe that although we’re good at our jobs, we’re also unattractive in some way and therefore open to the threat of being rejected. Perhaps we see ourselves as ruthless, a bully, overambitious or, alternatively, we may view ourselves as dull, grey, bland and uninteresting. Thus, our thinking goes, if we reveal these unattractive qualities by being too open we may get – indeed we probably will get – a reaction we don’t want from other people. They may become angry, hostile and start criticising us. Or they may feel angry, but give us the silent treatment, simmering with resentment. Either way, it’s a reaction we don’t like because it confirms what we already knew (or rather believed): that at heart we’re not innately likeable or attractive and are always one step away from the pain of rejection.
So we adopt defence mechanisms to prevent ourselves having this unpleasant experience. One classic defence among senior executives is to not speak our truth. By withholding, we believe we’re less likely to upset the other person and therefore less likely to be rejected. The problem, of course, is that we fail to deliver as a leader by ducking a key responsibility.
Whatever it is we believe about ourselves, we have an attachment to avoiding an unpleasant outcome (usually rejection). But that attachment only comes about because, deep down, we feel negatively about ourselves.
Of course, if leaders want to be completely free of a tendency to wander into the “responsibility for” zone they must unearth and dissolve their most limiting self-image beliefs, but that’s another discussion. Yet the point I’m making is that simply being aware of the difference between “responsibility for” and responsibility to” can make life much easier for leaders.
The author is James Scouller, an executive coach. His book, The Three Levels of Leadership: How to Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow and Skill, was published in May 2011. You can learn more about it at www.three-levels-of-leadership.com. If you want to see its reviews, click here: leadership book reviews. If you want to know where to buy it, click HERE. You can read more about his executive coaching services at The Scouller Partnership’s website.
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