In the previous article, I wrote about the five leadership styles that can turn your strengths into blind spots. Here are the next five.

Firefighter Leader 

Your strong sense of urgency to respond to problems—whether it’s a missed deadline, unhappy customer, production issue or a major execution roadblock—makes you solve them quickly and prevent major disasters. You thrive on solving pressing problems and jumping into crises. Your ability to remain composed during difficult situations, identify solutions to problems that block progress and protect business from immediate risks makes you as the person everyone turns to when things go wrong. 

You’re admired for your ability to handle pressure and resolve critical issues faster than anyone else in the company. 

However, being a “Firefighter leader,” when crisis management becomes your default way of leading rather than the exception, you become so busy in solving today’s problems that you fail to prevent tomorrow’s issues. Problems keep repeating as the team moves to the next emergency before addressing the root cause. Priorities are constantly shifted to handle the latest urgency. Long-term initiatives are delayed as they are constantly interrupted by the latest fire. People learn to be reactive, rather than being proactive. They stop paying attention to the important priorities as immediate demands keep them occupied.

Being trapped in a cycle of urgency leaves little time for planning or improvement. When you don’t learn to escape the reactive mode, strategic work suffers.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a firefighter leader:

1. You feel valuable when solving crises.
2. Most of your day is spent responding to urgent issues.
3. Important priorities are pushed aside constantly to address the latest problem. 
4. You measure success by how quickly issues are solved, not how rarely they occur.
5. You barely have time for strategic thinking.

Solving the root cause of problems is always more urgent than solving any problem which it produced. Addressing the root cause of problems never costs time; it always gives time.
― Luca Dellanna, 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

Pride yourself on preventing problems, not extinguishing fires. Address the root cause. Reward preparation, not the ability to handle crises. 

Stabilizer Leader

When your leadership strength is to create structure around chaos, you become really good at building dependable systems and processes, improving execution and reducing unnecessary risks. You’re able to reduce surprises, establish order and restore confidence and stability. Predictability, reliability and consistency makes business operate with a greater discipline. Execution speeds up as work becomes more organized with clear expectations, defined roles and responsibilities, better planning, less uncertainty and operational excellence.  

Employees feel less overwhelmed by constant change, customers experience greater reliability and trust increases as teams become more aligned around common processes and know what to expect.

However, when consistency and stability takes priority over growth and opportunities, you start resisting change. Bold ideas are shot down because they appear too risky. Every new initiative requires extensive documentation, multiple review cycles and a long chain of approvals. Maintaining the status quo takes priority over experiments and innovation. Instead of pursuing growth, people start playing safe. The desire to reduce risk can make the organization slow to adapt and reluctant to innovate.

Resisting change until every uncertainty has been addressed, becoming increasingly cautious in decision-making and not being able to separate healthy experimentation from unnecessary risk limits future growth. It prevents you from launching products and entering new markets much faster.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a stabilizer leader:

1. You look for risks before opportunities.
2. You stick to processes at the cost of agility.
3. New ideas are scrutinized more than existing practices. 
4. People rarely challenge the status quo.  
5. Competitors move faster than your organization.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
— Peter F. Drucker

Stop treating change as a threat. Evolve and embrace tomorrow’s opportunities before the organization falls behind. Thoughtfully adapt instead of trying to preserve the status quo. 

Visionary Leader

You’re a strategist—someone who’s always thinking about the future, new ideas and big opportunities. You recognize emerging trends, question conventional thinking and lean towards ideas that may seem just beyond reach. You’re energized by change, innovation and creating a better tomorrow. You encourage people to think bigger and not be limited by today’s constraints. You convince them that a meaningful change is possible. You rally them around a compelling purpose. You inspire direction and transformation. You inspire growth and possibility. 

Your optimism is contagious. It makes the future feel exciting and within reach. 

But when you continue to play the role of a visionary leader and keep chasing the next big opportunity before giving life to the existing ones, projects compete for the same people and resources. Roadmaps change repeatedly. There’s a constant shift in direction. People who were enthusiastic before now feel exhausted because they can’t make out what truly matters and what are the organization’s top priorities. Constantly introducing new initiatives overwhelms teams and prevents existing priorities from gaining traction. When execution is not prioritized, even the best ideas lose value.

You need to translate strategic ambition into executional reality. You need to let important initiatives complete before launching new ones. You need to protect strategic focus by limiting active priorities.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a visionary leader:

1. You have laid down a solid strategy without execution plans.
2. New opportunities constantly interrupt ongoing work.
3. Success is measured by ideas rather than successful completions.
4. People feel overwhelmed by constant change.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

Don’t let new ideas outpace execution. Turn initiatives into reality. Measure success by outcomes, not an imaginative future. 

Expert Leader

You have the deepest knowledge, technical expertise and the experience to solve difficult problems. You’re consistently right and have the best answers. You have high standards. You establish best practices, solve problems others cannot and are trusted with high risk decisions because of your informed judgment. You raise the quality of thinking by asking tough questions that most people avoid. 

People listen when you speak because you have built competence over many years and are now highly respected. Your expertise is invaluable when an organization needs someone with deep knowledge and a reputation for excellence. 

However, continuing as an “Expert leader” limits others’ growth. You correct instead of coach. You give answers instead of asking questions. You review every important decision. You’re involved in every technical detail. Always having the best answers makes it difficult to step away because everything starts depending on your perspective. Team members struggle to make confident decisions without you because they believe they can’t succeed without your knowledge and expertise.  

Instead of being the person with all the answers, you need to develop independent thinking, build the confidence and judgment others need to succeed. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as an expert leader:

1. Discussions often end with your opinion carrying the most weight.
2. You feel indispensable because of your knowledge.
3. People constantly come to you for answers instead of making their own decisions.
4. Success depends heavily on your expertise. 

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
― Jack Welch, Winning

Stop measuring your success by being the smartest person in the room. Measure it by how capable your team becomes without your involvement. Delegate judgment, not just tasks. 

Protector Leader

You protect your people from brutal work environments where others lack respect for their time and productivity. You constantly filter information before it reaches the team. You shield them from executive pressure. You protect them from organizational politics. You act as a buffer for everything. 

Protecting your team from getting overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them and keeping them away from anything that might distract them gives them an opportunity to  focus for long durations without interruptions, which leads to increased productivity and high quality work. 

However, good intent and healthy protection can turn into toxic behavior when you don’t draw the line and go overboard with it. You block people from getting the necessary exposure. Your team acquires technical excellence, but fails to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution or delegation. You create strict team boundaries with a “my team” vs “your team” attitude by treating your own team’s goals as primary and everything else secondary. This breaks down collaboration necessary to achieve common goals. Instead of creating a resilient team, you build a dependent one. 

Instead of trying to over-protect your team from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, coach them to manage their own time well. Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like. Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.  Encourage them to go beyond team boundaries to acquire knowledge about other teams and functions. Tell them to make decisions aligned with the larger interest of the organization and not just their teams.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a protector leader:

1. You absorb pressure instead of letting your team learn from it.
2. You negotiate deadlines and expectations without involving them.
3. You worry that exposing people to failure, criticism or conflict will damage morale.
4. Team members approach you whenever they face resistance instead of resolving it themselves.  

Employees don’t benefit from leaders who take away the suffering. They need leaders who come alongside them to understand the struggle and support dignity, capability, and purpose.
― Nate Regier, Compassionate Accountability

Your good intentions to act as a gatekeeper only hurts your team. Stop shielding and start empowering to help them move forward. 

Summary

1. You solve problems faster than anyone. But when firefighting becomes your default, root causes never get addressed. Problems keep repeating. Stop rewarding speed. Reward prevention.
2. You bring order to chaos. But when stability becomes the goal, change becomes the enemy. Bold ideas get buried in approvals. Stop protecting the status quo. Start protecting the future.
3. You see what’s next before anyone else. But when new ideas keep arriving before old ones finish, execution suffers and people burn out chasing your next pivot. Stop measuring success by ideas. Measure it by outcomes.
4. You have the answers. But when you’re always the answer, no one else learns to think. Your team depends on you instead of growing past you. Stop being indispensable. Start making yourself unnecessary.
5. You shield your team from noise and politics. But over-protection breeds dependence, not resilience. Your people get good at the work and bad at everything around it. Stop shielding. Start empowering.

Recommended Reading

Leadership and Self-Deception By The Arbinger Institute

The Leadership Challenge By James M. Kouzes

The post When Leadership Strengths Become Leadership Blind Spots appeared first on TechTello.

Your leadership style may no longer fit the organization and the hardest part is seeing it. The startup you built with your hands-on, move-fast style may start to suffocate as it grows—it needs structure and delegation, but you refuse to give up control. Your ability to solve crises and bring order to chaos can become a bottleneck once stability returns and the organization is ready to take risks. Your exceptional thinking skills that inspired and launched many new initiatives may fail as you love kicking-off projects, but lose interest during the execution stage. Your strength to build strong relationships can come at the cost of avoiding difficult conversations—when preserving harmony takes priority over speaking the truth.

You can be highly effective in one stage of the organization and become a liability at a different stage. What made you excellent and effective once can now become the very thing that limits you. 

You have not become incompetent. You simply refuse to adapt to the changing context. You fail to see that your strengths and assets have now turned into a weakness. You ignore the possibility that what you bring to the role may need a fundamental shift. 

Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.
― Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale

Leadership isn’t about finding the perfect style. It’s about recognizing the strengths that once made you successful are no longer the strengths your organization needs now. It’s about constantly adapting and evolving instead of being fixated on a certain style. 

Here are the leadership styles that stop fitting different stages of organizational growth:

Hero Leader

In a startup mode, build fast, break fast mentality prevails. Speed and agility matters more than process and perfection. After working in this mode for many years, you may learn to thrive in uncertainty—solving problems personally, making quick decisions and carrying the team through difficult times. You were always available, dependable, resourceful and someone who worked the longest hours and carried the biggest load. 

In the early stages of the organization, these qualities were invaluable. They inspired confidence, created momentum and helped the team navigate ambiguity. 

However as the organization grows, instead of establishing processes, building systems and developing people, you may continue to operate in the “Hero mode.”

Believing that you’re the only person capable of helping or that everything depends on you makes you a rescuer of problems rather than a builder of capability. This slows down growth as it becomes limited by one person’s capacity. Your willingness to do everything prevents others from stepping up and taking ownership. It holds them back. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a hero:

1. You’re copied on every email.
2. Team members wait for your review and approval on everything.
3. You frequently step in to solve problems.
4. You prefer doing things yourself than delegating them.
5. You feel guilty taking time off with the worry that things may fall apart.

Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to ‘give control, create leaders.’ I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.
— L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

As the organization grows, evolve your leadership style from a hero to an enabler. Instead of trying to save the day, build a team that no longer needs saving.

Commander Leader

When working with new or inexperienced teams, high risk projects or during times of uncertainty and emergencies, providing clear instructions, telling people exactly what to do, reviewing every detail, checking every deliverable and monitoring the progress closely may get things moving and solve problems within the specific time constraints. 

It provides clarity, direction and quick decision-making. It prevents problems from turning worse due to lack of guidance and support. 

However, continuing in the “Commander mode” as teams mature or when there’s no rush, kills ownership and initiative. What once created alignment starts limiting creativity and independent thinking. Once team members become experienced, they don’t need hand-holding, continuous monitoring or constant direction. They need autonomy, trust and support. They need someone who can inspire confidence and believe in their ability to figure things out on their own. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a commander:

1. You micromanage every small detail.
2. You dictate how things must be done. 
3. You’re overly cautious and hyper vigilant.
4. You don’t give space to your team to think and learn. 

Micromanagement fails because no one person can control multiple people executing a vast number of actions in a dynamic environment, where changes in the situation occur rapidly and with unpredictability. It also inhibits the growth of subordinates: when people become accustomed to being told what to do, they begin to await direction. Initiative fades and eventually dies. Creativity and bold thought and action soon die as well. The team becomes a bunch of simple and thoughtless automatons, following orders without understanding, moving forward only when told to do so. A team like that will never achieve greatness.
― Jocko Willink, The Dichotomy of Leadership

As your team matures, shift in your leadership style from exerting control to providing context. Promote ownership and empowerment, not dependency. 

Builder Leader

Building products and systems from scratch, spotting opportunities, leading complex decisions and establishing a strong culture and a sense of purpose can make you highly valued and respected as a leader. You understand the products, people and customers better than anyone else. You’re deeply connected to the organizational challenges and its realities. 

Your energy, enthusiasm, a strong sense of conviction and willingness to do whatever the situation demands enabled you to build the organization from the ground up and that’s no small feat. 

As the organization grows, complexity increases as more teams, more products and more customers now need your attention. However, continuing to work in the “Builder mode” and operate as if the organization is still in its early days prevents you from realizing that you can’t scale without process and structure. You can no longer rely only on your instinct, decisions will now need data. Knowledge can no longer stay inside people’s heads, it needs to be documented and made available to everyone. You can’t be the one with all the information who builds everything personally, you now need to delegate responsibilities, decision-making and execution.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a builder:

1. You’re involved in operational details rather than strategic priorities.
2. You try to establish a deep understanding of the systems instead of operating with a 10,000 feet view.
3. You don’t invest in establishing processes, documenting knowledge or creating structure so others can operate without your presence. 
4. You believe that no one understands the organization as well as you do.

Letting go and trusting others to do things well is one of the more challenging aspects of being a leader of a growing organization.
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up

As the organization expands, shift your leadership style from intuition to processes and systems. Continue to build momentum and strong culture without personal involvement.  

Consensus seeker Leader

Collaborating with people from different teams and functions is one of the hardest jobs and you may be really good at it. You invite different perspectives, encourage others to speak up and create a safe environment to ensure everyone feels heard before any major decisions are made. Your ability to bring people together, have them resolve differences of opinion and agree on a common approach builds trust and alignment. It creates a buy-in which is otherwise hard to get. 

Your leadership style prevents siloed execution, reduces unnecessary conflict and makes people feel valued and respected.  

But, getting everyone to agree before moving forward isn’t always practical and desirable. Too much collaboration can slow down execution and create decision paralysis. When every decision requires universal agreement, speed, accountability and execution suffer. Too many meetings are conducted before important decisions are made which causes meeting fatigue. Plans are discussed, but never put into action because someone or the other is dissatisfied. Revisiting decisions that were already made becomes a norm leading to loss of opportunities and momentum. 

Instead of always seeking consensus, shorten decision cycles for lower risk issues. Seek inputs, but make the final call and have others disagree and commit—stop waiting for everyone’s approval. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a consensus seeker:

1. You postpone decisions because not everyone agrees.
2. You’re reluctant to make unpopular decisions.
3. More time is spent in meetings and less in execution.
4. Opportunities are missed because you refuse to take the final call. 
5. You feel increased emotional burden and decision fatigue from prolonged discussions. 

Use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this, but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander

When working for a growing organization, seek input, not permission. Stop prioritizing harmony when the organization needs speed. 

Coach Leader

When your leadership style involves growing people by asking questions, encouraging learning, developing skills, creating opportunities and building confidence, you invest in building strong relationships, creating engaged teams and a culture where people feel valued. Your goal is to develop future leaders by building long-term capability. Your coaching and support matters a lot when people face obstacles and challenges. 

People perform best when they’re supported, developed and encouraged. Protecting your team’s confidence and maintaining good relationships is a smart strategy to build a strong organization that can scale with the future demands. 

However, when developing people begin to overshadow delivering results, continuing in the “Coach mode” may unintentionally create a culture where accountability feels optional. You avoid difficult conversations with the worry it might discourage them. You don’t give direct feedback because it feels uncomfortable. You let high performers pick up slack as underperformance goes unaddressed. When accountability or decisive action is needed, endless coaching can delay progress. It can set up wrong expectations with the people that they’ll always be supported regardless of their performance.  

This doesn’t mean you should stop developing people. Growth requires balancing support with accountability. It requires providing encouragement with clear expectations, giving feedback early and holding people accountable instead of letting poor performance slip.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a coach leader: 

1. You’re known for being highly approachable and supportive.
2. You celebrate effort more than results.
3. You explain away poor performance instead of confronting it.
4. You give repeated chances to underformers without meaningful improvement.
5. You try to address missed targets with additional coaching. 

Leaders must…become better communicators and enforcers of what they want done. If you are more interested in being liked and popular than holding people accountable for results, you have a serious leadership weakness. Your job is to get them better. Holding people accountable to high standards and results is nothing to apologize for. Failing to stretch them to their potential is. 
— Dave Anderson, No-Nonsense Leadership

Accountability is not the opposite of support. Lasting growth depends on both. Don’t leave expectations unclear and standards inconsistent. Recognize when coaching has reached its limits and decisive action is needed.

My next article will cover 5 more leadership styles that can turn your strengths into leadership blind spots.

Summary

1. As the hero leader, you were the one everyone counted on. That dependability built the organization. But your team now waits for you instead of figuring things out. You didn’t build a team, you built a dependency.
2. As the commander leader, you brought order when there was none. But your team has grown since then. They know what they’re doing. What once created clarity is now creating frustration and slowly turning capable people into ones who wait to be told.
3. As the builder leader, you built something from nothing and understood it better than anyone. But the organization has outgrown what one person can hold in their head. You’re still operating like it’s day one and that’s exactly what’s slowing everyone else down.
4. As the consensus seeker, you made people feel heard and built real alignment. But somewhere consensus became a requirement rather than a goal. You’ve confused harmony with progress and the organization is paying for it.
5. As the coach leader, you believed in your people before they believed in themselves. But support without accountability isn’t kindness, it’s avoidance.

Recommended Reading

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There By Marshall Goldsmith

Scaling Leadership By Robert J. Anderson

The post When Your Leadership Style No Longer Fits the Organization appeared first on TechTello.

Are you making too many decisions in a day? Are you the escalation point for everything? Do you constantly firefight, struggle to think strategically and instead of being influential and impactful, becoming a bottleneck in the team?

If everyday feels like a burden that keeps you stressed and awake, if it feels like you’re simply going through the motions or if you lack energy, enthusiasm or emotional connection to whatever you’re doing, you may have drifted from being challenged and stretched to becoming strained and unsustainable. 

Most leaders fail to notice this drift because it’s often subtle and invisible until you’re deep in it. You may mistake being stretched beyond what feels comfortable with dedication, resilience and commitment. You may shrug it off as a tough phase until it becomes permanent. You may keep pushing yourself thinking it will lead to growth until it starts costing you. 

Burned-out, stressed-out, and frazzled leaders foster organizations that experience high turnover, low employee engagement, steep healthcare costs, and dysfunctional teams that often work against one another. 
― Jim Dethmer, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

If you already know that something isn’t right but can’t give it a name, these signs might help you recognize when your leadership role has stopped being challenging and started becoming unsustainable:

You’re always on

There’s constant demand on your time as a leader—making decisions, shaping strategy, aligning stakeholders and ad hoc meetings that creep into an already overpacked calendar. What starts as a busy day soon turns into a busy week. No time to rest, take a break or go offline. As many things vie for your attention, working round the clock becomes a norm. 

You’re always available, always on. Downtime and rest feels like a luxury.  

If you’re finding it hard to disconnect from work, if the thought of letting go leads to stress and anxiety or if you feel like your role demands you to always be on, you have shifted from productive to an unproductive zone. You’re exhausted, unrested and there’s no time for recovery. There’s always some demand, some distraction, something that makes you anxious and prevents you from mentally disconnecting. Unstructured time creates restlessness and an impulse to check in, stay connected and keep working.

Continuing in this mode keeps you busy, overwhelmed and ineffective. You keep jumping from one thing to the next without pausing to understand how it fits into your overall goal and whether taking it on will create a meaningful outcome or impact. Always being “on” leaves no time to apply the brakes, slow down and question if you’re on the right path. 

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? 
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’re available 24/7 without any room for rest or recovery. 

Every choice feels heavy

Your role as a leader requires you to make many decisions in a day. But when every problem lands on your desk and every small decision runs through you, your mental capacity to make good decisions starts depleting. Even small decisions overwhelm and drain you under the effect of decision fatigue. You start applying shortcuts, ignore important aspects, refuse to validate assumptions and fail to see the risks in the direction you plan to take. 

Solving problems and making decisions your team should be making bottlenecks your team. They can’t move without you. They feel blocked for your consent and approval. 

If you lack trust in your team to make independent decisions, if you intervene in every small decision and if the thought of not being involved makes you restless and tense, you’ve signed up for a path that’s infeasible and unscalable. Trying to make too many decisions causes poor, erratic and delayed choices—you avoid complex decisions, default to the easiest option and say no to innovative ideas because sticking to the status quo is the path of least mental resistance.  

Building a dependency instead of building a team makes people feel suffocated, disempowered and untrusted. Always watching, always meddling and always demanding control slows down your team’s progress while hurting your own productivity. 

Cars and decision makers, both need a service break, for better performance and long life.
— Harjeet Khanduja

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’re making too many micro-decisions and refusing to delegate. 

You’ve shifted into survival mode

If you don’t consciously plan how to make the most of your time and energy as a leader, you spend your day firefighting and reacting to the things around you. There’s no time to think strategically and chart out a future growth path. There’s no time to assess risks and put measures in place to avoid problems. There’s no time to reflect on your actions and learn from your mistakes. This makes you lead from fear, not vision. You make decisions to avoid failure, rather than pursuing long-term goals. The loudest voice in the room gets your attention, while important issues get pushed aside. 

Your day ends with a feeling of relief, not accomplishment. You’ve normalized chaos as a part of your work life.

If getting through the day has become your goal, if you have lost control over your time and strategy and if you feel a sense of powerlessness, you’ve shifted from thriving at work to barely surviving. Your day gets dictated by incoming pings, urgent emails and ad hoc meetings with no dedicated blocks for quiet, focused work. You constantly cut short important conversations to catch up on a previous crisis. You’re always busy, always exhausted without any sense of what you achieved this week. 

Quick patches, short-term thinking and analysis paralysis on important decisions leads to chaotic environments, repetitive issues and strategic blindness. Constantly staying in a firefighting mode also emotionally exhausts the team. Survival mode creates a perpetual cycle of fear, distress and agony—you dread the next morning while feeling like a massive weight has been lifted off your shoulders for making it today. 

Survival mode becomes our default when we inhabit it for months or years, and it begins to exact a significant toll. Physiologically, it manifests as chronic fatigue, disrupted sleep, weakened immunity, and increased susceptibility to illness.
— Alexander Betts, Refuge

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you react to daily demands instead of proactively leading with a long-term vision. 

Obligation has replaced passion

If nothing excites you at work, if you have lost your sense of “why” and if you do the work only to fulfil your responsibilities, you fail to put your knowledge, experience and skills to use. You don’t push yourself hard. You don’t show curiosity to explore diverse perspectives. You play safe and refuse to navigate the uncharted territory. Without passion, what keeps you going is only a moral sense of duty. But work without meaning and purpose feels like a drag—transactional, boring and mundane. Routine and repetition dulls your enthusiasm and creativity.   

You feel trapped by the high expectations of your role while feeling disconnected from the vision you’re expected to lead. Cognitive dissonance makes it worse with feelings of disconnection and resentment. 

If you’ve become risk averse and stick to the playbook to manage the status quo and avoid failure, if you ignore your team’s morale and don’t feel invested in their growth and if the energy around you feels tensed and guarded, you’ve slipped into a black hole which has killed your sense of creativity, enthusiasm and drive. You avoid difficult conversations because you lack the emotional energy required to navigate them. You show up to meetings and conversations while you’re mentally checked out. You become resistant to change and new ideas because they feel like disruption, not an opportunity. 

Your contagious energy trips the team into maintenance mode—they mirror your emotional state which kills their passion. They stop learning, experimenting and stretching. Opportunities that once excited them now feels like a burden. 

Returning from work feeling inspired, safe, fulfilled and grateful is a natural human right to which we are all entitled and not a modern luxury that only a few lucky ones are able to find.
— Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’ve lost your sense of purpose and drive and challenges that once felt meaningful now feel exhausting.

You’ve normalized feeling unwell

If work takes priority above everything else, if health falls last on your list and never gets prioritized and if you ignore your own needs and well-being, you start normalizing exhaustion and stress as part of your life. You ignore your body signals that’s screaming for rest. You avoid dealing with headaches and pains that have become a constant part of your life. You start relying on caffeine or other boosters to manage your energy levels. Your sleep, health and emotional regulation breaks down because you refuse to prioritize yourself.

You can’t remember the last time you felt well. You’ve forgotten what it means to have a life.

If you treat working long hours, lack of sleep and declining health as part of your job, you may mistake toxic coping mechanisms with being tough. Treating personal life and family time as distractions makes you consider 80-hour work weeks, late night emails and no time for vacation as a mark of dedication and commitment. You talk about them as a badge of honour. 

This behavior sets a wrong expectation with the team—they think they’re required to sacrifice their own health and match your unsustainable hours. Taking a break, leaving on time or disconnecting during vacation triggers performance anxiety. Collaboration breaks down as team members turn on each other due to exhaustion and lack of empathy. 

Your body always speaks — not in words, but in signals. Tiredness, cravings, tension — it’s not weakness. It’s wisdom. Listen before it starts to scream.
— Barbara O’Neill

Your leadership has become unsustainable if work has more importance than your own health, personal goals and family life. 

You’ve forgotten who you’re without the title

If your identity is tied to your role, if it consumes your narrative of the self and if you’re uncertain of who you’re without it, then any threat to the role feels existential. You make decisions based on what protects your role instead of what helps the organization—resisting change, avoiding delegation and controlling work in a way that no one gets an opportunity to shine and diminish your presence. You spend more time people-pleasing and maintaining perception. You show up everywhere and speak often to remain visible and build credibility. You reframe reality by hiding bad news and surfacing only the information that makes you look good.  

Your job defines you and losing it feels like losing yourself. You protect your position, not the purpose—spending energy on optics and position than doing actual leadership work. 

If you’re always insecure of your position, if you feel a sense of fragility and if you experience an identity crisis in the form of restlessness and irritability, you start acting out of fear, not conviction. You try hard to stay close to others in a position of power and secure their loyalty—even if it means staying silent when you disagree. You double down on control to establish a sense of authority. You push back on changes that involve scope of your work because any reduction to it feels like a challenge to your status and worth.  

Tying self-worth to your position and title makes you dictate minor details to establish your sense of importance. People start to notice that you value a sense of authority and control which makes them absorb the message that a direct challenge is unsafe and quiet non-compliance is the only way to survive. 

Our jobs were never meant to become the center of us. They were never meant to be the source of our worthiness. They were never meant to become the start and end of our identity.
― Robin Kirby, The Sparkle

Your leadership has become unsustainable if striving to protect your identity is your main focus than doing your actual job. 

Summary

1. If you can’t disconnect, if rest feels like a luxury and unstructured time creates restlessness, you shift from productive to an unproductive zone with no room for recovery.
2. If every problem lands on your desk and every small decision runs through you, you’re building a dependency instead of building a team—bottlenecking progress while depleting your own capacity to make good decisions.
3. If getting through the day has become your goal, you’ve stopped leading with vision and started reacting to daily demands—firefighting instead of thinking strategically.
4. If you’ve lost your sense of why and show up only to fulfil your responsibilities, you don’t just lose your own drive, your contagious energy trips the team into maintenance mode too.
5. If you treat long hours, lack of sleep and declining health as a mark of dedication, you’ve mistaken toxic coping mechanisms for being tough and set the same unsustainable expectation for your team.
6. If your identity is tied to your role and any threat to it feels existential, you stop protecting the purpose and start protecting your position—spending energy on optics instead of doing actual leadership work.

Recommended Reading

Burnt Out to Lit Up By Daisy Auger-Dominguez

Nine Secrets of Resilient Leaders for Coaching Teams By Dr. Sandra L. Abbey

The post Signs Your Leadership Role Has Become Unsustainable appeared first on TechTello.

Employees who are highly motivated, energized and most likely to produce high quality work with minimal support or intervention are also most likely to be overburdened with ad hoc tasks and requests that keep showing up every now and then. They’re almost always the first one to get called when there’s a crisis. They get pulled into unplanned meetings and discussions because they’re the default fallback to lean on in case something urgent comes up. 

Having a few of these people in your team makes your life easy as a manager because you can always count on them to step up and get things done. But over relying on your best people is your worst mistake—by expecting them to do too much you push them away. 

All the extra work they’re expected to do takes their focus away from their main priorities—when unannounced tasks keep showing up, there’s less time left to do work that inspires and motivates them. They have to put in more hours to meet their original goals as unplanned work takes away a lot of their time and energy. The high expectations along with the exhaustion from addressing last minute requests, urgent problems and other work priorities takes a toll on their well-being and may even lead to burnout.

Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
― Jim Collins, Good to Great

Motivated employees may be your first choice when unexpected and unintentional work shows up, but the question you need to ask yourself before you act on your impulse is this: “At what cost are you willing to assign them this work?”

Overreliance on your high performers can lead to overwhelm making them quit, become frustrated or resent you for not managing the workload evenly. Instead of placing excessive demands on your most engaged employees, follow these practices to utilize their potential without weighing them down with too many responsibilities.

Consider existing workload

Whether it’s a small task or a large unit of work, every new task assigned to your most engaged employees must take their current workload into account. 

What if you assign them something new today and it makes them fall behind on the deliverable that’s due tomorrow?

What if they end up spending more time on the ad hoc request than what was originally anticipated?

What if they don’t like this work which makes them unhappy, discouraged and annoyed?

Instead of the default tendency to lean on them for everything new that shows up, evaluate the cost of involving them vs the benefit of leaving them out. Think about:

1. What will get impacted if you assign them this work? Is it acceptable?
2. What makes them your only choice to get this done? 
3. Who else in the team might be able to take this on or share their workload so that one person isn’t expected to pull the weight?
4. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t involve them? 
5. Who else might feel thankful to be given this opportunity?

Burnout happens when there’s an ongoing mismatch between the conditions an employee needs to support their well-being and their best work, and what their organization actually provides. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers.
― Kandi Wiens

Stop taking your high performers time and energy for granted. Consider their workload to be more fair and unbiased. 

Align opportunities with interests 

Engaged employees don’t mind the extra work when it’s an opportunity that aligns with their interest. What keeps them inspired is to solve tough problems, identify unique solutions and do the work that helps them expand their knowledge and build new skills. 

However, when you assign them every ad hoc unit of work assuming they will be the most efficient in getting things done, you ignore what keeps them inspired and motivated. You don’t take into account what matters to them. You ignore what kind of work will help them improve and what will simply keep them busy without improving their skills.  

Aligning opportunities with interests may not be possible all the time, but consciously trying to do this can help you achieve a much better allocation of work—you can avoid giving them work they’ve mastered and done multiple times before. You can consider their aspirations and the gap in their skills to keep the work growth-oriented. You can even frame it that way to keep the conversation productive. 

To avoid overburdening your most engaged employees, ask this:

1. What will this task/project help them improve? 
2. Does this work align with their goals, aspirations and interests?
3. If it’s something only they can do, how can you frame it in a manner that establishes the importance of the task while clarifying why you’ve chosen them to take it on?
4. Have you connected with them to know how they actually feel about the work and whether they find it interesting or mundane?

Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you. Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50 percent more than your average people or fifty times more, but they are absolutely worth more. Make sure they feel it. Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something.
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules

Stop ignoring your high performers goals and aspirations. Taking it into account can keep them energized and inspired. 

Plan and reprioritize 

Engaged employees are most likely to have more things on their plate than they can handle. Being good at what they do does not automatically make them good at planning and prioritization. They may underestimate the time it will take to solve a problem. They may commit to doing more work than they can handle. 

Without planning and prioritizing their work well, they may feel overloaded, overworked and overwhelmed. But instead of relooking at their priorities, they may try to meet their commitments by working extra hours. More work only adds to their burden, leaving them exhausted and burnt out. 

To help your most engaged employees achieve more without feeling overloaded, do this:

1. Schedule planning meetings with the goal to identify what deserves their attention and what must be reorganized, replanned or decluttered. 
2. Identify tasks which must be reallocated—someone else can do the work to help them focus on their most important goals.
3. Add in buffers to account for unknowns to keep commitments real and productive.
4. Eliminate tasks that are no longer useful or can be postponed to a later date. 

We’re lousy at figuring out how much time something will take us to complete. It’s a combination of overestimating our abilities and, to add insult to injury, underestimating the degree to which we are overestimating. We think we can do more than we can. 
— Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit

Stop assuming that your high performers can manage their own priorities well. Help them stay realistic by planning and reprioritizing their work. 

Provide active support 

Just because your engaged employees are self-motivated does not mean that you can assign them responsibility and leave them to figure everything out on their own. They may be dedicated and committed and may even navigate challenges on their own, but knowing that you’re around and will support them when they need help is crucial to act independently. 

Your presence matters. Your time and attention boosts their confidence in their decisions, enables them to take risks and makes them feel valued and trusted. Your advice during difficult moments helps them consider different possibilities. Your ability to ask questions without providing solutions expands their thinking skills. Knowing that you won’t abdicate them when they need you the most empowers them to push boundaries and reach for their potential. 

Your support is required at every step—connecting with them on a regular basis to understand how they’re doing and what they need to do better. Without actively engaging, you may not notice signs of overwork and exhaustion. You may miss the opportunity to keep their workload sane. 

Provide support without micromanaging their work:

1. What challenges are they facing and how do they plan to solve them?
2. What prevents them from making progress?
3. What’s creating unnecessary friction, making it difficult to achieve goals?
4. What kind of help do they need?

Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.
― Marcus Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules

Stop ignoring your most engaged employees. Just because they’re doing well does not mean they don’t need your support. 

Take their feedback

Your most engaged employees may be the most dissatisfied even though it may not be visible to you. Their ability to produce good work may overshadow the deep frustration they feel from being taken for granted. But, sooner or later, these feelings of discontentment will start impacting their work—they may not show the same enthusiasm or drive they brought to work. They may become reluctant to take on additional responsibilities. They may stop putting in the effort which made them shine and succeed. 

The change may be minor and hard to notice at first, which can leave their feelings unaddressed and unacknowledged. The only way to know how they’re actually feeling and what’s bothering them the most is to engage in a candid feedback discussion. By showing that you’re genuinely interested in their feedback, you can encourage them to open up and share their true feelings. By asking questions, you can dig deeper and try to understand their real concerns. 

Getting this feedback is not always easy though. You need to approach the discussion with curiosity without defensiveness or justification. You need to make them feel comfortable without fear of reprisal. You need to show an intent to actually fix things. All talk and no action will eventually make them shut down. 

To get honest feedback that’s actionable:

1. Make them feel safe by listening to their concerns without justifying or turning defensive.
2. Help them understand why their feedback matters and how you plan to act on it.
3. Make it a habit to have such conversations regularly so that you can fix things before it’s too late.  

The essence of good listening is empathy, which can be achieved only by suspending our preoccupation with ourselves and entering into the experience of the other person.
― Michael P. Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening

Stop assuming that your high performers don’t have concerns. Listen to them before the workload becomes unsustainable. 

Summary

1. Over-relying on your best people is your worst mistake. High performers are the first to get called in a crisis, pulled into unplanned work and expected to always deliver, but this pattern leads to burnout, frustration and eventual departure.
2. Every new task must account for what the person is already carrying. Before assigning work, ask: what gets impacted, who else could do this and what’s the real cost of involving them vs leaving them out?
3. Engaged employees stay motivated when work helps them grow. Avoid assigning tasks they’ve already mastered. Consider their aspirations, skill gaps, goals and frame assignments in a way that makes the purpose and the choice of them clear.
4. High performers often over-commit and underestimate time. Hold regular planning sessions to declutter priorities, reallocate tasks, build in buffers and eliminate work that’s no longer useful. Act before the pile becomes unsustainable.
5. Self-motivation doesn’t mean people don’t need you. Regular check-ins asking about challenges, blockers and friction signal that you won’t abandon them. Your presence builds confidence and enables bigger risks.
6. Your best performers may be quietly the most frustrated. Declining enthusiasm and effort are early warning signs. Create space for candid feedback with curiosity, no defensiveness and a genuine intent to act on what you hear.

Recommended Reading

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work By Jason Fried

Slack By Tom DeMarco

The post Are You Overburdening Your Most Engaged Employees? appeared first on TechTello.

Leadership is an act of courage. It requires making tough decisions, choosing unconventional paths, and staying resilient when faced with challenges and setbacks. It requires killing projects with sunk costs and investing that time and energy into potential prospects. It requires standing apart and pushing through for the right cause even when everyone around is choosing a safe path. 

Leaders make hundreds of decisions throughout the day and every small decision they make and every action they take has a substantial impact on the growth of the organization and its people. Their underlying feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness, hidden motives to be liked and respected and unfounded concerns around appearing vulnerable can sometimes manifest as fear—fear of not being liked, fear of failure, fear of not knowing, fear of being judged, fear of being found out or fear of losing their position. 

This can make them play safe by sticking with the status quo, avoid decisions with unknowns and uncertainty to limit mistakes, people please to avoid being disliked or pretend to know things when they don’t have a clue.  

Fear that starts from the top seeps into organization culture—people learn to say things that will earn them a nod even when it does not lead to growth. They stop raising concerns, stop taking risks and stop trying to excel because mediocrity is not only accepted, but expected from them.  

Fear is a natural thing though and leaders are humans too who are not devoid of this feeling. The high stakes of their role can make fear even more prominent and real. 

But there’s a difference between productive and unproductive fear—productive fear can make you challenge your assumptions, ask better questions, listen to others and be better prepared while unproductive fear can make you lean towards popular opinions, shut down differences of opinion and care more about protecting your image than solving problems.  

We often think of courage as an inherent trait, however, it is less about who people are, and more about how they behave, and show up in difficult situations. So feeling fear is not a barrier. The true underlying obstacle to brave leadership is how we respond to our fear. The real barrier to daring leadership is our armor, the thoughts, emotions and behaviors that we use to protect ourselves when we aren’t willing and able to rumble with vulnerability.
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

Instead of thinking of fear as a thing to avoid, you need to accept it while not letting it get in the way of how you act or make decisions. To do this, you need to watch out for signs of fear that can make people feel unsafe, unheard and unseen.

Fear of losing control

Do you lack trust in your team to make independent decisions? Do you worry about things going wrong if you’re not involved? Do you jump in at the first chance of trouble and try to fix things without letting your team take control?

If you feel the need to be part of every meeting, every decision and every small discussion, you have a fear of losing control. You can’t let go, can’t delegate, can’t rest without overseeing everything that happens in your team. 

Your desire to stay in control impacts your team’s performance—seeking your approval every step of the way prevents your team from thinking independently, making mistakes and learning from them. They become too dependent on you for every small decision. They don’t get the opportunity to step up and take charge. They don’t develop the confidence to solve problems without hand-holding. 

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
― Julie Zhuo, The Making of a Manager

Instead of seeking control, share context. Empower your team to think and act on their own. 

Fear of failure

Do you refuse to take on new challenges with the worry you might fail? Do you stick to easy choices and safe bets? Do you choose a path of certainty because it’s less risky even though the path with ambiguity looks more promising?

If you’re risk-averse, focussed on avoiding mistakes and succeeding at all costs, you have a fear of failure. You don’t invest in experimentation, don’t create space for exploration and don’t encourage risk-taking. You stick to tried-and-tested approaches because you don’t like dealing with unknowns and uncertainty. 

Playing safe may get the job done, but it does not lead to growth. Not having the opportunity to face obstacles, handle conflicting situations or navigate the uncharted territory prevents your team from building the skills required to learn and grow, which leads to unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the long-run.

The fear of failure kills creativity and intelligence. The only thing it produces is conformity.
― Anup Kochhar, The Failure Project

Instead of avoiding failure, embrace risks. Choose the hard path because it’s more rewarding in the end. 

Fear of criticism 

Do you consider disagreement as an attack on your intelligence? Do you consider differences of opinion as a challenge to your status and authority? Do you encourage opinions that match your viewpoint and reject ideas that are not inline with your assumptions and beliefs?

If you engage with others to prove your smartness, raise your self-esteem and consider any opposition or pushback as an attack to your status, you have a fear of criticism. You worry that others will not find you credible or your reputation will be damaged if you let them see your flaws and imperfections. This makes you abuse your power and position to silence your team and make them adopt faulty logic, outdated beliefs and less optimal solutions. You push for what you believe is right instead of showing curiosity to find the right solutions. 

When dissent is discouraged, people in the team stop sharing their thoughts because they don’t see the value in voicing their concerns. Issues that could have been avoided are not discussed. Better ideas never surface. People in the team feel unheard, dismissed and overlooked. Lack of safety to express openly creates an environment where people feel uninspired to excel. 

Psychological safety is the key to creating a workplace where people can be confident enough to act without undue fear of being ridiculed, punished, or fired – and be humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done. As Amy Edmondson’s research shows, psychological safety emerges when those in power persistently praise, reward, and promote people who have the courage to act, talk about their doubts, successes, and failures, and work doggedly to do things better the next time.
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss

Instead of looking down upon criticism, reward healthy disagreements. Value finding the right solution over being right.  

Fear of conflict 

Do you put off difficult conversations because they make you uncomfortable? Do you procrastinate and ignore the conflict instead of trying to face it head-on? Do you hope that the issue will resolve itself instead of actively trying to seek alignment and reduce misunderstandings?

If you keep avoiding difficult conversations because you don’t think you can handle them well, you have a fear of conflict. You worry about what to say, what to avoid and how to say it in a manner that does not hurt the other person or damage the relationship. You keep postponing the conversation with useless reasons and excuses because you fear saying the wrong thing or making things worse.

But putting off conflict can actually make things worse. Issues left unaddressed escalate over time. What was once a manageable problem can grow into a much larger issue if not addressed on time. Constant worry about unresolved issues can also take a toll on your mental health and lead to increased stress, anxiety and even feelings of helplessness. When important issues are being ignored or swept under the rug, it can erode trust, build resentment and damage relationships with your team. 

Beginning a conversation is an act of bravery. When you initiate a conversation, you fearlessly step into the unknown. Will the other person respond to favorably or unfavorably? Will it be a friendly or hostile exchange? There is a feeling of being on the edge. That nanosecond of space and unknowing can be intimidating. It shows your vulnerability. 
— Sakyong Mipham, The Lost Art of Good Conversation

Instead of putting off a hard conversation or delaying it forever, address issues directly. Providing clarity and closure will help you gain trust, respect and also alleviate stress. 

Fear of being disliked

Is likability important to you? Do you seek approval to please others? Do you go with the popular opinion as opposed to a more promising unpopular choice because you worry that not going with the majority will make them dislike you? Do you keep saying yes to requests even when they do not align with your goals because saying no can make others unhappy?

If being liked is at the core of how you behave, make decisions or how you act, you have a fear of being disliked. You try to people please your way through tough situations, challenges and setbacks instead of showing the courage to make the hard choices and stand apart. You try to play nice and refuse to give critical feedback because it creates a risk of becoming unpopular and unadmired. 

Likability and popularity leads to bad choices and poor decisions. It makes you unsee problematic behavior, ignore real problems and play favorites to those who charm you with their sweet talk and flattery. Seeking consensus and approval does not make others like you. It does not earn you trust and respect. Rather, it prevents you from emerging as a strong leader that others want to emulate. 

Being nice does not come out of goodness or high morals. It comes out of a fear of displeasing others and receiving their disapproval. It’s driven by fear, not virtue.
― Aziz Gazipura, Not Nice

Instead of being liked, focus on building trust. Stand up. Speak up. Say no. Don’t be afraid of upsetting a few people in the short-term. 

Fear of appearing weak

Do you refuse to take responsibility for your decisions? Do you blame others for not getting the desired outcomes? Do you try to cover up your mistakes as accepting them makes you look incompetent? Do you project an image of strength because you consider vulnerability as a weakness?

If you don’t take responsibility and blame others or external circumstances for your situation, you have a fear of appearing weak. Instead of accepting when your decisions lead to bad outcomes, you look for justifications and excuses. Instead of trying to understand what went wrong when things don’t work out the way you anticipated, you look for a target to blame. Instead of owning up your mistakes, you try to hide them and pretend they don’t exist. 

Never showing vulnerability makes it hard for you to connect with people—putting on a facade of strength and imperfection makes you come across as fake and unreal. You also fail to hold people accountable in the team because you yourself don’t set a good example. 

Humility is a reflection of vulnerability; it is the self giving itself permission to say, “I don’t know everything.
― John Baldoni, Grace Under Pressure

Instead of pretending to be strong, take responsibility for your actions. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s a strength. 

Fear of losing credibility

Do you worry that if a project fails, it will reflect badly on you as a leader? Do you constantly look out for mistakes and try to correct them even before they’ve occurred? Do you point out flaws and shortcomings with the concern that if you miss catching them, others may question your expertise?

If you watch your team like a hawk and try to ensure nothing ever goes wrong, you have a fear of losing credibility. You closely monitor tasks, keep reminding your team not to miss anything and create a lot of fuss when there’s even a minor slip or small deviation from the expectations. 

When the team feels constantly judged and monitored, it lowers their morale. Always reminding them of the gaps without appreciating them for things they did well also makes them feel disregarded, undervalued and unappreciated. Your tendency to avoid mistakes at all costs creates a sense of fear and resentment in the team. 

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

Instead of hunting for mistakes, build a resilient team that can face challenges and solve problems on their own. You’ll be more trusted and respected. 

Fear of change 

Do you delay decisions that require stepping out of your comfort zone? Are you reluctant to make changes to keep up with the future demands? Do you continue with old ways of doing things because the idea to change and adapt leads to stress and anxiety?

If you consider “change” as a thing to avoid instead of as a means to build a future-ready organization, you have a fear of change. You continue with projects that are no longer serving you well instead of investing in new opportunities. You don’t spin off new initiatives and restructure your organization to align with them. You keep doing the work that seems safe, familiar and easy. 

Continuing with old methods, practices and systems with the worry that any change might break what’s already working well leaves you behind—you fail to build an organization that can scale to future needs. Top performers in the team eventually leave as they get frustrated without learning and growth.  

Executives are often reluctant to accept the need for change; they may have a vested interest in the status quo, or they may feel that time will eventually vindicate their previous choices. Indeed, when we ask executives what prompts them to seek out blue oceans and introduce change, they usually say that it takes a highly determined leader or a serious crisis.
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy

Instead of resisting change, embrace discomfort. Change may be challenging, but it’s an opportunity to grow and evolve.  

Summary

1. Fear of control can prevent you from empowering your team and become a bottleneck for everything that happens in the team. Build a team that can function independently.
2. Fear of failure can make you give up on opportunities that appear risky and stick to a safe path, impacting your team’s learning and growth. Make conscious bets, invest in taking risks. 
3. Fear of criticism can make you shut down differences of opinion and push others to accept your thinking, even when it’s suboptimal and biased. Make better choices by encouraging dissent.   
4. Fear of conflict can make you put off or avoid difficult conversations thereby turning a small problem into a major issue. Handle challenging conversations at the right time even if they’re uncomfortable at first.
5. Fear of being disliked can make you lean towards consensus instead of pushing for what’s right. Instead of seeking approval, learn to say no.
6. Fear of appearing weak can make you use blames and excuses to justify your outcomes instead of identifying what went wrong and taking steps to fix it. Take responsibility, own your mistakes.
7. Fear of losing credibility can make you constantly point out your team’s flaws and shortcomings making them feel judged and turn resentful. Stop pointing out mistakes and share your support. 
8. Fear of change can make you continue with the status quo instead of investing in opportunities that are necessary for future growth. Embrace change to grow and evolve.

Recommended Reading

The Anxious Achiever By Morra Aarons-Mele

Leading Beyond Fear By Neil Pretty

The post What Fear Costs Your Team Over Time appeared first on TechTello.

When I was a manager, automation meant looking for routine tasks that prevent people from doing their best work. We were limited to automating data pipelines, deployments, reporting, alerting and other tasks that can leverage tech.  

We never imagined a world where machines can make decisions on our behalf and act autonomously. We never considered the possibility of an agent who can scan inboxes, schedule meetings, respond to emails, connect to internal task management systems or slack messages to separate signal from noise. 

Whether it’s summarizing information, writing code, fixing bugs, interacting with external APIs and data sources, retaining information over long multi-step workflows, evaluating outcomes and adjusting strategies dynamically in response to new information or achieving complex multi step goals without human intervention, autonomous systems that use AI agents can do this round the clock without complaining or ever getting exhausted. What you can achieve with Agentic AI is only limited by your own imagination.  

For a manager, leveraging Agentic AI is no longer optional, it’s a necessity. Continuing to operate without it means choosing a less efficient, more time consuming, resource intensive and error prone path. Teams that leverage AI to their advantage can achieve their goals in less time—they’re more performant, productive and more present to tackle everyday challenges at work. 

Over the next decade, AI won’t replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
― Harvard Business Review, Artificial Intelligence

Here are a few use cases in which managers can leverage AI to run their teams more effectively:

Executive assistant  

Every day managers waste a tremendous amount of time in managing inbox, calendars and stakeholders. They still miss important emails, struggle to prevent their calendars from overflowing and disappoint stakeholders for not sending out critical updates on time. 

Even after spending so much time trying to be organized, they don’t have a simple way to separate signal from noise. 

They have to keep checking emails every few minutes because what if something shows up that deserves their immediate attention—system alerts, emails from leaders, stakeholders or others who are a critical part of their day-to-day work. They have to manually schedule and reschedule meetings to handle conflicts, plan and prioritize time for critical work and decline meetings that are not worth their time and attention. They have to follow-up on each deadline manually, create a summary (highlighting risks, achievements and plan ahead) and send that update to their stakeholders.    

All this consumes their focus and energy, which ideally should be spent in building better products, solving complex problems, designing efficient processes and growing their teams. 

Instead of having to do this manually, wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal assistant who would do all this and much more for you?

An intelligent PA can:

1. Scan your inbox and summarize urgent items, approval delays, follow-ups, categorize emails and suggest actions and can notify you instantly (on your WhatsApp, slack) of an email from a certain group or set of people so that you don’t have to constantly check your email.
2. Highlight your most important meetings in the day, remind you of important deadlines, upcoming travel plans and flight status. 
3. Send out an automatic status update message to your team every day at a certain time asking for progress, blockers, plan for the next 24 hrs, dependencies and any other callout. It can then summarize it for you and flag risks or anything that needs your attention. 
4. Convert a meeting transcript into key decisions, action items, owners, deadlines and follow-ups and send them to the entire team. It can also automatically follow-up on the actions items and keep track of progress. 
5. Gather information from meetings, documents, emails, notes, slack and other channels to create a status update summary for stakeholders highlighting progress, blockers, risks and other important information. 
6. List the most important decisions you need to make today with contexts, risks and even recommended action.
7. Put a meeting on your calendar from simple call outs like: “Schedule a recurring meeting every Friday from 3-4pm with my team.” or “Schedule a bi-weekly 1-1 meeting with every member of my team for 30 mins. Keep it in the second half of the day.”  or “Block this Tuesday afternoon from 12-3pm for my daughter’s PTM.” or “Mark a dentist’s appointment next Thursday at 6pm.”
8. Work with you on meeting conflicts, advise you on available slots and do the actual work of scheduling the meeting without you having to open your calendar. 

A PA built using Agentic AI has the capacity to plan, reason and act autonomously. It can do all this and much more without your intervention. 

To build your own PA, think about the questions you need answered:

Any critical meetings today? Do you need to prep for it?

What are the emails that need an urgent response?

What deadlines do you have this week?

What are the top 2 focus areas for today?

What risks do you need to mitigate?

AI Automation doesn’t replace human judgment—it spotlights where it’s needed most.
― Ian Michiels, The Validation Economy

You can start building simple use cases and then add more complex use cases depending on the amount of control you want to give to your assistant. I built my own PA within 8 hours which sends me a daily brief on WhatsApp using Twilio. It wasn’t the most sophisticated version, but with all the systems connected and basic intelligence already plugged in, it will only take me a few more days to automate it for all my use cases. 

Here’s a simple prompt I used:

You are a high-quality executive assistant.

Emails:
{emails}

Events:
{events}

Generate a WhatsApp-style daily brief.

Format:

Daily Brief

Priorities:
...

Inbox:
...

Meetings:
...

Risks:
...

Focus:
...

Onboarding copilot

When new members join your team, getting them up to speed is a time consuming process. How well they understand the existing systems and processes also gets limited by their mentor—a dedicated and focused mentor can quickly ramp them up and make them productive from day 1 while a mentor who doesn’t take this responsibility seriously can leave the new joinee confused and demotivated. 

Onboarding shouldn’t be taken lightly because it shapes the early experience and determines whether the new joinee excels or struggles at work. 

What if this entire process is automated and handled by an agent who’s intelligent enough to curate a custom experience based on each individual’s role, expectations and gaps? This agent can provide a mentorship experience without being biased or busy.

An intelligent onboarding agent can:

1. Create an email id for the new employee and send a welcome mail to them.
2. Add them to all relevant tools, groups and corresponding message channels with proper access and usage readiness. 
3. Create a procurement request to get them assigned a laptop, badge, desk, food coupons and other necessary resources. 
4. Send them content to understand org hierarchy and get themselves acquainted with leaders, managers and stakeholders.
5. Identify key people to meet (team members, stakeholders, cross-functional partners) and help them build the right relationships early by scheduling meeting invites. 
6. Create a tailored onboarding plan based on role, level and location. 
7. Curate role specific learning (docs, videos, other material) that adapts based on progress and gaps.
8. Allow them to ask questions to understand past decisions, project context and why certain things are done the way they are. This reduces dependency on people to answer basic questions. 
9. Break down goals into daily/weekly actions. Keep track of their progress and nudge them to complete their assigned tasks. Adapt in real-time based on whether they’re ahead or behind. 
10. Take their inputs and notify you of their concerns or challenges faced. Also, detect signs of disengagement based on missed tasks, low interaction or delayed responses to catch early onboarding failure. 
11. Track onboarding milestones and flag any delays or lack of engagement. Nudge you on when to check in, what to communicate and what to clarify.  

An onboarding agent built using Agentic AI can be your partner to provide a seamless experience to new employees which keeps them focused, engaged and learning. 

The best way to think about what to build in an onboarding agent is to think about the questions that need to be answered:  

Who should they reach out to if they get stuck?

What are the best practices and processes for communication, collaboration, meetings, deployment and debugging?

Who are the key stakeholders?

Who are the different leaders, managers and architects in the org and what areas do they own?

What are the expectations at their level based on their role and competencies?

What are their goals for the first 30-60-90 days?

How can they get the feedback?

Who can answer their queries?

How can you know their progress and what kind of help can you provide?

You must design a system for training and onboarding that gives people a real, fighting chance at success.
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

Here’s a sample prompt to start:

ROLE:
You are an AI Onboarding Agent designed to help new employees become productive quickly and confidently.

OBJECTIVES:
- Accelerate time-to-productivity
- Provide clear, actionable guidance (not generic advice)
- Personalize onboarding based on role, goals and progress
- Drive accountability through commitments and follow-ups
- Reduce confusion by explaining context and priorities

INPUTS AVAILABLE:
- user_profile: {role, team, level, start_date}
- onboarding_plan: {30_60_90_goals, tasks, milestones}
- progress_data: {completed_tasks, pending_tasks, delays}
- knowledge_base: {company_docs, processes, FAQs}
- interaction_history: {past questions, responses, issues}

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Identify the user’s current onboarding stage and immediate priorities
2. Provide a concise “Focus for Now” (top 1-3 priorities)
3. Break work into specific, time-bound next steps
4. Highlight blockers, risks or dependencies (if any)
5. Ask 1-2 focused questions to drive clarity or ownership
6. Adapt responses based on progress and past interactions
7. If delays or confusion are detected:
   - simplify tasks
   - reduce scope
   - re-prioritize essentials

OUTPUT FORMAT:
- Focus for Now:
- Next Steps (numbered, specific, time-bound):
- Risks/Watch-outs (if any):
- Question(s):

CONSTRAINTS:
- Be concise, practical and specific
- Avoid generic advice or long explanations
- Do not overload with information
- Prefer action over explanation
- Prefer clarity over completeness

SUCCESS CRITERIA:
- The user knows exactly what to do next
- The user can act immediately without further clarification
- Progress is measurable by next interaction

Performance tracking and signal detection agent

Giving constructive feedback to your team on a regular basis is not an easy process. Most managers suck at it because it requires continuous effort to gather, organize and summarize feedback in a way that motivates them to do better at their job instead of damaging their confidence. Your cognitive biases like confirmation, recency, fundamental attribution error and several others also prevent you from being impartial and neutral when delivering this feedback. 

The biggest challenge is having all your observations in one place—capturing those impromptu feedback moments or conversations, logging when they did well and where they lagged, documenting appreciation or complaints from other teams/functions, their behaviors/attitudes towards other team members and in general how communicative, collaborative and attentive are they. 

Before AI, I used to maintain feedback of each of my team members in an excel file. But it was a painful process to sift through all the notes and try to make sense out of them. Lack of time and my own biases would often make me miss critical inputs that could have been tremendously beneficial to my team. Not having a structured process also made me miss entering details into the excel—there was no system to remind me or nudge me to stay consistent.  

What if you could use AI to manage your team’s performance without relying on your memory or rough feedback notes? 

An intelligent performance system can:

1. Convert your inputs into more concrete feedback points based on each member’s role, goals and competencies.
2. Point out when your feedback seems biased and challenge you to rethink. 
3. Call out incomplete or opinionated feedback and ask you to provide examples to keep it real.
4. Identify if a certain feedback is a one-off event or a behavior pattern based on their past performance and history. 
5. Nudge you to enter feedback when it detects you haven’t been consistent or focusing on only a few team members while ignoring others.
6. Pull each team member’s achievements and misses from the task management system to identify how they’re progressing on their goals—missed deadlines, low output or inconsistent performance. 
7. Cover the gap between someone not performing and why they’re not performing by spotting patterns like “struggles with prioritization” or “poor stakeholder management.”
8. Read messages from emails, slacks and other channels to gather their contributions or concerns raised by others. 
9. Help you frame feedback clearly by avoiding emotional or vague language and connecting behavior to impact.
10. Convert data into performance summaries, promotion cases and review notes. 
11. Create a single snapshot of each team member with clear direction for you on the next steps to take.

A performance management system built using agentic AI can make giving and receiving feedback less intimidating, more structured and highly valuable.

To think about what to include in your performance management system, think about your pain points:

How do you keep feedback organized and easy to summarize?

How do you separate patterns of behavior from one-off events?

How do you ensure you’re not being unfair or biased?

What challenges do you face when trying to compare performance to their goals and expectations?

How do you know how others feel about working with them? 

Corporate performance management systems and processes are gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state.
― Pearl Zhu

Here’s a sample prompt to start:

ROLE:
You are a performance management assistant helping managers give clear, fair and actionable feedback.

INPUTS:
- user_profile
- goals
- task_data (achievements, misses, deadlines)
- communication_data (messages, feedback, concerns)
- past_feedback

YOUR JOB:
1. Identify key signals (progress, gaps, patterns)
2. Distinguish one-off issues vs repeated behavior
3. Suggest likely root causes (e.g. prioritization, ownership, communication)
4. Convert insights into clear, specific feedback
5. Challenge vague or biased feedback and ask for examples
6. Suggest next actions for the manager

OUTPUT FORMAT:

Performance Snapshot

Key Signals:
...

Patterns:
...

Possible Causes:
...

Feedback Suggestion:
...

Gaps in Feedback:
...

Next Actions:
...

RULES:
- Focus on facts and observable behavior
- Avoid vague or emotional language
- Highlight bias or missing evidence
- Keep output concise and actionable

These are just a few examples. Managers can build so many other systems using agentic AI like goal tracking and completion, an agent that manages collaboration initiatives or a system that minimizes downtime by proactively monitoring, raising alerts and maybe even applying a patch before it becomes an issue. 

Summary

1. Managers who adopt Agentic AI to delegate and manage their workload can run their teams more efficiently. By having agents summarize, plan and take automatic actions, managers can focus on work only they can do. 
2. Building a personal assistant is critical. Without it, you have to manually manage your emails, calendar, messages and other information that’s scattered across different sources and channels. PA built using agentic AI can collect information from different sources, summarize it for you and help you act on it in just a few minutes without spending hours trying to make sense.
3. Onboarding is a time consuming and an error prone process. Employees feel lost and demotivated when it’s not done well. Building a personalized onboarding agent using Agentic AI can ramp up new joinees with a structured, customized and engaging process that works for their role, goals and expectations. It can notify you and help you address their concerns proactively without waiting for them to become disengaged. 
4. Managers who take the feedback process seriously build high performance teams. But giving the right feedback is still a challenge most managers face. This can be solved by automating the process using agentic AI, which can manage the entire performance history of each of your team members and help you keep feedback clear, constructive, fair and unbiased.

Recommended Reading

Agentic Artificial Intelligence By Pascal Bornet, Jochen Wirtz

AI Engineering By Chip Huyen

The post Essential AI Automations to Run Your Team Smarter appeared first on TechTello.

Most people face friction at work, not once, but multiple times during the day which not only makes it hard for them to get their job done, but is also a constant source of frustration, resentment and disappointment. 

Your team would have faced friction whenever they collaborate with people from different teams and functions where misaligned priorities, gaps in expectations, unclear roles and unspoken assumptions lead to blame games, heated debates and meetings with no conclusion—converations linger on, projects get delayed and more time is wasted in protecting ego than solving problems.

Friction also shows up when some people who consider themselves superior to others refuse to co-operate. They dictate how things must be done. They try to control every aspect of the project. They may also become aggressive or demean others by attacking their intelligence when they disagree with them or challenge their point of view. 

Whether its personal clash, cultural discord or resistance towards certain processes and practices, friction makes even simple things hard to achieve. It impacts your team’s morale, productivity and performance by wasting their time and energy in trying to convince others to see things their way—while not realizing that others are thinking the same thing too. 

When tasks take longer to complete, deadlines are missed and a team fails to meet expectations, as a manager you may attribute it to lack of effort, capability or performance issues, without considering the friction that contributed to it. You may push your team harder and ask them to put more effort, but simply spending more hours in the day won’t reduce the resistance they face at work. Rather, subjecting them to high expectations without making their job easier will only put them through unnecessary pressure, stress and anxiety. 

While constructive friction can give people an opportunity to be better, destructive friction can demotivate them and make them avoid collaborative work. It can also make them become uncooperative, difficult to work with and inflexible—the same qualities they found resentful in others at first. Work environments where people constantly waste time in navigating broken processes, unclear systems, interpersonal conflict or dealing with frustrating tasks like waiting for approvals, doing redundant work or not having the right tools at their disposal can lead to faster burnout, increased fatigue and high emotional tax.     

The challenge is not to eliminate conflict but to transform it. It is to change the way we deal with our differences.
― Roger Fisher, Getting to Yes

To make the work environment healthy, productive and conducive to growth, you’ve to actively take measures and reduce workplace friction by following these practices:

Turn assumptions into agreements

Every project, decision or a task has multiple assumptions baked in. Illusion of transparency cognitive bias can make people believe that these assumptions are as evident to others as they are to them. But others can’t read their minds. They can’t possibly guess what they are thinking. 

These assumptions if not stated explicitly and validated can lead to a huge misalignment of expectations. Team members may end up spending a lot of time on something only to be rejected or disapproved later. Clarifying assumptions and seeking early agreement can reduce this gap by aligning on expectations and reaching a common consensus. 

To avoid rework and frustration that comes from not seeking alignment upfront, do this:

1. Document key assumptions and observations and get a sign-off from the stakeholders before starting development to reduce gaps in understanding thereby making less avoidable errors. 
2. Ask others to do the same. 
3. Review all the assumptions together and ensure everyone is operating from the same set of presumptions.

Whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

To reduce workplace friction, ask your team to seek clarification on their assumptions and not work with a false notion of certainty. 

Clarify behaviors that won’t be tolerated

Healthy boundaries are essential for the mental and personal well-being of all employees at work. When these boundaries are exploited—either because expectations aren’t being set on what constitutes toxic behavior or because some people have a general attitude problem and simply do not care—the more time someone spends around them, the more damage they suffer. 

Letting people who create unnecessary friction stay in the system for too long undermines the effort of many others. Emotional depletion from being around them impacts how they work, what they do and finally what they collectively achieve together.

Letting bad behavior go by gives permission to such people to make other’s life more difficult by exploiting boundaries, disregarding commitments and using manipulative techniques to exploit others into doing things that serve their interest, without regard for the overall goal. 

To be upfront about what behaviors are acceptable and what behaviors won’t be tolerated, do this:

1. Work with the leadership team to define behavior that is looked down upon and the behavior that’s rewarded.
2. Have managers and leaders hold group discussions on the topic. Cite examples, encourage people to share their stories on friction they’ve faced at work (without naming and shaming others) and ensure everyone understands how not to behave going forward.
3. Provide a forum for employees to report cases of bad behavior and ensure to get to the bottom of each case.

Some teams burn up work time discussing the uncivil behaviors. Others spend work time strategizing about how to help the target or protect themselves should further incidents occur. These efforts sap time, energy, and creative zest from the team.
― Christine Pearson, The Cost of Bad Behavior

To reduce workplace friction, stop tolerating behaviors that normalize resistance and start encouraging behaviors where openness, support and curiosity is rewarded. 

Hold people accountable

People clash when ownership is unclear or authority is assumed—who needs to make a decision, who needs to approve, who owns the outcome or who’ll be responsible for making the final call. When boundaries of responsibility aren’t clearly defined or roles aren’t explicitly made clear, it’s easy to interpret friction as attitude and behavioral problems, while the issue is actually structural. 

When people don’t understand the scope of their role, they’re bound to misinterpret it. When someone seems to delay a decision, challenge a direction or demand that their input be considered, it may not be because they like to create trouble—it’s quite likely they have a wrong understanding of their role. 

To shift people from defending territory to collaborating towards outcomes, do this:

1. Remove the ambiguity around their roles. Clearly define the scope of their role and work.
2. Establish clear boundaries around who owns the decision, who provides input and who executes.
3. Make it clear who is accountable for results. This clarity reduces confusion and prevents finger-pointing when challenges arise. 

Successful organizations front-load accountability into their strategy. When front-loaded, accountability breeds better relationships, eliminates surprises, and vastly improves job satisfaction and performance.
― Henry J. Evans, Winning With Accountability

To reduce workplace friction, establish “who does what” upfront by ensuring roles are well defined and accountability is clear. 

Reduce communication gaps

Communication in an organization breaks down when its importance isn’t taken seriously—vague discussions, indirect feedback and unclear instructions makes it hard to separate the signal from the noise. Confusion, misunderstandings, expectation mismatch and faulty assumptions have one thing in common—communication gap. It’s this gap that adds to friction as people are forced to decode messages or fill in missing details.

When communication is unclear, incomplete or scattered, ambiguity increases which makes multiple interpretations possible—everyone assumes what seems right to them while disregarding what may actually be true. This leads to more time spent in clarifying, correcting and reworking on tasks than making progress and achieving goals. What starts as a gap in understanding can soon spiral into frustration, anger and resentment. 

Leave little room for interpretation by making communication more clearer and structured. Do this:

1. State expectations directly, explain the context behind decisions and be explicit about what action is needed. 
2. Document key decisions and keep important information organized and accessible.
3. Ensure meeting notes are circulated at the end of each meeting with clear action items and next steps.
4. Establish communication guidelines—what needs to be communicated, by when and which channels are suitable for what type of information. 
5. Encourage everyone to communicate more, not less.

Without effective communication, organizations shut down. You know that effective communication is missing when the environment is highly political, people talk about one another instead of to one another, and work just isn’t fun. Unhealthy communication environments can only attract top talent with money; employees aren’t engaged, and you risk the future success of the organization. 
― Ethan F. Becker, Mastering Communication at Work 

To reduce workplace friction, pay attention to how information is exchanged, decisions are communicated and whether the right channels are used to ensure everyone is in sync. 

Normalize disagreements

Challenging ideas directly, questioning an approach or sharing alternative opinions is not friction. When people mistake healthy disagreements to be friction, they turn argumentative and defensive. Instead of leaning into the disagreement, they try to run away from it. This prevents them from examining ideas, exploring a better path and collaborating on opportunities.

Treating disagreements as friction makes it personal–egos get involved, discussion feels unsafe and the conversation shifts from solving problems to proving who is right. People are either forced to push their ideas aggressively or those who can’t do it choose to keep quiet. Friction isn’t caused by disagreement, but by suppressed opinions or competing egos. 

Make conversations more open and productive by normalizing disagreements. Do this:

1. Talk about disagreements as a necessary part of decision-making and seeking alignment.
2. Encourage team members to challenge ideas without questioning intent and remaining respectful.
3. Teach the importance of “disagree and commit” once a decision has been made—supporting others even when they do not agree with their point of view and working with them instead of working against them.
4. Establish regular checkpoints, cross functional meetings and decision reviews to allow everyone to raise concerns early without letting minor issues turn into major conflicts.

In organizational settings, we tend to live on one of two ends of a continuum. We either have mismanaged agreement (conflict avoidance), or we tear the relational fabric between people to shreds. Conflict is the door to creativity, consensus, and commitment. If the team doesn’t learn how to talk straight and be tough on issues without blowing one another out of the water, they will probably never experience the creative synergy needed to achieve exceptional results.
― Pat MacMillan, The Performance Factor

To reduce workplace friction, make disagreements as a necessary and temporary discomfort in pursuit of truth. Normalize conflicts to find the best possible answer.

Summary

1. Friction between team members makes it hard to achieve goals and get work done. 
2. Assumptions, when not explicitly clarified, leads to misalignment of expectations, misunderstandings and conflict. Turning them into an agreement upfront can prevent friction from popping up later.
3. Some disruptive people have the tendency to create unnecessary friction. Setting ground rules around behaviors that won’t be tolerated can prevent such people from being unnecessarily difficult.
4. When the line around roles and responsibilities is blurred, people assume conflicting roles and misinterpret the scope of their work. This leads to friction as it’s easy to point fingers when challenges arise as there’s no clear accountability for work.  
5. When clear, explicit and structured communication is an afterthought and not part of strategy, friction ensues as people are forced to decode messages or fill in missing details.
6. Not normalizing disagreements can make conversations feel unsafe as differences of opinion can feel personal, leading to friction from suppressed opinions or competing egos. 

Recommended Reading

The Friction Project by Robert Sutton

Managing With Power By Jeffrey Pfeffer

The post Want to Eliminate Workplace Friction? appeared first on TechTello.

When you work as an individual contributor, all your achievements and accomplishments are easy to talk about—products you built, bugs you solved, designs you developed or the ideas that created a huge impact. You can showcase your value by highlighting the goals and outcomes you achieved independently or how your collaboration enabled a smooth cross-team rollout.      

However, this gets tricky as you rise up the ladder and become a leader. You’re no longer writing code, debugging issues or working on architecture design. You are not directly involved in day-to-day execution of tasks or solving problems on the ground. You set the direction, guide your team and enable them to achieve goals while operating from a 10,000 feet view of your organization. 

You set the targets, while others achieve them.

You define the strategy, while others execute on it. 

You lay out the expectations, while others work hard to exceed them.

Your contributions flow through your team, which makes it harder to articulate them. Visibility is important at every level, but it’s even more crucial for a senior leader—your position comes with high expectations and a huge pay-check. Without a solid account of the impact of your leadership, you won’t be able to justify your role or why you deserve to be in that position. 

You need to demonstrate your value without taking credit for others’ work. You need to talk about results without hogging the spotlight. You need to own success without sounding boastful or arrogant.  

Remember, self-promotion isn’t a sin. Sometimes it’s even necessary to get an idea accepted by a fearful or incredulous public. Great leaders don’t hesitate to call attention to their creations.
― Will Peters, Leadership Lessons

When communicating your impact as a senior leader, use these practices to showcase your value, build credibility and earn appreciation for your efforts without being seen as manipulative or insincere:

Stop inflating or diluting your impact

How you frame your contributions makes a huge difference. Do you lean towards calling everything out as a team effort or do you boast about your achievements even though it was your team who did all the work? 

Using “We” to talk about all your accomplishments minimizes your contributions as a senior leader. While it promotes the idea of teamwork, it casts a shadow on your leadership—without stating the unique value you add to the team, you prevent others from acknowledging your leadership skills. Passing all the credit to the team may seem like a humble approach, but it harms your credibility and reputation.

On the other hand, using “me” to describe all your accomplishments makes you come across as manipulative, insincere and untrustworthy. It puts a spotlight on your contributions while minimizing your team’s effort and hard work. Morale and motivation in the team dips down as people feel cheated, invisible and undervalued. Bringing yourself at the forefront of all the discussions while pushing your team to the background does not boost your image or reputation, it makes you come across as narcissist and insecure.   

Instead of leaning on either side of “We” or “Me,” seek a balance. Highlight your team’s achievements, but don’t forget to throw in a mix of your problem solving skills that helped your team implement an efficient solution. Appreciate the quality of the project that made clients happy, but also mention how you handled the relationship when the team faced many challenges and setbacks. Give credit to your team for managing a critical last minute request, but don’t forget to bring up your quick decision-making skills that unblocked the team. 

Combine “We” with “Me” to articulate your contributions in a way that does not minimize you or your team’s efforts. Use words like guided, coached, oversaw, empowered, steered, navigated, advised and influenced to describe your value creation. 

For example:

Instead of: “We were able to successfully meet Q1 goals.” or “I was able to successfully meet Q1 goals.”

Say: I am very proud of the team for achieving Q1 goals successfully. Everyone did a tremendous job of staying on top of their goals and taking responsibility to meet the desired objectives. One thing that enabled this was a clear goal-setting exercise. Before we started execution, I ensured that all teams had a good clarity on their goals. I also often reminded them of the big picture to enable all decisions done independently were still aligned with our long-term goals. Empowering teams enabled them to move at a faster pace without being blocked on every small decision.  

Instead of: “The clients were very happy. My team did an excellent job in handling the projects.” or “The clients were very happy. I ensured all projects met their expectations.“

Say: The teams did an excellent job in delivering projects on time and with high quality. We had a few issues raised by our clients during the development phase, but I managed by providing them with key updates on a regular basis and assuring them that their concerns will be addressed. I also guided the team on how to incorporate client’s requests without impacting the overall deliverable. In the end, the clients were very happy with the team’s work.  

Don’t inflate with “I.” Don’t dilute with “We.” Own your contribution without erasing the team. 

Show strategic thinking

As a senior leader, you aren’t expected to know all the execution details, but you’re required to own strategy—proactively identifying problem areas, thinking about the future and its needs and detailing out the changes that are required to build a resilient organization.

Strategic thinking involves challenging assumptions, questioning conventional methods, identifying areas that are no longer serving the org well, staying attentive to the shift in market trends and formulating a plan that’s aligned with the future growth and expectations. It requires challenging the status quo, taking bold risks and incorporating a feedback loop into the process to audit outcomes and adapt to the changes around you. 

Strategic thinking isn’t just about creating big plans and expecting others to execute on it. It shows up in small and big decisions, the guidance you provide to your team and the initiatives you take to build a high performance team—coaching people to make decisions, creating opportunities to build new skills, building a solid hiring pipeline and coming up with creative ways to keep employees happy with a sense of progress, purpose and belonging.   

When articulating your value as a senior leader, focus on strategic contributions—killing a project that was no longer valuable and instead assigning the resources to new opportunities. Org restructuring that’s better aligned with future expectations. Bridging talent gap through internal coaching and external hiring. Automating work to reduce manpower. Solving communication problems through better processes to reduce wasted time and increase productivity. All these and many other strategic initiatives stay invisible unless you explicitly bring them up.

For example, you can say:

Here’s an update for everyone. I have decided that we’re no longer going to be investing in [xyz] because [state the reason]. Instead, by having these people work on [abc], we can [state what you wish to achieve].

To start some of the new projects next quarter, we needed to close a few critical hiring positions. By doing [state your plan], I was able to meet our hiring targets. 

I re-examined the current org structure and made some changes for efficient collaboration and execution. Here’s the new structure that will enable us to meet our goals… 

Strategic thinking is the set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities to focus attention, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward.
― Michael D. Watkins, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking 

Don’t just focus on the outcomes. Own your contribution by highlighting the strategic initiatives that made success possible. 

Use metrics and data

As a senior leader, the impact of your work can’t be described using guesswork or hunches. You can’t rely on your intuition and call it facts. Your claims about adding value to the organization has to be backed up by data—better retention, revenue growth, higher engagement, improved customer satisfaction, faster deployment cycles. Using vague language to describe your contributions or not sharing the numbers to substantiate your claims can prevent you from being taken seriously. It can also harm your credibility as others see you as someone who does the talking without showing results.

To get others’ attention and ensure they take you seriously, use data and numbers to add weight to your words—share metrics, explain why they’re relevant and then describe how you’ve improved these metrics to bring value to the organization. Providing context and supporting your arguments with visible improvements can instantly get others to appreciate your efforts. 

For example, you can say:

Our systems can now handle 100 million QPS. Earlier, we were limited to only 20 million, which prevented us from catering to peak volume during the holiday season.

We closed hiring 2 senior leads and 1 architect this month. It will enable us to ramp up our efforts on the system rearchitecture and finish it within 6 months instead of 1 year.

Our attrition dropped from 13% to 9% this quarter through a new employee engagement program that enabled us to retain more employees. 

We have created a data automation pipeline which allows us to view business metrics in real time. Using the dashboards, business users can make better real time decisions. Earlier, they had to wait 24 hours before getting any insights.   

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning. 
— Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Numbers add weight to your contribution. Shift from sounding conceptual to showing concrete results. 

Share learning lessons 

As a senior leader, you make hundreds of decisions throughout the day—some big, others small; some urgent, others important; some with a huge impact, others with a small pay-off; some that solve long-term problems and others that address the immediate need. Each of these decisions have learning lessons that you’re uniquely positioned to tell. 

Analyzing your decisions and drawing useful insights from both your successes as well as your failures not only improves your decision-making skills, sharing them with others prevents them from making the same mistakes or leveraging your successful strategy to their own line of work. Your value is seen not only through the outcomes you deliver, but also the process used to get there.  

Here are some of the ways to articulate your contributions:

My decision to build our own CRM solution in-house to reduce dependency on a third party vendor has resulted in tremendous cost savings for the company. While the team did an excellent job in rolling out the product on time, one big mistake we made was not aligning the rest of the organization with it. This resulted in last minute collaboration efforts across different functions which impacted our other planned deliverables. Going forward, I recommend we include cross-team collaboration efforts as part of our planning. 

My team has created a single dashboard that collects data from the various sources and displays all important tech and business metrics in one place. This has significantly reduced the time it takes to resolve issues. While building the product, we made many mistakes. Some critical ones are: [share your lessons]. I suggest we leverage it and implement it for all tech systems. 

I recently resolved a common concern that was impacting team productivity—missing product requirements or last minute changes was causing a lot of confusion and rework. I sat down with the product teams and identified what was resulting in those gaps and how we can minimize changes after the requirements have been locked down. I learnt that [share your learnings]. I think we should make this a mandate across all teams before starting implementation. 

All leaders find it easy to take responsibility for success. Few have the courage to take responsibility for setbacks.
― Jo Owen, Leadership Rules

Your failures and mistakes are as important as your successes. Don’t hide them. Turn them into valuable learning lessons.  

Summary

1. It’s hard to articulate your contributions as a senior leader because most of the work you do is either invisible or does not lead to an immediate impact. 
2. Instead of highlighting every contribution as a team effort with “we” or making every success about you with “me,” combine the two. Appreciate and acknowledge your team’s work while also sharing how your leadership enabled the team to be successful. Don’t inflate or dilute your impact. Seek a balance. 
3. While execution is what gives life to a strategy, the effort that goes into building a good strategy and refining it to keep up with the future cannot be overlooked. This is where you must shine as a senior leader. By talking about your strategic contributions, big or small, you can make your thinking, decision-making and planning skills visible. 
4. Your impact as a senior leader is difficult to measure without data and metrics to back it up. By sharing actual numbers, you can make your contribution indisputable. 
5. Sharing your success as well as your failures helps the organization in improving processes, implementing better practices and reducing costly mistakes. It creates tremendous value by leveraging lessons learned. Don’t limit your contributions by highlighting only success stories, show real leadership by talking about your mistakes as well as failures. 

Recommended Reading

Executive Presence By Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Leadership Is Language By David Marquet

The post How to Articulate Your Contributions as a Senior Leader appeared first on TechTello.

When I first took up the management job, nobody told me that I need to watch out for my habits that can have a serious impact on my team’s productivity and performance. My intent was right—I wanted to do well in my role while also helping my team grow. However, without paying attention to how I came across to others or how I communicated, I did not always act in ways that were best for me and my team. 

Instead of pushing my team towards excellence, I subjected them to unattainable high standards. In trying to achieve harmony, I unconsciously promoted seeking consensus over healthy disagreements. To protect my team’s feelings, I softened the feedback instead of giving tough love. By keeping the team busy with urgent asks, I prevented them from working on long-term requests. I also refused to trust my team with complex tasks and preferred to do them myself because I was too afraid of failing or them not meeting my expectations. 

I thought I was doing everything right because no one told me otherwise. I made many mistakes before I realized how my habits were negatively impacting my team. 

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. 
― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership

Here are the habits every manager must actively avoid to build a strong team:

Tolerating bad behavior

How do you handle bad behavior in the team? Do you actively work to eliminate such behavior or turn a blind eye, especially if these people are high performers who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work?

Tolerating their toxic behavior—getting agitated when others make mistakes, expect them to work at their pace, pass sarcastic remarks, challenge their intelligence, belittle their skills or demean them when things don’t work out the way they expected—conveys the message that such behavior is acceptable and anybody can get away with it.

This can happen in two ways: 

• Passive enabler: Passively enabling these behaviors by failing to notice them and staying ignorant of the effect they have on your team.  
• Active enabler: Actively contributing to it by delaying action—waiting for more proof, ignoring the conflict, worrying about losing them. You may also try to rationalize the situation by convincing yourself that things aren’t that bad after all or they are too minor to be noticed. 

Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted than they are. In other words, these people are jerks. Many may think, “This guy is so brilliant, we can’t afford to lose him.” But it doesn’t matter how brilliant your jerk is. The cost of jerkiness to effective teamwork is too high. Jerks are likely to rip your organization apart from the inside.
— Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules  

To avoid this habit:

1. Don’t put off or delay difficult conversations—especially when it involves toxic behavior. It will only get worse and won’t disappear on its own. 
2. Be careful about the words you choose. Emotionally charged words can trigger negative emotions and put them on the defensive.
3. Share your observations, talk about the impact and invite them to come up with a solution. 
4. Leave the feedback with clear expectations on the desired changes, timeline and repercussions of not taking the feedback seriously.

Stop tolerating bad behavior for too long before addressing it. The overall damage done to the team is highly expensive. Create a healthy work environment where your team can flourish and thrive. 

Refusing to delegate hard problems 

Do you assign work based on your team’s current knowledge and experience? Do you give them tasks they already know how to do? Do you only delegate responsibilities that match their current skill set?

Delegation not only enables you as a manager to get more done, it’s also an excellent opportunity to expand your team’s skill set. However, if you limit their scope to work they already know how to do well, they’ll never build the skills required to excel at the next level. Without the opportunity to navigate challenges, they’ll never develop creative thinking skills. Without facing obstacles, they’ll not build the resilience to continue and not give up. Without dealing with the expectations to perform at the next level, they’ll not learn how to handle stress and pressure. 

Failing to delegate not only keeps you super busy with work that could have been handled by your team, it also conveys a message that you don’t trust them enough. Lack of trust, lack of opportunities and lack of support turns into frustration and resentment within team members—they start doing the bare minimum just to get by or those who can’t take it quit. Team performance takes a dip when you prefer doing things yourself instead of giving a chance to your team to learn and stretch. 

Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
― Julie Zhuo, The Making of a Manager

To avoid this habit:

1. Identify work that people in your team might be well suited to perform based on their potential, not current skill set. 
2. When delegating, provide complete clarity on the expectations, requirements and a measurable success criteria.
3. Be around to support and guide. Delegation does not imply abdication, you’re still responsible for the outcomes your team achieves.
4. Whenever you decide to do something yourself, ensure it’s actually meant for you. Don’t let fear of not meeting expectations or a sense of perfectionism get in the way of effective delegation. 

Make delegation as your primary strategy. Build a team that trusts you with their growth—give them challenging work that will require them to stretch, build new skills and develop courage and conviction. Delegate and empower. Don’t limit their potential.

Engaging in finger pointing and blame games

When things go wrong at work or don’t work out as expected, what’s your first reaction? Do you blame others? Do you complain and jump to fault-finding? Do you use sarcasm, belittling or other deprecating behaviors to express your dissatisfaction and disappointment? 

Blaming and complaining makes you spend time and energy justifying the result, criticizing people or repeating concerns while not paying attention to the problem or working out a solution that will move your team forward. Your negativity and the attitude to target others and disparage them for failures doesn’t stop with you, your team learns to use it as an excuse too—problems linger on, long debates ensue and delivery deadlines are missed as finger-pointing and blame shifting becomes the norm of the day. Team productivity and performance takes a hit as more time is spent in escalating problems than resolving them. 

Refusal to accept blame, pointing fingers at others, and wimpy language can help bosses keep their jobs for a while, but it usually backfires in the long run. No matter what is said, bosses are seen as responsible for what their people do.
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss

To avoid this habit, shift to solutioning mode:

1. What problem exists?
2. What did you do or not do that caused this to occur?
3. What solutions have you tried?
4. What worked, what didn’t work?
5. Do you need a new strategy?
6. Can you experiment?
7. What other alternatives you haven’t considered yet?

Stop acting as a victim. Stop promoting a defeatist mindset. Channel your team’s energy into problem-solving instead. 

Giving vague and indirect feedback

When giving feedback, do you clearly state the behavior or action that needs to be repeated or must be stopped? Do you highlight what’s valued at work and what’s not tolerated? Do you give a clear direction on the changes people must make to be more effective at work?

Vague feedback or a fleeting comment is easy to overlook or misunderstand and it leaves people feeling confused, upset and frustrated. Feedback like “That was great.” “Nice work.” “You need to communicate better.” or “Your presentation sucked.” doesn’t require much thinking or effort. You give it, you forget about it and so does the other person. Without detailing out what you liked or disliked about your team’s work, you cannot expect them to take any action. Such feedback makes you feel good—you think you did your part of the job—but it does nothing to advance your team in the direction of their goals.   

Radical Candor is what happens when managers show that they care personally for employees while also challenging them directly with clear, kind feedback that is not aggressive or insincere.
— Kim Scott, Radical Candor

To avoid this habit:

1. Give specific feedback by crafting a thoughtful message that’s easy to understand and apply. It shouldn’t be ambiguous or leave the other person guessing. 
2. State what they did, what worked or did not work and the corresponding impact so that they’re encouraged to repeat good behaviors and give up on the ones that push them back. 
3. If team members don’t improve despite giving feedback, don’t blame them or label them ineffective. Focus on delivering feedback that’s actionable, not vague. 

When you give feedback, be as specific as possible. Ambiguity leaves team members guessing and blocks real improvement. 

Promoting groupthink mentality

Do you steer conversations away from conflict, prioritize harmony over debate and intervene to smooth things over when team members disagree, voice differences of opinion or challenge assumptions? Do you send the message that raising uncomfortable truths may lead to friction rather than progress? Do you promote groupthink mentality—seeking consensus and suppressing your team’s energy to lean into discomfort and rise above the challenge?

When groupthink mentality prevails, people stop voicing concerns. They nod along in meetings, but privately disengage. Diplomacy takes priority over honesty, consensus over clarity and safety over bold decisions. When managers avoid tension, teams learn to avoid it too. They make decisions that are comfortable in the short-term, even though it leads to long-term stagnation. High performers disengage, sensing that challenge and complexity are unwelcome.

Consensus is horrible. I mean, if everyone really agrees on something and consensus comes about quickly and naturally, well that’s terrific. But that isn’t how it usually works, and so consensus becomes an attempt to please everyone.
― Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

To avoid this habit:

1. Encourage teams to stay curious rather than reactive when opinions clash.
2. Set ground rules for constructive disagreements and allow them to sit with tension instead of rushing to resolve it.
3. Teach people that discomfort is not a signal to retreat, but an invitation to listen more openly, engage more thoughtfully, deepen understanding and arrive at breakthrough solutions that wouldn’t emerge in the absence of constructive tension. 

Constructive tension is not something to be feared—it’s a catalyst for clarity, creativity and progress. Create space for deeper dialogue and better decisions by inviting discomfort and resisting the urge to smooth things over quickly.

Playing it safe

How do you make decisions when there’s ambiguity or uncertainty involved or when the path ahead has many unknowns and challenges? Do you reject risky opportunities and stick to the familiar? Do you ignore creative ideas and lean towards solutions that have worked before? Do you choose safety over growth? 

You can minimize chances of failure by sticking to the known, but letting fear of failure or making mistakes prevent you from investing in growth opportunities signals need for invulnerability and perfection. Playing safe conveys the message that risk-taking behavior is not supported or encouraged.  Soon, team members make safety their goal too. They stop sharing unconventional ideas, start leaning towards tried-and-tested approaches, try to hide mistakes and let go of opportunities that require taking a risk. 

Don’t be in the business of playing it safe. Be in the business of creating possibilities of greatness.
― Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime

To avoid this habit:

1. Establish clear boundaries on the kind of risks your team can take on their own, risks that require your involvement and risks that are out of scope.
2. Frame failures and mistakes as opportunities to learn—identify what went wrong, why did it occur and the measures that need to be put in place to prevent it from happening again.
3. Devise experimentation strategies to minimize the impact of uncertainty and make more data driven decisions.
4. Support making choices with long-term growth, not those that relieve short-term pain. 
5. Encourage speaking up, sharing disagreements and voicing differences of opinion to evaluate different perspectives before locking down on a decision. 

Growth can never be risk-free. Risk-taking appetite is built by actually taking risks, not sitting inside a comfort zone. Safety brings comfort, but it also limits growth. 

Masking true focus with false urgency

Do you spend more time firefighting than building products, more energy on short-term wins than long-term success and more effort in being tactful than thinking strategically? Is there constant pressure around every issue, rush to decide and chaos in prioritizing as everything deserves immediate attention?

False urgency creates a sense of busyness without creating momentum—with confusion, half-baked solutions, wasted effort and exhaustion. When urgency is falsified rather than grounded in real business needs, teams operate like a mad powerhouse—people in the team keep running in many different directions without actually reaching anywhere. Jumping from one task to another and being in a constant state of overwhelm and reactivity can drain team energy, increase stress and can even lead to burnout. When employees don’t get time to do deep work or experience the joy and pleasure of being in a state of flow, they feel unhappy, stuck and dissatisfied. 

The paradox of short-term thinking is that it often ends up being more damaging and more expensive than longer-term thinking.
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption

To avoid this habit:

1. Ruthlessly separate what is “urgent” from what is “important.” Use team time to focus on strategic issues, not just firefighting.
2. Create space for reflection, debate and long-term planning. Slowing down may feel uncomfortable, but it prevents costly mistakes.
3. Instead of chasing quick wins, set clear success measures tied to impact, not just activity. This keeps the team focused on results over appearances.
4. Whenever a new crisis shows up, pause to ask: Is this truly urgent or just noise? Encourage leaders to push back on false alarms.

Mindless busyness due to a false sense of urgency does not lead to progress, it only adds to stress. 

Expecting your team to take urgent requests seriously and attend to them in a timely manner isn’t wrong. It’s counterproductive when every other request is given a high priority and the team is expected to jump at the chance.

Reacting with unchecked emotions

How do you show up when pressure is high, expectations aren’t met or communication breaks down? Is there visible tension in your voice, a hint of disappointment in your tone or impatience in your body language?

Unchecked emotions like irritation, sarcasm, defensiveness or emotional withdrawal shakes people’s confidence. They start worrying about saying or doing things that might trigger an emotional outburst. This makes them hide mistakes, choose words carefully and play safe as they try to stay out of your way. Whether it’s showing frustration in a meeting that disregards your views, aggressive tone in an email that challenges your authority, raising voice when someone disagrees with you or passive-aggressive behavior when things don’t go well, these moments don’t just pass away—they linger in the minds of those around you. Your presence becomes associated with emotional reactivity, making people hesitant to lean on you. 

Big emotions—like anger, fear, and sadness—can be really uncomfortable. But even uncomfortable feelings are okay. In fact, all emotions are okay. It just takes practice to manage uncomfortable emotions so you can respond in a healthy way.
― Jessica Speer, BFF or NRF (Not Really Friends)

To avoid this habit:

1. Stay calm in pressure filled moments, grounded in discomfort and manage your emotions when things get tough. 
2. Instead of suppressing emotions, regulate them—acknowledge them without letting them drive your behavior.
3. Consciously create space between stimulus and response. Respond with intention rather than impulse. 

Visible frustration, defensiveness or emotional outbursts unsettle teams. Demonstrate emotional steadiness, especially in high-pressure moments.

Modeling burnout instead of self-care

Do you take pride in working 24/7 and never taking time off? Does work always take priority over other commitments and goals in life? Do you expect your team to be 100% committed to their jobs?

Pushing all aspects of personal life to the backburner just to do a remarkable job, earn accolades and recognition has multiple negative consequences in the long-run. Disappointment, frustration and dissatisfaction from ignoring other parts of life seeps in and eventually catches up with people. Tasks take longer to complete as team members struggle to maintain focus and efficiency, fatigue and burnout kicks in which leads to poor work quality and increases risk of errors and mistakes. 

We are socialized into systems that cause us to conform and believe our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our constant labor becomes a prison that allows us to be disembodied. We become easy for the systems to manipulate, disconnected from our power as divine beings and hopeless. We forget how to dream. This is how grind culture continues. We internalize the lies and in turn become agents of an unsustainable way of living.
— Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance

To avoid this habit:

1. Encourage your team to set boundaries and ensure those boundaries are respected.
2. Coach your team to limit time spent in meetings so that they have plenty of time during the day to work on important stuff. 
3. Don’t expect your team to accommodate everything without realigning and reshuffling priorities. Unrealistic workloads aren’t sustainable in the long run. 
4. Your words and actions convey silent expectations. Work habits that you follow yourself get passed to your team. Set a good example for your team. Be a positive role model.

Encourage taking time off to recharge and rest. Stop glorifying the hustle mentality which promotes toxic productivity. Seek balance, not burnout.

Summary 

1. Ignoring bad behavior conveys the message that toxicity has no consequence. It impacts the team’s morale as people feel mistreated, undermined and undervalued. Stop ignoring toxicity. Set clear guidelines on what behavior is acceptable and what won’t be tolerated.
2. Refusing to delegate hard problems conveys the message that you don’t trust your team with complexity. It prevents them from building skills that will lead to their growth. Stop assigning work within their comfort zone. Challenge them to embrace difficulty. 
3. Blaming and complaining conveys the message that accountability has no value. It makes people operate with problem focus instead of adopting a solutioning goal. Stop acting as a victim. Promote a sense of responsibility and ownership.
4. Giving unclear feedback conveys the message that feedback has no value. It makes people ignore feedback as they can’t really act on it. Stop giving vague and indirect feedback. Be specific, make it actionable.  
5. Seeking consensus conveys the message that independent views are disregarded. It makes people nod in agreement even when they disagree. Stop seeking harmony. Promote healthy disagreements.    
6. Leaning towards comfortable opportunities conveys the message that risk taking behavior is not supported. It makes people stick to the familiar without navigating the uncharted territory. Stop playing safe. Start embracing unknowns within boundaries.
7. Expecting everything to be done at a priority conveys the message that everything is urgent. It makes people waste time on inconsequential tasks while ignoring important activities. Stop creating a false notion of urgency. Plan and prioritize well.
8. Becoming unpredictable and highly emotional under pressure conveys the message to others to stay out of your way. It makes them worry about how you’ll react to anything they say or do. Stop being emotionally reactive. Handle pressure with calm and poise.
9. Working long hours and on weekends conveys the message that personal goals don’t matter. It makes people feel burnt out and exhausted. Stop promoting hustle culture. Seek balance, not burnout.   

Recommended Reading

Nine Lies About Work By Marcus Buckingham

First, Break All The Rules By Marcus Buckingham

The post Management Habits That Slowly Break Teams appeared first on TechTello.

Leaders make decisions with high stakes, co-ordinate across many teams and functions, seek alignment on the strategy and way forward, navigate complexity, keep stakeholders aligned and coach and guide their teams to achieve goals. This and multiple other expectations makes their job hard, challenging and stressful.

While stress can signal the need to be more thoughtful—validating assumptions, challenging decisions and exploring diverse perspectives—it can also shut down thinking and make leaders behave in unexpected ways. They may use control and authority to solve the problem instead of listening and staying flexible. They may put off decision making or delay it to avoid facing their fears. They may spend long hours at work to expedite progress and reduce pressure. They may act defensively to justify their viewpoint and shut down feedback. They may withdraw and go silent when their brain reduces to co-operate and turns off under stress.  

Stress can trigger specific behaviors without their conscious awareness—they may act a certain way, not knowing this is how they come across to others. These default patterns of behavior become more ingrained with each repetition. Their reaction to stress not only impacts their own behavior, their team adapts to it too—when to comply, when it is safe to speak up and when it’s best to stay silent.  

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
― Frank Herbert, Dune

Identifying what’s your leadership default response under stress is the first step to make a conscious choice. Which of these styles do you lean towards?

Control

When things get stressful at work, do you try to use control, power and authority—getting involved in all decisions, telling others what to do, dictating solutions and micromanaging your team’s every move? Do you try to achieve targets and hit goals by exerting pressure? Do you force others to accept your viewpoint instead of influencing them to align with your thought process? 

You may think that controlling tasks, projects and deadlines will ensure nothing goes off track, but it messes with your team’s sense of autonomy—not getting the freedom to explore and strategize, apply their thinking skills and learn from their mistakes demotivates them and lowers their morale. They stop taking initiative, stop sharing their perspective and stop working harder. Performance and quality of work suffers which adds to your stress instead of reducing it. 

To identify if you lean towards control under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you feel the strong urge to step in and take over when things are uncertain?
2. Do you seek frequent updates to reduce your anxiety?
3. Do you stop others from making decisions without your approval when the pressure is high?
4. Do you feed solutions and solve others problems instead of letting them do their own thinking?
5. Do you stop trusting your team when expectations rise?
6. Do you notice more dependency and less initiative from your team?

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

Instead of exerting control under stress, trust and empower your team. Give them the context to make decisions, freedom to find solutions and support to navigate obstacles and challenges. Ask questions, listen and encourage them to think.   

Avoidance 

When things get stressful at work, do you use avoidance as an escape route—postponing important meetings, not responding to emails, pretending to be busy and deferring decisions to avoid risks? Do you put off difficult conversations because the mere thought of handling a conflict brings more stress? Do you ignore issues and use delaying tactics to avoid dealing with problems?

Avoidance may seem safe—doing nothing cannot exaggerate the problem. However, ignoring, avoiding and delaying does not make the problem disappear, it only makes it worse. Delayed decisions lead to lost opportunities. Unresolved conflicts build resentment. Problems left untackled shoot up, demanding more time, energy and resources to resolve. Your tendency to “avoid” under stress not only disrupts the team’s momentum, it makes them avoidant too—they learn to ignore problems instead of facing them head-on. Problems linger on, communication gaps widen and misunderstandings spike which adds to your stress instead of reducing it. 

To identify if you lean towards avoidance under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions: 

1. Do you delay decisions or conversations when the stakes are high?
2. Do you become harder to reach or less communicative during times of stress?
3. Do you avoid giving difficult feedback even though you know it’s needed?
4. Do you postpone decisions because you’re not sure how others will react?
5. Do you rationalize inaction by telling yourself “it’s not the right time”?
6. Do unresolved issues tend to resurface repeatedly in your team?

Avoidance is a passive-aggressive way of expressing that you are tired of showing up. Hoping the problem will go away feels like the safest option, but avoidance is a fear-based response. Avoiding a discussion of our expectations doesn’t prevent conflict. 
― Nedra Glover Tawwab, Set Boundaries

Avoidance may seem like a safe exit from a stressful situation, but it distracts you from solving real issues. Don’t let your mind trick you into behaviors that give you short-term relief at the cost of bigger long-term problems. Show up, solve problems and make decisions at the right time, not later. 

Overwork 

When things get stressful at work, do you try to compensate through overwork—staying back late, working on weekends, squeezing in more meetings and hardly taking a break? Do you start working long hours, sending emails and pings late into the night or early morning to deal with fear of missed targets or unmet expectations? Do you sacrifice sleep, health and family by prioritizing work over well-being?

Constantly working long hours to the point of being exhausted leads to mental and behavioral issues—you’re easily frustrated and irritated as being overwhelmed shortens your fuse. You have trouble focusing, find it hard to remember and are easily distracted. You lose enthusiasm and feel disconnected from others. You find it hard to disconnect even when you’re not working. Always-on mentality and the expectations to be available 24/7 takes a toll on your team’s performance too—they start making more errors, miss deadlines and take longer to complete tasks. Trying to do more makes you achieve less, which adds to your stress instead of reducing it.  

To identify if you lean towards overwork under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions: 

1. When you slow down, do you feel uneasy, guilty or anxious?
2. When pressure rises, do you work long hours instead of reprioritizing?
3. Do you equate being exhausted with being committed and responsible?
4. Do you communicate a constant sense of urgency to your team?
5. Do you delay rest or recovery till things calm down?
6. Does your team appear tired, reactive and burnt out?

What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
― Jason Fried, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work

When you’re tense and anxious, instead of burying yourself in work, identify what matters and let go of the rest. Quit being overworked, overstressed and constantly dissatisfied. 

Defensive 

When things get stressful at work, do you use defensiveness as an armor to protect yourself—shifting blame, making excuses, attacking, denying and shutting down the conversation instead of listening, admitting fault and taking responsibility? Do you use raised voice, sarcastic tone or other such negative behaviors to make yourself heard? Do you ignore and dismiss feedback as you find it as a threat to your image and self-worth?

Defensiveness under stress is your body’s most natural response as it tries to protect you from harm by shutting down threats. But, it also escalates problems, shuts down communication and makes others feel unsafe—your defensiveness makes others defensive too, leading to unproductive patterns. Stress can add to feelings of shame and hurt, which can prevent you from accepting feedback, learning from mistakes and understanding the underlying root cause of problems. When others feel attacked, they stop sharing, stop being vulnerable and start playing it safe. Defensiveness builds emotional walls, which adds to your stress instead of reducing it. 

To identify if you lean towards defensiveness under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions: 

1. When something goes wrong, do you focus on protecting your image rather than exploring what happened?
2. Do you shut down curiosity and differences of opinion when emotions run high?
3. When you’re under pressure, do you feel the instinct to explain, justify or correct feedback?
4. When making a high stakes decision, do you treat disagreement as a sign of disrespect?
5. Do you feel a strong need to be seen as competent and in control?
6. Do people around you become more cautious or reserved during high pressure situations?

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial.
― Dan Brown, Inferno

When pressure spikes, instead of pointing fingers and finding someone to blame, redirect your energy inwards—focus on what you can and can’t do instead of who’s at fault. 

Perfectionism

When things get stressful at work, do you turn into a perfectionist—exemplary performance, excessively high standards and 100% perfect outcome just the way you expect? Things have to be your way or they are simply not “good enough.” Do you obsess over minute details and struggle to celebrate as what could have been done better dominates your focus? Do you feel compelled to overdeliver and constantly push others beyond their limits?

Under stress, it’s common to mistake perfectionism for excellence. But chasing perfectionism and striving for excellence are two very different things. There’s a fine line between healthy striving and setting goals that make you and others miserable. The drive to excel is not the same as the drive to perfect. They are two very different things. Excellence is about utilizing your and others’ potential to seek a great outcome. Perfectionism is about obsession to the point of being self-destructive. It kills the joy of creating as nothing ever meets the bar. Perfectionism also slows down your team. Pushing others to meet your high standards leads to resistance, reluctance and rework, which adds to your stress instead of reducing it. 

To identify if you lean towards perfectionism under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions: 

1. Do you prioritize flawless execution over learning?
2. Do you redo others’ work instead of coaching them?
3. Do you equate high standards with high performance?
4. Do you consistently push delivery timelines to get minor tweaks incorporated?
5. Do you struggle to accept outcomes that are effective, but imperfect? 
6. Does your team hesitate to take initiative for the fear of getting it wrong?

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Know when it’s important to push for the best and when to settle for good enough. Learn to accept flaws that are necessary to move ahead. Make excellence, not perfectionism as your goal and you’ll have less stress and more success along the way. 

Overconfidence 

When things get stressful at work, do you turn overconfident in your skills and abilities—making risky decisions without proper analysis, relying only on past experience without current data to back it up and making assumptions without checking their validity? Do you pass judgment and dismiss information that does not match your beliefs as you feel absolutely certain of what you know? Do you try to appear smart and competent which makes you speak more and listen less to others perspectives?

Overconfidence is a trap—it can make you disregard important information, spread the feeling that others’ views don’t matter and tells them to stay quiet even when they disagree with you. Not only do you end up making bad decisions, you start making people feel unheard, invaluable and unsafe. This destroys your team’s confidence, reduces their morale and makes them question your competence. It prevents them from trusting your judgment even when you have good suggestions or ideas to share. Lack of trust, support and conviction from your team adds to your stress instead of reducing it.

To identify if you lean towards overconfidence under stressful situations, ask yourself these questions: 

1. When pressure increases, do you become more certain of your own viewpoint and less open to other alternatives?
2. Do you assume you have enough information without seeking diverse perspectives?
3. Do you rely on past experience or success to justify decisions made under stress?
4. Do you mistake confidence for certainty under complex or unfamiliar situations?
5. Are you more interested in proving yourself right and less in being curious?
6. Have others stopped sharing their viewpoint because they know they won’t be heard?

Overconfidence is usually the mistake of experts, and we do give them a lot of power and authority. Plain and simple, incompetence is frustrating, but the people guilty of it usually can’t screw things up that bad. The people guilty of overconfidence can do much more damage.
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree

To make less faulty decisions under stress, instead of relying only on your gut, be more rational. Pause, take a step back and consciously seek input from others.  

Summary

1. When you lean towards control under stress, you try to get involved in every decision, every discussion and every small detail at work. Control can give you the power to dictate every move, but it takes away your team’s sense of autonomy—they stop taking initiatives and start taking instructions which impacts their performance and productivity. Instead of seeking control under stress, support and empower.
2. When you lean towards avoidance under stress, you put off important tasks for the fear of making wrong decisions. Avoidance can give you temporary relief at the cost of bigger problems—issues left unaddressed demand more time, energy and resources to fix in the future. Instead of avoiding problems under stress, face them head on and get them out of the way.
3. When you lean towards overwork under stress, you start working late into the nights and on weekends to make progress on your goals. Overwork leads to exhaustion and burnout. Pushing aside personal priorities to make time for work impacts your mental health and personal wellbeing. Instead of doing more work under stress, reevaluate your priorities and do work that matters.
4. When you lean towards defensiveness under stress, you refuse to take responsibility for your actions and look for a target to point fingers and blame. Defensiveness prevents you from accepting feedback, fixing problems and make others feel unsafe. Instead of becoming defensive under stress, identify what’s under your control and act on it. 
5. When you lean towards perfectionism under stress, you waste time in minor tweaks and small details instead of focusing on the big picture. Perfectionism prevents you from accepting a “good enough” solution and puts pressure on the team to meet your high standards. Instead of turning into a perfectionist under stress, strive for excellence. 
6. When you lean towards overconfidence under stress, you make hasty decisions without complete information or rely only on past successes and experiences without considering alternate perspectives. Overconfidence leads to poor decisions and destroys team’s confidence as they feel unheard and undervalued. Instead of relying only on your gut, seek diverse perspectives and make more informed decisions.   

Recommended Reading

Managing Leadership Anxiety By Steve Cuss

The Stress Effect By Henry L. Thompson

The post What’s Your Leadership Default Under Stress? appeared first on TechTello.