Step 318: The High Price of Lazy Leadership

I’m not sure how or why the term “people leader” became synonymous with “delegator”. I find it disturbing. I’m witnessing a rather ugly and rapid example of this transformation right now. Thankfully I am not directly involved with it. I’ve certainly experienced the end-result first hand, and it’s interesting to be on the outside looking in to how the process of a promotion actually changes someone. Granted, I am witnessing a worst-case scenario. There are people who get promotions and continue to do the exceptional work that got them promoted in the first place. I love those people. I’m not talking about them in this post. I’m talking about the ones who think their new title actually entitles them to something when really a title (degree, experience, famous contact, etc.) doesn’t entitle them to anything.

All of a sudden someone gets a promotion and they can’t be expected to read a presentation, get to meetings on time, or to actually have any capacity for detail. And they’re no longer doing actual work. They’re “supervising” the work of others. With the onset of a promotion, they emerge from their hard-working cocoon and blossom into the role of “idea people”. Gross. Whenever someone tells me he or she is an “idea person”, I immediately re-label them as “someone who can’t get anything done”. Everyone has ideas, and should work to bring those ideas to life. My problem with the self-proclaimed idea people is that they can’t actually execute anything. They need whole teams of talented people to get their ideas into the world. And somewhere along the line, corporations decided that idea people would get promoted and people who actually work would be the drones. What an ugly, backwards paradigm.

The consequences of such a system are equally ugly: 55% of Americans are not satisfied with their jobs and over 50% of Americans say their standard of living is not getting better. And here’s another interesting tidbit – 70 – 80% of job satisfaction has to do with how much an employee respects his or her boss. It has almost nothing to do with the actual work. And yet, what do corporations focus on during performance reviews and promotions? The work, not relationships. It’s all about results and not how those results were achieved, completely going against the grain of effective leadership.

The old adage of “it’s not what you say, but how you say it that counts” is not that far afield from “it’s not what you achieve, but how you achieve it that matters most”. If leaders want that title of leader, then they need to live up to their end of the bargain. They need to stop thinking of themselves as delegators and start thinking of themselves as motivators whose main purpose is to service their teams.

If 80% of job satisfaction has to do with leadership, then leaders should be putting at least that percentage of their working hours into actually supporting the people who work for them. If we can do that, then imagine the jumps we’d see in productivity, creativity, and happiness. And my money’s on the idea that a happy, productive, and creative workforce also leads to bigger profits.