Watch our new series to find out!

DEAD RIGHT: 3 Unintended Consequences of Overrelying on Your Positional Authority

As an executive advisor, I’ve heard many discussions about fostering an environment of radical transparency and candor. I’ve seen many leaders trying to apply these foundational concepts to their for-profit or nonprofit organizations.

But as well-meaning as these attempts were, they sometimes had the opposite effect and created greater dysfunction within the organization.

The authors and thought leaders who have brought these ideas to mainstream organizational life have done a great service to the rest of us, and this article is not a critique of their work.

In fact, after doing my own research, I have found these issues appropriately and expertly addressed. However, as wonderful as these ideas and principles are, they sometimes can hurt an organization and make matters worse, especially when they are not implemented correctly.

Here are three common pitfalls I’ve observed when well-meaning leaders encourage their teams to apply the concepts of transparency and candor without a proper plan.

Common Pitfall #1: Personal attacks are cloaked in radical transparency. The first common pitfall is pretty straightforward. I’m willing to bet you can think of at least one colleague that uses honesty and transparency to personally attack another colleague. For example, when a colleague throws someone else under the bus or lays blame where it doesn’t belong, only to turn around and say “somebody has to be honest here.”

I don’t share this example with an intent to discourage team conflict. In fact, the ability to navigate and ultimately leverage conflict for the organization’s good sets great leaders apart from other leaders.

But bear in mind that unhealthy conflict is always personal and unproductive. It leads to self-protection and less vulnerability instead of better results. Healthy conflict, on the other hand, is never personal. It is always about making sure that the organization’s mission is successful.

Common Pitfall #2: Pushback is perceived as dismissing another individual’s transparency. When it comes to transparent conversations, keep in mind that sometimes team members may perceive disagreement as a dismissal of their own opinion. While this is normal and the result of our own bias, it can also negatively impact the team. In fact, when an employee receives feedback that is more negative than their own self-perception, they are “44% more likely to drop the relationship with that colleague.”

This reaction can lead to conflict escalation or avoidance which results in team conversations and debates becoming shallower.

When as leaders we respond to pushback in a way that seeks to understand, we model values–like humility and curiosity–for our teams.

Common Pitfall #3: The leader is unwilling to put a stake in the ground. It’s not uncommon for teams to be stuck discussing the same conversation over and over again under the guise of trying to achieve a solution that pleases everybody.

But when a team repeatedly rehashes the same conversation, it’s a sign of a dysfunction within your organization.

When teams implement the principles of transparency, leaders must display the courage to move the team forward. Do away with hashing and rehashing the same conversation — it will not lead to greater success.

Instead, take a stand and place a stake in the ground so that you can finish that old conversation and lead your team into new territories. Once moving forward, there is no need to continually discuss the things of old.

Not sure what this might look like within your organization? Here are three telltale signs that as a leader you are not standing firm:

Dysfunction grows and silos strengthen

Your best people become more frustrated and look for the exit.

Your culture repels potential healthy team members.

When done right, implementing candor and transparency within your organization will bring many benefits — from exposing unhealthy behavior to increasing overall productivity, and improving your organization’s reputation. But if you’re not careful, it can lead to pushback, personal attacks disguised as transparency, and being stuck in the same old conversation.

If any of these signs seem familiar, contact us to start a conversation about how we can help.

Joyner Advising Group’s mission is to help forward-looking leaders create alignment.

Perhaps you’ve heard statements like, “Management always does this;” “Management never does that;” “If leadership didn’t always do [something not-so-flattering] we wouldn’t even be in this position;” or my personal favorite, “None of my other bosses ever had a problem with me.”

While recognition is an important first step, the vital question is: do you know how to deal with these scenarios? Here are 4 principles to keep in mind as you address victim mentality:

1. Understand your role and responsibility. Too often leaders fail to define their role—and their boundaries. This creates unnecessary anxiety and stress. I’m often surprised at the number of leaders who carry unnecessary strain and tension.

The best leaders—the healthiest ones—have learned to carry the right responsibilities, not those that others should carry. Dealing with a victim mentality starts with healthy boundaries.

2. Resist the Superhero urge. While addressing victim mentality, the leader will see opportunities to lower the tension and “come to the rescue” of those they hold accountable by absolving them of their responsibility. But this doesn’t help! I’ve met many leaders who had a history of enabling others to persist in a state of “victimhood.” These leaders believed that by “rescuing” others they were, in fact, helping them. It rarely (if ever) turns out well for the individual or the organization.

There’s a better way: by asking questions that focus on the underlying issue, a leader provides the context (and the time) for the “victim” to reflect. In best-case scenarios, when a leader asks questions it generates self-reflection within the “victim.” This self-reflection leads to self-awareness, which in turn leads to an acceptance of one’s situation, and finally a commitment to a productive next step.

If the leader plays superhero and tries to solve the problem, he or she unintentionally validates the victim mindset. It reinforces the false notion that “my problems are because of other people’s actions; I’m powerless to solve my own challenges and I need someone to rescue me.” And so the cycle continues.

Encouraging self-awareness and building responsibility takes time: don’t be discouraged if a “victim’s” self-awareness doesn’t increase the first time you try using adaptive questions. It probably won’t. Which is why you should:

3. Expect blame shifting and disruption. Be prepared for a few unexpected twists and turns in the conversation. When faced with an opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives, “victims” frequently stir up chaos around them. Creating confusion is their fallback strategy to effectively avoid responsibility and to hide from accountability.

When taking the posture of a victim, the individual will continue to blame different people (or company processes) until they find one that sticks. If this strategy is successful, any conversation ends up being an adventure in missing the point.

Given this, it is important that the leader constantly reframe the issue back to the individual’s responsibility to choose his or her own way forward within the constructs of the organization’s mission, values, and strategy.

The reframe must always put the onus on the individual to make a decision. The leader should never make the decision unless it is time to sever the working relationship.

At every step, it’s critical that the leader:

4. Wait. Waiting is critical when addressing a victim mentality.

When I was a Boy Scout (age thirteen), I learned how to rappel down a cliff. I’ll never forget (after all harnesses and carabiners were in place) standing with my heels at the edge of a massive cliff. At that point my troop leader nonchalantly said, “Lean back.” My adolescent brain heard these instructions and thought: what in the H – E – double-hockey-sticks did he tell me to do?

Every bone, every muscle, every tendon in my body screamed, Whatever you do, Chris Joyner, do not lean back! Just as it is counter-intuitive for a teenager to lean back over a cliff’s edge, it is counter-intuitive for us as leaders to pause, to wait.

Difficult conversations are characterized by uncomfortable, tension-filled periods of silence that require the leader to be a non-anxious presence. The common thread among all four principles is the leader’s ability to be patient and stay focused on the foundational issue.

As a leader, patience and focus are possible only when you understand your own role and responsibility, resist the urge to rescue, and expect multiple iterations of blame shifting.

Ultimately, throughout the conversation, you must refrain from filling the space and allow silence to do the heavy lifting.

For most of us, dealing with this type of challenge is far from enjoyable. These situations offer a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate values and leadership principles to our teams and organizations. In my experience, authentically demonstrated values and principles build rapport and credibility in ways that words and slogans cannot.

So, why is any of this important?

So, why is any of this important? Our best employees are watching! They are paying attention to the team member who is unprofessional, comes in late, leaves early, shirks responsibility, and shifts blame to others. If the leader does not address these dysfunctions, even the best employees can become bitter.

In tight labor markets, your highest performers have many options. Your competitors will try to entice them to join their organization. Creating a culture of healthy accountability—characterized by non-anxious engagement with the victim mentality—is perhaps the most critical element to retaining your best employees.

Skillful leadership will retain hard-working team players while appropriately dealing with those who are hostile to other team members and the organization’s mission. If done well, you will improve the performance of marginal employees and demonstrate to your best employees that “victims” are not rewarded.

[i] Because “victim mentality” is such a loaded phrase, I want to be clear about two things regarding the context of this article. First, there are real victims in our communities and around the world that need to be rescued. These are not the “victims” to which I refer in this article. I am discussing those who position themselves as victims in the workplace. Secondly, I have taken the victim posture in my own life many times. The people who have served me best utilized the principles I discuss in this article to draw me out of that posture into healthier functioning.

At Joyner Advising Group, our mission is to Help Forward-Looking Leaders Create Alignment. Click here to learn more about how we can partner with you.

Recently, I met with a small team of high-level managers. We were gathered around the conference room table wrestling with a challenge they had identified as their “most pressing problem.” Because company revenue was built on projects, there were times when some teams would be working 60-70 hours a week, while other teams had little to do. The result:

·     One-third of their workforce was over-utilized.

·     One-third was appropriately utilized.

·     One-third was underutilized.

Everyone agreed this was untenable if they wanted to make the firm more effective—and profitable.

Having identified a significant problem, the group moved to brainstorming solutions. It wasn’t long before Charles, 6’5″ with a deep baritone voice, said, “What we need is a meeting every month to talk about the human resources we can share with each other.” What happened next was quite interesting.

Nothing.

That’s what happened. I looked around to see six other managers hyper-focused on their pens, their notepads, their phones, or their fingernails. No one made eye contact. And so we waited.

After about 30 seconds of complete silence (yes, it felt much longer), I asked: “What do you think of Charles’s idea? Should we schedule a monthly meeting where you all can talk about sharing team members with one another?” Again, silence. And so, we waited longer.

I nudged them again: “Are any of you reticent to share one of your team members with another manager at this table?” Dawn, a soft-spoken but influential manager, broke the silence and admitted that she would be hesitant to lend a member of her team to another team. We proceeded to have an hour-long discussion on why. A few of the reasons given:

• Having a large team is more prestigious.
• Historically, managers who lead larger teams have received greater accolades.
• Promotions and compensation are impacted by the size of my team and the scope of the projects that I lead.
• What happens if, at the end of the year, our executives see that my team did our job with 50% of the workforce? Will they cut my budget for the following year?

Then Dawn asked an even more powerful question: “What if my employee likes working for another manager more than working for me?”

“What if my employee likes working for another manager more than working for me?”

Discovering the Real Issue

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, co-founders of Cambridge Leadership Associates, brilliantly distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges.

Technical challenges are those that can be fixed with expertise. You need a new roof? Call a roofer. Your car is pulling to the left? Take it to a mechanic for alignment. If issues are truly technical, the applied solution should fix the problem and make today better.

Technical issues are like a leaky roof. Most likely your team will not debate whether it should be fixed, and no one feels a deep emotional connection with the leaky roof!

Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, are rooted in deeply held beliefs and values. These types of issues reach deep within us and connect with the dreams, fears, passions, and anxieties of the stakeholders.

Why It Matters

Let’s go back to the management team. Imagine that the team reluctantly adopted the idea to add a monthly meeting to share resources. Imagine you are a manager at that first meeting, and you mention that your team is overworked and desperately trying to hit a near impossible deadline that is critical for the company’s Q1 success.

You request additional resources only to hear your colleagues respond, “My team is about to kick-off a huge project,” or “I have a few people who are taking PTO (paid time off), so now’s not a good time,” or “I have assigned my group to do some critical research on our next project.”

You went to the meeting, asked for help, and got none.

However, that’s not the only downside. As you walk around the department over the next month you begin to notice another manager’s team surfing the web or playing Candy Crush Saga. You see them arrive late and leave early. They are taking extra-long lunch breaks.

Meanwhile your team is working 70 hours a week. It would be quite natural for your frustration to turn to anger and your anger to bitterness. The byproduct: diminished trust between you and the other managers.

Instead of solving the problem we actually made it worse. This is what happens when we apply a technical solution (e.g., another monthly meeting) to an adaptive issue, which can rarely be solved with a one-and-done decision. Ultimately, yesterday’s “solution” becomes today’s biggest problem.

A Way Forward

These managers needed to balance the competing values of individual rewards, respect, and accolades of leading a large team versus allocating resources effectively to get stuff done. As we continued to work, they discussed a re-design of incentive metrics so that all teams were incentivized on a collective set of company projects, which would drive managers to assign resources to the projects most critical for corporate success. Working with HR, they also made some compensation changes to encourage resource sharing.

While still a work in progress, we found a way for managers to navigate the situation more effectively. And, even more significant, they built trust in each other as they shared more transparently about their own anxieties, fears, and concerns.

I’d love to hear others chime in. To get the discussion going I’ll pose a couple questions:

Have you faced a similar situation, where the issue was clear but the resolution was super tricky?

Have you worked somewhere that a corporate “value” was in conflict with a methodology?

The failure to recognize adaptive challenges can cause a company to stall out, stuck in a repeating cycle of frustration. The conversations—and the work necessary to discover and tackle these issues—can be uncomfortable and stressful.

Sometimes an experienced third-party can help leaders find their way—faster and with relationships not only intact, but improved.

I wasn’t there to tell these managers what to do. My value was to identify the problems beneath the surface, and give the managers an opportunity to recognize and take ownership of the deeper-level issues—the ones that could lead to lasting change.

Do you think you or your team might be stuck? If you find yourself facing the same problem over and over, it’s possible. Joyner Advising Group helps Forward-Looking Leaders Create Alignment. To learn more about how we can partner with you, check us out here !

Many managers and leaders dread having to hold people accountable. I’m fascinated by the number of work-arounds leaders create to bypass holding an employee accountable to widely agreed upon productivity targets or healthy rules of engagement.

I’ve advised and coached leaders who have spent upwards of a decade working around an employee or manager, sometimes developing woefully inefficient processes that frustrate and irritate dozens of other people. When they tell me about the situation, it is clear that they’ve simply accepted this as typical and okay.

It may be typical, but it is far from okay! Think for a moment about the wasted time and energy — not to mention the emotional toll on the leader caused by unnecessary stress and anxiety. Further, the longer the process continues, the more accommodations that have to be made.

Here are five keys to create and sustain a culture of healthy accountability based on my experience working with senior leaders and executives around the country. The power of these keys lies in the adaptive conversations that take place within your organization. Having your leaders wrestle with this information together is the secret sauce.

While this process was developed for a medium-sized client of my newly formed advising firm, the principles also work for smaller organizations (profit or not-for-profit) and large multinational corporations. These 5 keys are now the foundation of a dynamic workshop designed to help leaders create a culture of healthy accountability within their organizations.

1. Recognize our Fundamentally Flawed View of Accountability. In organizational life we often create a false choice between compassion/empathy and healthy accountability. False choices are created for a number of reasons, but the primary one seems to be that viewing things in a binary fashion makes decisions easier.

There has to be a better way. Instead of viewing accountability as an expression lacking compassion, organizational leaders need to see it as a gift to be accepted from — and given to — others.

As I look back on my 20+ years in the workforce, the people who served me best were often the ones who challenged me and held me accountable to a high standard. At the time, it certainly did not feel great. Upon reflection, however, it is clear those were the people who helped me become the leader I am today. Here are a few simple questions that leaders can consider together:

 Why is it so difficult for us when we are held accountable by others?

What keeps us from holding others accountable when we know it is the right thing to do?

What excuses do we offer (ourselves and others) when we are unwilling to hold someone accountable to clearly defined expectations?

2. Understand the Playing Field. Every question or comment defines, in some way, the conversation’s playing field. This is the field upon which attitudes, ideas, frustrations, hurts, dreams and desires will compete.

Leaders regularly accept the playing field that is presented to them by stakeholders without consideration. Whether you are a parent or a manager, you know those times when you are 10 minutes into a conversation and you think, “Uh-oh. This isn’t going well. I thought I was just answering a simple question! How did we get to this point?!”

Some may think I’m too harsh or suggesting that all frustrated employees (or children) are nefariously looking for ways to undermine leadership. That is not my intent. Ask yourself this question: “when I am frustrated with a member of my family, do I tee up the conversation in a way that bolsters their argument or do I present information in a way that gives me a greater chance of winning?”

Right. Presenting our ideas so that they win the day is simply human nature. We do it. Others do it.

That’s why as leaders we have to lead with questions instead of simply reacting to a comment or question. When we react we are accepting the playing field as it has been defined. Questions help the leader determine the assumptions and beliefs that are driving the behavior and actions. Questions help the leader understand what is really behind the comment or the complaint.

Bottom line: in order to ask good, pertinent questions the leader must listen well.

         Think of a time when you received a negative comment or criticism. What was going on in you that led to a quick rebuttal or response? In other words, what kept you from listening well?

             Describe a scenario in which you reacted quickly and, in time, the playing field that you stepped on was not the one you anticipated.

3. Change the Playing Field (Learn to Reframe). Changing the playing field is only effective if the leader understands the current playing field being presented. In my work with organizations, I have found that the presenting issue is rarely the real, underlying issue. When a leader has the ability to reframe a challenge or topic, it helps others see the situation differently. The reframe often helps people focus on more important things, like values and principles.

With accountability, reframing should always lead to an individual’s ownership over their next step. Instead of making decisions for others, the leader requires the individual to make a decision within the bounds of the organization’s values, principles and strategies. The reframe is a critical element for success in this endeavor.

Describe a scenario where the presenting issue was not the real issue (Think about times that you have responded to the presenting concern and then the “concern” changed. This process often repeats until everyone is frustrated).

What is a helpful reframe?

4. Resist the Urge to Rescue. Throughout this process the leader will have many opportunities to lower the tension and “rescue” the individual they are holding accountable. I’ve coached many leaders who recognized a history of enabling others to persist in a state of “victimhood,” believing that they were, in fact, helping them. It rarely, if ever, turned out well for the individual or the organization.

The victim mentality (for further reading: 4 Essential Principles For Addressing Victim Mentality) is characterized by the blaming of others for one’s own failures or disappointing results. All of us have met people who regularly talk about how others (boss, spouse, children, friends, co-workers, employees) have done things to them and how others are responsible for their personal challenges and failures.

Sometimes we are those people. I have accepted a victim mentality in my own life that led to blaming others for my own disappointing results. This basic human tendency is why it is critical that in accountability our reframe always must lead to the individual’s ownership of their next step.

Describe a time when you took on a victim mentality. What was the result?

Describe a time you recently acted as a “rescuer.” What were you thinking and/or feeling when you decided to rescue? What was the outcome?

5. Create Clarity of Expectations. When an individual chooses to join in the forward-moving endeavor, it is critical in the moment to clarify expectations and next steps. Painting a picture of what accountability will look like moving forward will make it an easier path to walk. I encourage those I work with to have numerous planned touch-points in the first four weeks so that a new, healthier rhythm can be established.

These five steps are a beginning, and in no way exhaustive. What are some strategies that you utilize to hold employees accountable?

On the other hand, if you recognize an accountability avoidance behavior in your organization, let’s talk. Joyner Advising Group exists to help forward-looking leaders create alignment. To learn more, check us out here.