An extract from this month’s piece on The Tenon.
Early in my career, a leader I respected told me I was too polite.
I said “please” when I asked my team to do things. To them, that one word weakened my authority. It turned an order into a request, and it let people say no.
They had a point, by their model of leadership. The leader decides, the team executes, and “please” only slows that down.
I kept saying it anyway. These were smart, experienced people, and a team like that doesn’t need telling. It needs to be trusted to think, or it stops bringing you the thinking.
It took me twenty years to understand what that small argument was really about. Two different bets on what a leader is for. One builds people who do what they’re told. The other builds people who can still make the call when you’re not in the room.
We tend to praise the first kind and call it strength. The decisive leader, fast with an answer, always across the detail, the one the whole thing runs through. But a team that runs entirely through one person has a single point of failure, and it is standing at the front.
The leaders whose work outlasts them are quieter than that. They ask more than they tell. They shield their people from the wrong pressure and leave the right pressure in place. They treat being argued with as a sign the thinking has spread, not as a threat. And they measure themselves by what keeps working when they are not in the room.
That is the hardest thing the job asks. It is also the only part that lasts.
Read the full piece here on The Tenon.
