woman leader with hands on hips in front of team

How Well Do You Handle Power? Leadership of Entitlement Vs. Responsibility

What’s more important to you — the status you get from being in a leadership position or the responsibility to serve others?

The quality of your leadership is shaped by whether you emphasize the status and privilege that you get from being in a leadership position versus the responsibility you have toward others.

The Importance of Initiation for Leadership

In traditional cultures throughout time, you would have undergone initiations to mark important transitions and stages in life to acknowledge reaching a new level of maturity or ability. For example, an initiation could indicate whether you were ready to become an elder or a leader in the group. Initiation can also reveal your life purpose and unique talents to yourself and the community. Through initiatory processes, a group learns to trust individuals to be in positions of power like being a chief or an elder in a tribe.

With each successive initiation, you would examine some aspect of yourself for the purpose of letting go of qualities or behaviors that won’t work for them going forward. The idea is that you would grow into your unique self over time and to become a better person and bring your unique gifts to the community.

An African Tale About Initiation & Leadership

There is a traditional African story that illustrates the importance of initiation in terms of leadership. It involves a brother and sister, whose father had passed away.

One day after his passing, the father appeared to the siblings and waved them over to follow after him. They follow him even though they can’t believe their eyes.

He led them to down through a hole in the ground, and underneath the ground, they see an entire village. The father led the children to the center of what appeared to be a deserted village and motioned to them to hide in some nearby bushes, where they could silently watch what happened.

After a while, a crowd of people come to the center of the village, followed shortly by someone who looked like an important person. The boy and girl saw one side of this person was covered in maggots. The people of the village gathered around and started picking away the maggots and cleansing this side of this high-status person.

After they had done that , it was getting dark so everyone, including the important chief or elder, left. The brother and sister stayed hiding until dawn the next morning, when the people again returned, followed the important person. This time, the children saw their other side, which was covered in gold. Again, the people of the village gathered around and began anointing this golden side the chief with oil and polished it until it gleamed brightly. When the ritual was complete everyone departed.

Now this story points out a couple of important things about leadership:

  • Even as a leader, you have both wonderful qualities that support your work with others (gold) and some not-so-wonderful qualities that block your ability to express your unique wisdom and talents (maggots). With intention and the help of those around you, you can cleanse what is wounded and unwanted, like the maggot side, and polish your noble aspects, like the gold side.
The Wisdom Missed for Today’s Leaders

Today, you are probably not as aware of the initiations you go through in life — even if you go through a ceremony — but they still happen. Unfortunately, it’s likely you miss the wisdom you could get out of them. As a result, instead of consciously designing and debriefing initiations that prepare you psychologically for the responsibility of leadership, today’s culture focuses more on the outer material things you can achieve as you climb in status.

Thus, it’s likely that you were not adequately centered in knowing yourself and were unprepared to assume your first (and maybe subsequent) leadership position. It’s likely you hadn’t determined and detonated your emotional triggers or defined their own unique purpose and contribution in life. In other words, you probably weren’t fully aware of or worked to heal your own maggots. And you probably hadn’t fully embraced and polished your unique gifts and talents to use for the benefit of others.

The Recurring Mistake Organizations Make with Leadership

Also in my experience, most companies are not very good at creating structures to support individuals to be ready for positions of greater responsibility leading and supervising others. Instead, the assumption organizations often make is that if you are good at a job due to your technical skills, you’ll be able to lead others effectively. When that assumption is proven false, in some cases, the company calls someone like me to help polish the leader’s “gold” and become aware of and cleanse the “maggots” through coaching.

All this to say, our society bases its definition of success on outward appearances.  To this end, most companies’ repeatedly fail to prepare prospective leaders for the level of self-awareness and emotional maturity required to be effective . This leads to an over-emphasis on the outward status and the material perks of leadership by many of those in leadership positions. This superficial emphasis on the outward trappings of occupying an elevated position are a false signal of worthiness and competence and only serve to reinforce the Ego.

In all likelihood, you will focus on what’s in it for you if you haven’t done the work on yourself (been initiated). This means, your presence and leadership will not be as beneficial to others as it could be. Any inability to handle yourself appropriately impacts your ability to handle power and authority appropriately. Thus, any “maggots” will be painfully evident to everyone around you – others will clearly see your wounds and your shadow qualities even if you don’t see them yourself. Accordingly, most organization do not prepare or initiate new leaders for the psychological and interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence required to lead others effectively.

So, instead of focusing on the status and the perks of leadership (which are often really nice and you should enjoy them), a mindset shift is necessary: with leadership comes greater responsibility to others, which means the process of becoming a leader is a great opportunity for you to grow as a human being. In fact, weirdly, situations will come up (sometimes repeatedly) that require you to face aspects of yourself that you may need to question, reinforce, or even transform. These situations will seem specifically tailored  for you. Situations will repeatedly reflect old patterns and beliefs until you increase your emotional intelligence and take your responsibility to others more seriously.

To conclude, leadership is more about being mindful and humble about your responsibility to others, and that requires you to get in good emotional and psychological shape. It’s less about any entitlement to elevated status and perks. Understanding this allows you to focus on your own development into the type of person who is ready to lead others (and help them grow too). After all, when you attend to your “maggots”, you allow your healed and polished authentic self to impact your team, your community, and the world in the most positive way possible.

individual, team, team identity, team purpose

5 Ways to Transform a Group of Individuals into a Team

In the U.S., most people are taught from an early age to be individually competent and independent. It’s no wonder that most of your employees have some difficulty in knowing how to work effectively within a team. Here are five things you can do to forge a collective sense of “team”:

1. Create Routines That Signal Start of Team Space

Being part of a team is like being a partner in a marriage — both require individuals to give up some of their individual desires and aspirations in service to the group. (Read a previous post I wrote about the ego “sacrifice” required here.) As a team leader, you can reinforce this notion with routines that are designed to signal that the group is entering “team” mode and to put their individual goals to the side.

Examples of these routines are:

  • At the beginning of team meetings, consider starting with a few seconds of silence to allow everyone to bring their focus into the meeting.
  • Use a team “check-in” to allow each individual to engage with the rest of the team from the start.
  • During an initial team or project launch, ask each individual to share what baggage they intend to leave behind (past quarrels or resentments, habits, tendencies, etc.) that won’t serve the team purpose and stakeholders.

In short, you can build small habits into team processes to reinforce the notion that everyone is moving into team mode where the team and its work is the focus instead of furthering individual agendas.

2. Frequently Revisit Team Purpose

To maintain the focus on the collective team endeavor, always remind your team of its purpose. Reminding the team why your team exists is a fundamental way to establish and re-establish team focus. Everything team members do — from the behaviors needed to achieve team success, to the goals and objectives they strive to achieve, to the processes they create for high quality output, should all come from to the team’s purpose. This is also true for each decision made and the roles and responsibilities assigned. In short, team purpose informs everything your team does. Team purpose reminds your team that their collective endeavor is not about them as individuals as much as it is about the team as a whole and the benefit it provides to others.

3. Keep Stakeholders at the Center of the Team’s Work

It’s easy for team members to get overly focused on their individual agendas and responsibilities. Yet, your team’s success is ultimately measured by how well its collective work provides beneficial value for stakeholders. In fact, stakeholders and their needs are the reason for your team’s purpose, which in turn drives your team’s work. (Read a previous article on how to take yourself out of the center.)

To keep your team’s focus on stakeholders, connect with them from time to time. Staying in touch allows your team to discover how well your team is providing valuable benefit to them and whether the relationship is good. When your team sees its stakeholders as central to team operations, you prioritize the collective team endeavor of serving stakeholders over individual team member interests.

4. Make Vulnerability and Fallibility Okay

One of the big reasons individual team members can be overly focused on themselves is that they want to appear capable. Yet, each human on your team has flaws. To mask those flaws, individuals often balk at admitting they sometimes lack skills or that they make mistakes. That’s why it’s important that you as team leader show that it’s okay to admit you aren’t all knowing, may lack some ability, and will own up to mistakes in the spirit of learning. Additionally, your team might consider creating norms around these concepts.

Acknowledging human frailties permits team members to accept each other as individuals. It also can focus them on learning together as a team rather than protecting their individual egos.

5. Create Team Accountability for Individual Team Member Development

As suggested by Keith Ferrazzi, you can forge a deeper focus on the team by creating a Team Relationship Action Plan. The key to such a plan is to ensure each individual team member identifies their own areas for growth. Then, they ask for what they need from other team members to make gains in those areas. This creates mutual accountability between each individual and whole team for individual development that furthers the team purpose and goals.

To conclude, individual talent and creativity are necessary contributions to team success. However, successful teams are able to create a singular team focus to serve their stakeholders. Don’t rely on this happening naturally; consider trying some of these ideas to routinely reinforce what it means to be a team.

 

WANT TO USE THIS IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman works with executives and senior leaders to create team environments that optimize ownership, accountability, learning, and results. Learn more at bethstrathman.com.