When You Become the Problem That Needs Fixing

What if the biggest risk in your organisation is not culture, capability, or technology, but you?

In recent newsletters, I explored workplace bullying and the danger of efficiency without judgment. Both share a common factor: leadership. I said that leadership bullying is the new workplace epidemic. Its impact on trust, well-being, engagement, and performance is devastating. Efficiency pursued without judgment of the effectiveness will quietly shape behaviour, culture, and risk, often for the worse.

The paradox is that many leaders who bully or have abandoned judgment and ethical thinking are not aware of it until the damage is irreversible. Are you that person?

It was not intentional. It just crept up on you.

You didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become toxic. You told yourself you were raising standards and protecting quality. Driving performance and moving faster.

You called it accountability, while your team called it unpredictability. You thought you were tightening execution while they experienced tightening control. They started managing you rather than the work.

Slowly, you stop being the leader who enables performance and become the reason it slows.

 There is hesitation in the room, and the conversations tighten. There is tension in the team. And without meaning to, you become the obstacle the team is navigating.

How does that happen?

Inconsistent leadership

I described this in a newsletter as, “This could be a leader who exhibits unpredictable moods, changes the rules for no apparent reason, and changes expectations without warning. Employees never know what is expected of them. They live in fear of being wrong. This creates anxiety, confusion, and self-blame. Employees must become hyper-vigilant.”

Anticipation

Employees will try to predict your leadership style. They will walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting you. They spend time trying to anticipate your behaviour and seek patterns in it to inform their manner of interaction with you.

Anxiety

When employees are anxious about your reaction, they worry. They strive for perfection rather than accepting that good is good enough for the task at hand. They prepare excessively before meeting with you. If they must deliver news that they think you will not like, they will dress it up with a ribbon around it, in the hope that it lands better. They will start a conversation, trying to manage your expectations. Rather than saying “We are going to miss the date”, they will say, “We’re making strong progress, but there are a couple of small dependencies we’re just working through…” The truth is delayed, and the risk is softened.

Caution

Employees are overly cautious, which means ideas, opinions, and perspectives either surface slowly or do not surface at all. Everything decreases in speed or comes to a resounding halt.

Fear

When employees fear punishment for getting something wrong, they will not tell you what is really going on. They will avoid your reprimand or reprisal by hiding the truth.

Uncertainty

If you cannot provide clarity of expected outcomes, employees will have to keep on asking questions to ascertain what it is that you want. They are in a no-win situation. If they don’t ask, they won’t know, but if they do ask, they fear admonishment. “What do you mean, you don’t know what to do?

Abandonment

When employees are told what they need to achieve but are then denied any support or guidance under the premise, “You should know what to do”, they are left to flounder and try to find their own way. You have abdicated your responsibility in developing your people.

Pressure

If you set unachievable expectations, you are setting your employees up to fail. You may say you have high standards, but when they are impossible to achieve, you just cause stress, anxiety, and eventually burnout.

Efficiency

The pressure is on you to do more with less. The word efficiency echoes throughout every organisation right now.

To achieve efficiency, you added oversight. You checked in more often, you demanded more frequent updates, and you exercised more control. You became a micromanager.

You wanted to know what everyone was doing at every hour of the day, so you started monitoring online activity. If the green light was on, they were working. If not, what were they doing? When people feel monitored, they shift from contribution mode to compliance mode.

This control does not increase efficiency. It increases dependency and dependency slows everything down.

When you exercise this level of control, you remove opportunities for your employees to practice judgment.

Their capability is built on using their judgment; when they do not, it diminishes. This is when they will defer to you.

When you micromanage, you remove autonomy and accountability. Your employees are no longer accountable for the outcome. They are just carrying out your instructions.

You become accountable for all decision-making and the associated risk. Everything flows back to you, and you become a hindrance to performance.

The more you decide for your team, the less capable they become of deciding without you. This makes you a bottleneck and your team dependent.

The paradox

You will be inclined to tighten control when performance dips, but it has dipped because you have removed autonomy. The cycle repeats itself. You tighten control, performance dips further, and you become more convinced you were right to intervene.

The result

I explored the impacts of stress, anxiety, and burnout in my previous newsletters. But there are also cost implications when you become the problem.

Time

Your people spend their time managing your reactions and predicting your mood. Your need for perfection means they spend time rewriting work that was already good enough. You're insistent on approving all work, which means time is wasted waiting for your approval.

This is time that should be spent solving problems or serving customers.

Rework

When you instil fear into people of being wrong, they will overwork everything.

They overanalyse and over-polish. They avoid making decisions and unnecessarily escalate to you.

The rework keeps on multiplying while you see it as due diligence.

Silence

This is possibly the most dangerous result of your action. I wrote about the danger of silence in the workplace in “It’s Always the Quiet Ones.”

“Silence is the Loudest Scream” is a quote from Eastern philosophy. My interpretation is that when people choose not to speak up or respond, they convey a stronger message or express intense emotions, far more effectively than words.

They are not telling you what is going on. You are not aware of pending risks.

There is no questioning, challenging or disagreement. You have groupthink where no one says anything but just nods in agreement with you. Silence is not agreement. It is protection. And protection is what people do when they do not feel safe.

The mirror

Before you say, “This is not me”, I ask you to take a moment, pause and look in the mirror.

It is often easier to recognise over-control in other leaders, rather than in yourself.

You have been telling yourself you are trying to be efficient, ensure quality, avoid failure, and maintain high standards. You did not intend to intimidate, create fear or silence dissent. However, intent is irrelevant to impact.

Ask yourself these questions, because leadership blind spots rarely announce themselves loudly.

·       Does your team hesitate before speaking up in meetings?

·       Does the conversation go quiet when you join the call?

·       Are you the last to hear about problems?

·       Are you the only person making decisions?

·       What do I do that makes it unsafe to disagree with me?

·       Do your team seek reassurance for matters they used to handle themselves?

·       Are your people just following instructions to the letter without any innovation or creativity?

If you are seeing any of this, you may be the centre of the problem. If you choose to ignore it, the damage will compound quietly.

What if you see yourself?

This is where you need both humility and courage. You must have the humility to admit what has happened and the courage to take action.

Stop

Stop trying to fix the team. The team is responding to you. You may have felt that your intent was justified, but that does not change the impact you have had.

This is your problem to solve.

Ask

Take a deep breath, take a dose of humility and courage, and ask for feedback. Have the humility to explain that you realise your leadership style has been detrimental to the team, and that you want to fix it. Do not make excuses or defend yourself. Have the courage to ask for help and accept what you hear openly. Welcome the feedback and thank the contributors.

Ask questions such as:

·       What do I do that stifles you?

·       What do I do that makes your job harder than it should be?

·       When am I a bottleneck?

·       When do I overstep?

·       Where do I create hesitation?

·       What would help you feel safer challenging me?

Then say nothing apart from thank you. And mean it.

Act

Take it on board and work to fix the problem.

Give back decisions and provide autonomy. Do this publicly so others can hold you accountable.

Be consistent and remove the fear of your reactions. Respond the same way to a challenge as you do to praise, and react the same way on a bad day as on a good one.

People do not want you to be perfect. They just want predictability and certainty.

Keep on asking for feedback and act upon it.

This won’t get fixed overnight, but once you start, and people feel better working with you, it will get easier.

Final words

Leadership is not what you demand. It is what it feels like to work around you.

And if that feeling is fear, hesitation, or silence, then that is your leadership.