We live in a momentous time in human history, one that has never offered more abundance and opportunity. Breathtaking advances in science and exponential technological innovation bloom all around us, making our lives better and easier. And yet there are people at all levels of organisations who feel fatigued, distressed, and even beaten down at work. It’s a Dickensian dichotomy – the best of times and the worst of times.
I empathise with the very real pressures, difficult bosses, or underperforming reports people face at work. In a challenging environment, it can feel easier and safer to just hunker down, do your job, stay in your lane, and let everyone sink or swim on their own. However, we know fully that a change is needed in the team or entire organisation even. We feel as though we know the solution to the problem but we just hold back. Why? Because “this is not my job”, “my title doesn’t allow me to tell them what to do”, simply put “I am not in charge”.
Seize responsibility
The fact is that we attach too much importance to our job title and many of us would use this as an excuse to shy away from the leadership opportunities available to us and the responsibility we all have to make positive changes in our world.
After having that conversation with many people, I keep on hearing the same rejections “Your statement doesn’t work in our industry”, or “You don’t know how we do things here”. Yes it is true that some organisations have a strong hierarchical culture and having a voice that could be heard when we are at the bottom of the food chain doesn’t seem very plausible. However I would argue that no matter what your status is within an organisation, the way to be a leader is to start leading. Right now. Do the job before you have the job. That choice is always entirely in your hand. And the way to begin is by accepting that it’s all on you.
A friend of mine, Alex, worked as a Designer in a well known Beverage Company and got very frustrated with the Account Manager, David, who was responsible for the launch of new products. Both of them worked in separate departments and would report to different people but the success of their job would highly depend their abilities to work together. When I asked him why he felt that David fell short of expectations, Alex was able to clearly articulate his mistakes and more interestingly he also felt that he had an answer for all the problems. Therefore I suggested that he should consider ways to help David improve his performance. But Alex shook his head at the idea of helping him. “That’s not my job”, he said, “And even if I knew how to help him, he’s not going to want to hear form me. I know him. He’ll get defensive. He always does when someone says something that touches his turf, even without criticism”.
I’ve heard it so many times before: “They won’t listen to me anyway. It will never work”. It’s a common excuse for not stepping up to lead, especially when being a leader is not part of your job description. But real leadership is not about telling others what to do. It’s about inviting others, encouraging others, getting others excited about new possibilities. True leadership doesn’t presume to have all the answers. In fact the opposite is true.
"The best leaders start with an open mind and invite others to seek solutions with them. Truly great leadership is about genuinely caring about the other person’s success as you mutually learn and grow. But it is absolutely crucial to leading others when you have no positional authority" – Keith Ferrazzi
Take charge of your relationships
My recommendation was that Alex get to know David, and let David get to know him. He should suspend his assumptions about him so he could find out what was important to him at work and in his personal life. When I am in this situation, I find the best way to start is to ask the other person’s advise about something you would like to know more about. I suggested Alex to be curious about David’s interests and his life. The goal is to build a genuine rapport with the other person. Share ideas and eventually we’ll look for ways to improve, to rise, together.
"How well do you know the people who work with you? Do you know the three or four events in their life that have shaped who they are today?" – Cheryl Bachelder
Team members with those insights are able to understand their peers’ motivations and desires, leading to better conversations and fewer misunderstandings. That said, I told Alex that it might not work all the time. That is always a possibility with any relationships. The importance of taking that first step is that until you try, you really can’t know if someone will make a good teammate. If David turns out to be unreceptive, I told him he could shift his focus to other people, and another problem.
Alex and I kept in touch over the following months and gave me updates on his progress. He took to heart that it was his responsibility to reach out and build a relationship with David. Both of them began to talk more often, first about work challenges, and eventually about themselves. Over time they ended up building a trusting relationship at work and even took on extra duties as a team. Alex told me that he believed that David just needed to be reengaged by someone he could trust. No boss assigned them to the tasks they took on together – they just took the initiative and ran with it. Position and authority didn’t come into play. Alex and David challenged the status quo, also co-elevated their teams and went on to launch new products successfully.
"When you take responsibility for developing close co-elevating relationships with your teammates, you find you can overcome obstacles that previously seemed insurmountable" – Jeff Bell
Refute the excuses
Redefining and broadening our relationships starts with recognising that each of us is responsible for doing this ourselves. It’s not the responsibility of our teammates, our boss, or the company’s leadership. Simply put, we create the reactions of those around us through our behaviours, and in the end, we need to own the decision whether we want to have successful relationships with our co-workers, bosses, clients or partners.
All of that is obviously easier said than done. I know that some people challenge, test and provoke you. People are difficult sometimes. Well, most of the time… And believe me, I have faced many challenges that made me want to back off and give up. However one thing would keep me go forward – the fact that if I didn’t attempt to transform the relationships around me, I knew that I was choosing to be mediocre and hide behind excuses.
Keth Ferrazzi, author of Leading Without Authority, does an excellent job at describing some of excuses we would use when we shy away from leading ourselves and others.
1. Laziness
Most of us are satisfied with relationships based on coexistence. As we are busy, we fail to to follow through and faithfully co-elevate with others because it feels like it’s too much work. The reality is that we can’t afford to abdicate our responsibility to lead because our to-do list is too long. If we hang back with a not-my-job attitude, we might wind up with not-a-job. Co-elevating relationships require extra-time. It requires us to be pro-active. Although we’re feeling jammed, it requires no effort to fire off a quick email to set up a 15-minute call. If the mission is important, we will do what we need to do to get the job done and co-elevate our relationships.
"We want to go after problems that no one else has solved, and create things that no one else has ever figured out. To do that, we need people who don’t make excuses" – Scott Cook
2. Deference
All too often I hear people resist taking the first step toward co-elevation in deference to the organisational chart. When a task crosses a boundary and require the help of colleagues in other departments or involves advocating new initiatives, I’ll hear, “That’s above my pay rate”, or “It’s not my call”. Someone once told me, “it’s not my job to be my boss’s coach”. But if your boss turns out to be the person you need to engage with to make a difference – then, yes, when the occasion allows, you might have to coach your boss. If you ever catch yourself being so deferential to the chain of command that you fail to speak your mind and hide the truth, you are not only letting yourself down, you’re letting the whole team down. The truth is that often, people are waiting for you to dive in and become more involved.
3. Playing the victim
When people or events disappoint you, don’t run away, resign yourself to the situation, or succumb to self-pity. Take the rational response to the situation and just treat accepting your disappointment the way you accept the forces of the market – as a reality to be dealt with.
"One of the best things about accepting the mindset of leading without authority is that it can cure the disease of seeing yourself as a victim" – Keith Ferrazzi
I lived with the victim mindset for years, telling myself and others stories that would excuse my failure to act in certain situations. I felt victimised after being demoted in a previous role. I blamed others for not pulling their weight. I used such stories whenever I felt short on delivering projects the way I’d envisioned. On certain issues I was blind to the reality that I was just giving up, rather than doing the hard work of facing the conflict and owning my part in why a relationship wasn’t working.
It took me years to realise that it was my own doing. Now I can see with more compassion, how people can get so deeply invested on seeing themselves as victims that they make it impossible to succeed. When self-pity becomes a disease.
Once we accept the idea that it’s all on us, the excuse that we are the victim goes away. That understanding gives us total freedom to act, to build co-elevating relationships, and to lead without authority.
Remember – it’s all on you! Break free from indulgent judgments, self-serving stories, and the pernicious habit of needing to be right or insisting that the other person reach out to you first. There is a professional, emotional, and physical cost to indulging feelings that keep us stuck and resentful. We give away our power, and fail to co-elevate, when we insist things have to go our way.
