Mind the gap
Between intention and impact
Hi everyone - I hope March is treating you well.
This month I’ve got a story for you.
I coached a wonderful Head of Department once - let’s call her Grace.
Grace really, really wanted to be a good leader for her team. She’d just been promoted internally from manager level. She knew the organisation she worked in really well (and all the politics!), she’d delivered the work successfully for years and she was - to be honest - a bit of a perfectionist.
Grace wanted to help her team. She knew they were overworked. She knew they were being asked to deliver a LOT.
So she helped out. She got involved. She took work off them when they were overloaded and sometimes she just did stuff herself because she didn’t want to add to their workload.
She also wanted to make sure that everything the team produced was the best it could be, with the benefit of her experience and organisational awareness. She wanted them to be respected internally and to protect them from walking into minefields. So she made sure she had an eye on all the ongoing projects and that all decisions were run past her.
Can you see the problem here?
Of course, Grace started to feel overwhelmed and burnt out.
But there was another consequence. Her team started to feel demotivated. Work started slowing down. Other teams and clients started getting annoyed.
Grace was doing everything with the right motivations. She was trying to be a good leader. But she was making an entirely different impact from the one she intended.
We can all get tripped up by that gap.
Not all of us will do the same as Grace. We all have our own blind spots.
One of mine was always trying to be positive as a leader and therefore making people feel like I wasn’t listening to their concerns.
I worked with a CEO once who was so keen to be honest and open with staff about the challenges the organisation was facing that, rather than reassuring them, he left them all terrified they were going to lose their jobs.
The thing is, most people you work with will have no idea what you intend. They will only experience the impact.
What Grace’s team saw and experienced was a lack of trust. They saw a leader who didn’t delegate because she thought they wouldn’t do a good enough job. The result was that they lost confidence and motivation
What people outside the team experienced was a bottleneck, where everything had to go through one (overloaded) person so everything was delayed. The imapct was that they started to get frustrated and exclude her department when they could.
Once Grace had identified the gap, we could start to unpick why it had grown and what assumptions, beliefs and behaviours she had to shift.
Because she was a great person who wanted to be a good leader, she was able to do that and start to think about delegating more and getting comfortable with the idea that things might not be perfect, but they would get done.
All of which was great for those around her at work. But just as importantly it was better for her. She was able to stop putting so much pressure on herself and felt a lot less overwhelmed.
So here are some things to think about this month:
What impact are you having on those around you?
Was that your intention?
Do you need to “mind the gap”?
If you’re new here ….
Hi, my name is Ruth and I am a coach, facilitator and consultant working with leaders who want to make an impact.
I offer a range of resources under The Human Leader, all of which are free and designed to help you lead the way you want.
If you work in a charity or not-for-profit, you can join my monthly coaching group
You can download my resilience self coaching workbook
You can download my guide to running an away day
I put my most popular emails and articles into the blog
I’m working on building this up - so do let me know if there is anything that you would like to see on there.