Do you believe if you want something done right, you must do it yourself? Or perhaps you tell yourself if you are genuinely passionate about your work, no amount of it is too much.
Welcome to the Leadership Myths Club for Frustrated Overachievers. The club slogan is “I work better under pressure.” the manifesto contains more than one self-defeating assumption.
Although the actual club in question is fictitious, of course, this scenario is real. Our companies are filled with leaders who continue to act on faulty assumptions. They tell themselves their accomplishments rely solely on the number of hours they work, their endless pursuit of more skills, and their incomparable reliance on logic. They are blind to how these myths may be limiting their leadership success.
Give Up Useless Assumptions and Create a New Story
Anyone who believes leadership is easy today, raise your hand. Hmmm…..
Most of us are struggling to break through the noise in our organizations.
Are you tempted to blame the pandemic, employees, or society in general for your frustrations? Slow down.
Your reasoning may be legitimate up to a point. However, why dwell on what you can’t control? Use your brainpower wisely, and focus on where you do have power. Push through your limitations by abandoning the myths holding you back.
The Myth of Urgency
Does this sound familiar? Hurry, hurry, hurry. Your to-do list grows by the hour. You never have time to spare, and you always feel overwhelmed.
This is the story characterizing many overachievers. However the narrative is full of holes. Constant stress and time pressure are not your friends in a world demanding fresh starts and ground-breaking solutions to complex challenges.
If round-the-clock work prevents you from relaxing and reflecting, you are dampening your ability to create and innovate. And you are likely to burn out, not just once but repeatedly.
Have you ever had the following experience? You pushed hard to solve a problem to no avail. Finally, you walked away from it and engaged in some other less stressful activity. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a viable solution came to you while cooking dinner or working out.
Most of us recognize the scenario!
Gemma believes hard work is the path to success. She puts in 12-hour days routinely, and often works on weekends. And when not at work, Gemma continues to obsess over it.
Gemma is hard on her employees. She assumes those who are not willing to work 12-hour days probably don’t believe as strongly as she in the company’s mission.
However, her unrelenting schedule seems to be letting her down lately. She is a senior leader in a company with high turnover. And the organization appears stuck as the leaders try to bring people back to the office as the pandemic wanes.
Her answer to her dilemma? She works harder and longer in hopes of improving the workplace culture driving out so many employees.
Gemma would do well to remember, overwork kills creativity. Our creative brains function best when we are relaxing, and brute force often results in inferior or no solutions.
Geoffrey James, contributing editor to Inc., authored an article taking on the myth of overwork. He ended it by saying we need the courage to relax. Yes indeed.
Skills Alone Do Not Guarantee Good Leadership
Leadership skills: We learn them in school and develop them on the job.
We seek out workshops to learn how to develop strategies, solve problems, and set SMART goals. No one would deny the importance of these skills to leaders.
The problem comes when we face unprecedented challenges, and we believe if we just focused on honing our skills or developing new ones, we could move the mountain.
Skills alone will not enable our longed-for breakthroughs.
Lauren is a senior leader of a startup in a very competitive industry. She is intelligent and ambitious. She assumes skill mastery and hard work will pull her through even the most difficult situations.
However, lately, her efforts to strengthen company resilience are falling flat. So, she enrolls in a leadership skills workshop to become even more adept. Nevertheless, she remains fatigued and burned out.
The cycle she frequently repeats as she moves from company to company resembles the following: Lauren starts very strong, works hard, and concentrates on applying her masterful proficiencies and time-tested techniques to the job at hand.
She errs repeatedly by relying on her skills alone to overcome the barriers she faces to complex problems. She must expand the way she envisions leadership rather than merely seeking to become more skillful or to find new techniques for addressing the challenges.
And that brings us to another myth.
Logic Alone as the Path to Strong Leadership
The time for leading only through logic passed long ago. Multifaceted human beings are emotional, logical, physical, social, and spiritual. And we do not want to subjugate all parts of ourselves to logic as we carry out our jobs.
The best leaders understand relationships are crucial to their success. And the ability to lead requires connecting with others as whole human beings, not just logic-driven workers.
Want to have an impact on the organizational culture? Then honor the many sides of all who are part of the cultural story.
When Old Leadership Stories Fail, Give Them Up
Many traditional leadership stories, in addition to these, do not hold up in our complicated world. Yet we lag in uncovering and giving up the myths.
So, why are we so reluctant to jettison what isn’t working for us? Are we too afraid or too lazy to find new, more relevant stories?
Maybe we are not aware that we still hold these faulty assumptions. Or perhaps the stories worked for us in the past and are still effective in relatively simple, familiar situations. Therefore we apply them in all circumstances. Big mistake!
Once we hit the proverbial wall, continuing to rely on these routines is fruitless. Complexity requires new ways of thinking and leading.
Yes, change is uncomfortable. And finding new leadership frameworks and routines is hard work. Yet the choice is clear: we can either muster the courage to change or continue to repeat our self-defeating behavior cycles.
Remember the time-tested adage often attributed to Einstein: The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results.
