Invested Leadership · Chapter 04
04Your Team Through New Eyes
The leaders you already have are not the ones on the org chart.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”Wayne Dyer
The problem
The leaders you already have are not the ones on the org chart.
A leader sees a different version of every employee than that employee’s peers see. Interactions from the top down are simply not the same as peer-to-peer ones, and the view from the top is the one most decisions get made on.
The authors have watched clients be repeatedly surprised by what their own leadership team thought of specific people. Not mistaken — surprised. They were working from one angle and had mistaken it for the whole picture.
Diana, and the Queen Bee
A firm needed an operations lead under a senior executive who had deep subject-matter expertise and no operations background. Two candidates. One had been there far longer, held the institutional knowledge, and was considered the top gun. The other, Diana, was less experienced and knew less about operations.
Diana got it, because she could relate to people — exactly what the senior executive lacked and therefore what the organization actually needed. She closed the operational gap quickly. Told to solve a records bottleneck by making everyone work two extra hours a day, she pushed back, argued the cramdown would cost more in goodwill than it gained in output, and built an asynchronous overseas team instead. Faster, cheaper, no ten-hour days. She was eventually promoted to her boss’s peer.
The chapter then goes looking for the people like Diana who are already in your organization without the title. Who do people go to for advice about personal situations? Who is constantly helping? Those are displays of leadership. The authors call them Queen Bees, and note the inverse holds too: naming someone a manager does not make anyone follow them.
Key takeaways
The authors’ own summary, from the end of the chapter.
- Extend the process of self-reflection to your leadership team and throughout the entire organization.
- Ascertain your leadership team’s collective strengths and weaknesses to avoid blind spots — and to work out who can fill your own.
- The same process identifies the natural cultural leaders in the wider organization, and what they are good at.
- Seek mirrors, run company-wide 360 reviews, encourage after-action reports, and use the Predictive Index among the leadership team and other cultural leaders.
Title does not convey leadership.
Go further
Have them teach this
to your team.
This chapter is one talk in the keynote. The seminar is where your leadership team actually does the work.