One of the nettling things about good leadership is that it changes as your role and stature in an organization changes. It turns out that many of the very practices that distinguished you in lower levels of the org chart actually become liabilities or limiters when you reach the executive suite. This means that if you want to be most effective in a top job, you’ve got to unlearn some of the best lessons you learned early on, or stop doing some of the very things that won you the higher position in the first place. Here’s one of those things: Stop answering people’s questions.
When you are at lower levels on the org chart, or when you’re an “independent performer”, your path to greater influence and opportunity lies in your ability to provide answers. You might do this literally by providing the data or information called for by decisions and decision-makers, or metaphorically by providing the solution to new problems or opportunities. Either way, your ability to personally provide answers and fill the info gap is the key to your credibility, the measure of your effectiveness, and likely your ticket to the “big time.” However, once you’ve made it to the “big time” (or at least the “bigger time”) your success depends less on your own effectiveness than on your ability to foster others’. In this endeavor, your ability and/or inclination to provide answers yourself is not only less useful, but counterproductive.
Effective leadership at this level is about preparing others to provide the answers, and they tend not to do this if you’re busily doing it yourself. I frequently hear executives bemoan the fact that their people won’t “step up” or “answer the tough questions.” They’re frustrated and disappointed and they don’t understand their lack of initiative. “After all,” they say, “when I was in their position I always had the answers…” The problem is, they still do, and it creates a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophesy, that creates the very situation they are disliking.
Followers adjust their actions to fit their leaders’, and if a leader is too full of answers, she will eventually discover that her team is only full of questions. If you find yourself in this predicament, you’ll feel like your subordinates’ action (or inaction) is the impetus for your own, but its likely just as true in reverse. They are taking their cues from you. It’s counterintuitive, but to fix this scenario, you need to flip the script.
At this level, success doesn’t come from how much you know or can figure out; it comes from how much your people know and are willing to do, so keep the focus on them. Make a space for their answers by resisting the urge to give your own. Stop answering questions and start asking them instead. Turn e-mails back to the sender with more question marks than periods, and let people leave your office unresolved more often. This doesn’t mean that you should offer no feedback or guidance at all (being clueless and disengaged is a poor leadership strategy at every level) but use your input to shape consideration and direct discussion more productively rather than to settle it once and for all.
I know you often know the answer, and I that it’s often a better answer than what others might provide, but sometimes its better to have a lesser answer from someone else. I also know it’s often faster, more efficient, to simply provide the answers yourself, but sometimes speed isn’t what you need most. Your own expertise and initiative got you to this role, but it’s your ability to build others’ that is going to take you higher. If you’re not careful and sensitive to this dynamic you risk being another promising leader that didn’t pan out, or worse, one more brilliant failure.
andrewjjohnston 