The Leaders Dilemma – task vs behaviour and the impact on performance
The demands of organisational life, with the constant change agenda, quality service and improvements, rising profits or cost savings, mean that you may as a leader experience feeling under constant pressure. These circumstances increase the likelihood of reactive and often unhelpful ego-centred behaviour.
According to the Gallup survey 2017 (Gallup (2017), State of the American Workplace, www.gallup.com/workplace/238085/state-american-workplace-report-2017) just under 70% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged. Gallup’s definitions are:
Not engaged – an employee is in ‘checked-out’ mode. They show up for work each day and do their tasks, but aren’t passionate, innovative or making deeper contributions.
Actively disengaged – these are employees who are deeply unhappy and/or acting out, possibly working against the organisation’s objectives on a daily basis.
Gallup describes certain elements that contribute to enabling engagement and are clearly linked to leadership behaviour. These include the need for people to be clear on what is expected of them, to understand how they contribute to the business’s overall goals and, probably most importantly when it comes to leadership impact, to have strong relationships, feeling part of a team and experiencing their manager as genuinely caring about them.
A leader’s ability to build relationships, which enhance confidence in those they lead, creates a culture of safety and trust makes all the difference to levels of performance and organisational success. How we show up, the way we relate to ourselves and to others, our management of ourselves, our ego and our response to others all create our unique leadership style and ability to communicate directions and engage others to come with us.
It is well documented that people join an organization they admire, but leave because of the way they have been managed and led. (Buckingham, M and Coffman, C (2005) First, Break All The Rules: What the world’s greatest managers do differently. London: Simon & Schuster Ltd) This attrition costs the organization not only in terms of time and money spent on recruiting, inducting and ultimately losing talent, but also on a strategic level as it is potentially damaging to reputation, brand and creating an organisation fit for the future. The majority of leaders I come into contact with today are well-intentioned people, wanting to do a good job and make a positive difference. Their challenge is not so much achieving the task, because they are skilled in task management and delivery skills. It is more about how to manage themselves, their beliefs and confidence to influence stakeholders and the performance of their teams, while navigating often complex and politically charged cultures and dynamics.
And this is the dilemma, the chicken and egg of the situation. Organisations are nothing more than a collection of human beings coming together with a common purpose and endeavour. Although they are populated by ordinary people, something happens when a group comes together as an organisation. The 2003 Canadian film The Corporation reviews the behaviour of large organisations from the perspective of psychological pathology and finds them to have the personality traits of a psychopath. (The Corporation (2003), directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, written by Joel Bakan, Harold Crooks and Mark Achbar)
This psychological condition is classified by:
Superficial charm – psychopaths are initially engaging to others
Lack of empathy and recognition or respect for the rights of others
Focus on self – psychopaths put themselves and their own ego wants and needs first
A disregard for rules and law
Manipulative behaviours in pursuit of control and power
Lack of remorse or guilt for action
A tendency to display abusive or violent behaviours, particularly if their fragile ego is slighted or threatened in any way
We have all probably got stories of leaders who have narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies, and there are many more who cause a scandal and hit the headlines in the press, but from my experience of working in organisations over the last couple of decades, while people with these character traits do exist, I have come across far more organisations led by people who don’t fall into this category. So what happens within the organisation to result in a collective set of behaviours that is so far removed from humanity?
Focus on task over behaviour
Ultimately, whether it’s in the private or public sector, an organisation has a result it is trying to achieve. This may be providing the best value to taxpayers, quality of service or product to customers, or profits for shareholders. This means that the task, or what the organisation is there to do, dominates attention. In comparison, behaviour, or how people are being, is given attention almost reluctantly. Meetings are consumed by discussions about task; processes are constantly streamlined in service of task; the majority of activity is all about what the organisation needs to do to get the job done.
As leaders, managers or team members, we can easily find ourselves on the hamster’s wheel of ‘do, do and do some more’, relentlessly busy with activity to ensure the task gets done. There is little or no time for activities that support enhancing performance, such as coaching conversations, reflection or considering strategy.
Things are out of kilter. The over focus on task and pressure to deliver tends to result in a cultural disconnect between head and heart, with a cold focus on the short-term results of the bottom line rather than the far-reaching, longer-term impact and contribution the organisation could create.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying an organization shouldn’t be making a profit or spending the public purse responsibly. What I am suggesting is the over focus on task results in a business culture that is non-holistic and neglects the many positive human qualities that create great places to work and enhance performance.
This lack of attention to human behaviour and the cultural climate makes the workplace ripe for our egos to play out and utilise our well-worn survival strategies.
Part of the leader’s role is to create the circumstances that ensure optimum engagement and performance, yet what often happens is that leaders create circumstances that challenge people’s ability to perform, and can even be damaging to it. For example, the most common complaint I hear from leaders and their teams across all sectors and types of organisation is ‘We are dealing with an ever-increasing workload, fast-moving change and shifting priorities, and constantly needing to do more with less’. The effect is that people experience stress and exhaustion, and in such a state we are much more vulnerable to our ego traps. Leaders may become increasingly isolated from what is going on ‘on the ground’ in their organisations, and people don’t push back because they are caught up in a survival mode. Culture and ego survival strategies keep these challenging circumstances in place and can create a ‘learned helplessness’ around them.
Even in organisations that already have a relatively sophisticated perspective on performance, task still usurps consideration of how people are being and working together. I have observed more than one organization put in place a specially designed process to support and encourage leaders to step back and look at how they and their teams have performed, only for that process to become a task in itself. Treated like a tick-box exercise, it is completed as quickly as possible with little if any exploration or learning.
Breaking habits isn’t easy. Focusing on the task, which is external to ourselves, feels so much more comfortable than self-reflection, yet our ego’s avoidance of discomfort leads to many missed opportunities. The fallout is the loss of valuable insights, learning and innovations that could enhance performance.
Other processes also often contradict what the organisation is espousing to be important. For example, being ‘people focused’ is a popular organisational value, yet all targets tend to relate to sales or cost saving and have nothing to do with how a leader has led their team. If this is what a leader is measured on, then it is where they are going to put their attention, creating a system and culture that is task focused and potentially psychopathic at the expense of embracing behaviours and attitudes that create real engagement and enhancement of performance.