This series about Felt Leadership is based on Charles Handy’s 4 Organizational Cultures – Person, Power, Task and Role. To make this more meaningful for individuals we picture a leader as a combination of 4 different “people” – Person, Ruler, Worker & Organizer…
We call these 4 the “Leadership Team”. The characteristics of each, and the Balance between them helps us understand why the Felt Leadership of different Leaders and Teams is so different.
The first of this “Leadership Team” is also the most complex yet often overlooked – the Person.
Not just any person – You. Alone.
Who doesn’t want to be their own boss?
The good news is a lot of the time you are… This is who you are when outcomes are individual (not part of the group), and decisions are delegated. This is also the people in your team under those circumstances.. For many it’s most of their day..
We won’t try to cover the many different personality types here, but it’s obvious that your own personality is a part of “you”. Be aware of it. Try to understand your own attributes.
By definition, a big part of our daily journey is on our own, or at best only loosely connected to others. This has profound impacts on how we “feel” in a team, and also how we make others feel. That personal journey is a big part of the Culture of the teams we are in.
The individual “just doing their thing” plays a much bigger role in most organizations than is given credit. Despite all the hype about “corporate culture” and “star” leaders, many decisions are left to the person on the spot, not even the team leader but the worker. Perhaps most…
So it is also for most leaders – who manage based on how they’ve brought up as a child or conditioned at work, not by reading a script or doing it how their boss wants them to do it. Even less what they learnt in that Leadership Course..
This means the light inside us also lights the way forward for the team.
“..a big part of our daily journey is on our own…”
Good leaders are conscious that their own example matters – not just in front of the team but in their own actions and decisions.
The decisions that we take alone effect the individual, but likely without the immediate feedback we get in a team. The challenge with these is that we are all prone to self-delusion, so perhaps the most important decision we can make on our personal journey is to remain skeptical, to check assumptions. To check the map before we go too far off track. To get a 2nd opinion. Socializing isn’t just a friendly activity it’s a useful reference check.
This also has important implications for those leaders who remain separated or distant from their teams. Geography, busyness, numbers of people or personality separates many leaders and teams, and means those team members are spending more of their time as lone travelers. So is the leader.
How can you treat individuals if you don’t know them? Don’t see them in their own work environment? Don’t understand them?
If every individual effects the whole team it goes without saying that every team is different, even under the same leadership. Also the team “changes” when circumstances change. A team in a crisis is a different team to the same people when smooth sailing. Likewise success or failure impacts the team – because it impacts the individuals in it.
In the end it is the sum of individuals that makes up any team, including you as the leader. You had best take care of those individuals then…and look after them differently under different situations.
Your Team is a complicated thing that runs better if you acknowledge that complexity, and the individuals in it bring their own contribution outside of their formal roles.
Good leaders realize this and seek to understand the People in their team as individuals, as well as themselves, and seek to utilize every individual’s personality & talents not suppress them.
Image credits: weirdlittleworlds.com