The Decider Leader, making decisions in a vacuum

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson continues the series on non-canonical leadership types by looking at what she calls Decider Leaders. She tells the story of Mark, an imaginary leader who gets in way over his head and tries to lead through the strength of his decisions. Tune in to see if the results are good or bad.

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

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Transcript

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And he is in way over his head. Hello and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson. I'm your host, and today we are continuing the series of leadership types that you will not find in the canon. So what that means is they're not things like authoritarian, authoritative, coaching, servant, laissez faire, all of that. We've already done the buddy leader, we did the equipping leader and the visionary. Today we're gonna look at a leader that I'm calling the decider. And I'll get to what that means in a minute. First, I want to tell you a story about a man named Mark. Mark is not his real name, and Mark is not a single person. So just to be clear. Mark is someone who has spent the last 10 years of his career as a freelancer, going into companies on a project basis, working with the employees there, but never managing them on a permanent basis. Never being responsible for their development, never being responsible for their well-being. He was just there to check up on the work and make sure the project was done on time. He came into an organization that was at high chaos. He came in on a freelance basis and he was there, not exactly for a project, but he was there, I think, on a three or four-month contract to support the head of that department and to function in this individual contributor role. He immediately started spending time with the CEO. He went directly to the CEO and other C-suite members and also other directors of different departments throughout the organization. And he ingratiated himself with them. He became someone that they trusted, someone that they liked. He was a good old boy, and he fit right in with the culture of this organization. So they liked him, they trusted him, and in fact, the head of Mark's department left the organization during those first few months that he was there. And instead of using their recruiting department to find qualified candidates to fill that position, they did no kind of search. They instead just promoted Mark into that position. So suddenly you have a person who has only ever led projects in his career, and now he's managing 30-something people. He's got several teams reporting to him and people across the offices globally. And he is in way over his head. He does not know what he's doing. Now, this organization had a leadership development program. They had cohorts of new and lesser experienced leaders who would get content, met together, talked about their struggles, suggested things to each other, heard advice from an expert. They had a program. But Mark claimed to have more than 10 years of experience already in leading people. And because he claimed that, he sort of tested out of going into the cohort program. So instead of being in the cohort program, he qualified as the head of a department and also someone claiming more than 10 years of experience leading people, which again did not have. He qualified for their leadership coach program, where he could spend time talking with a leadership coach about whatever was concerning him. And he didn't have to go through the cohort process with the lowly leaders. And I think, I mean, one of the reasons I think he claimed 10 years of experience was if he hadn't, people would have questioned what on earth he was doing in that head of a department role that he was in. So there was, I'm sure, a reason for that. And had he gone to these cohort meetings, his lack of knowledge, experience, and expertise would have become obvious immediately. And he would have been shown for the actual imposter that he was. He did not have imposter syndrome. This man felt that he belonged in every room. But he didn't, and he didn't have that experience to back him up. So another note about leadership coaches. If you have listened to the earlier episode on this podcast about how not to do effective leadership development in companies, you will know that I am in full favor of cohort learning, where people receive content either asynchronously or synchronously, they go through it, they come together in a group, they talk about it, they reflect on it, they put it into practice, and they iterate it. And this is just topic by topic. Because what happens when you go to a leadership coach is you're only giving them certain bits of information. The coach can only help you with what you're willing to tell them. This is true in any one-on-one situation, especially when you're not there to observe what's actually going on. These leadership coaches tend to be outside of organizations because they work as a consultant. So they don't know what other people in the company know about these teams and what's actually going on. It's another reason that I really think that a cohort is the way to go because then you have peers addressing concerns with each other and they can hold each other accountable. I was talking with a friend about this recently, and she she works in a medical field and they don't have this kind of structure. They don't have coaching available to them. But she has a friend who is receiving leadership coaching. And I was really curious. I said, okay, tell me why. What's been going on? And she said, well, unfortunately, this woman's leading a team. It's not a huge team, but she doesn't really seem to like people very much. She isn't very compassionate. She's just there for them to get the work done. And if they're not meeting her standards 100%, she gets really upset with them. She's kind of yelled at them. And so people are unhappy on her team. So they sent her to a leadership coach. Okay. I said, how does that seem to be going? And my friend said, Well, she's actually not very happy with her leadership coach because he's telling her to do things like, well, maybe if you pretend to have more compassion, you can develop compassion for your people and use that as a starting place, which goes back to the fake it till you make it, which, as you know, I'm not a fan of. But in this situation, I think that was actually pretty reasonable advice. However, this woman said, Well, if I do that, then I'm not authentic. And don't I need to be authentic? So she was not really interested in taking the advice that the leadership coach was offering her. And I don't think she wanted to develop in any way. I think this was a great example of a company wasting a ton of money, because I'm sure this was expensive. But they're wasting, they're throwing money at something to fix a problem that doesn't have to be dealt with in this way. If I were this woman's boss, I would put her into a cohort of her peers who would be much more likely to hold her accountable for her nonsense and say, no, this isn't what we've seen. You don't have to do it this way. You can behave differently. And maybe this woman would actually be with people who she respected and she would listen to them. But that was not her situation. So that's a note on leadership coach leadership coaching. And one reason I think it's not a great, it's not a great solution for every leader problem. Okay, back to Mark. So Mark is way over his head. He is in a head of position. And instead of learning alongside other new leaders, which he was, instead of doing that, this organization sent him to a leadership coach. And that coach gave him advice that he took to mean something very specific. Now, what he reported the coach to have said was you need to make decisions. You are a decider. Make the decision and move forward. Now, I'm just gonna editorialize here for a second and give the leadership coach the benefit of the doubt to say, I can imagine a situation where someone comes to you as a coach where they're having trouble making a decision simply because they're not sure which which way to go is correct. They're waffling a bit, they're not really sure, they don't have in mind that they should just make a decision and then they can iterate. They're just, they've gotten themselves stuck. And you know what? For Mark's level of incompetence and lack of experience, I can imagine that he was often stuck. And so if you haven't told a leadership coach the whole story, if you, like Mark, have told them that you have so many years of experience, they may take the approach to say, hey, remember, you are there to decide. You can decide. This is what you're paid to do. You have this title, you need to make a decision. And from where I sit, I'm almost positive what they meant was make a decision so that you can get going and then you can iterate. Mark interpreted that in a pretty different way. He started thinking of himself as a very powerful man, a very powerful authority figure whose role in the company was to make decisions and make them alone. He had meetings with his team managers, but he had a very, very short attention span. He could hardly ever keep up with whatever was being said in the room. He lost interest, he would close his computer, he would start looking away, or he'd look at his phone. Everybody knew that he was disengaged. But it was his job to run these meetings. But he was struggling with it. So he started talking about having fewer meetings. And the team managers looked at themselves and said, Um, we need these meetings. These meetings are really important for us. And Mark was, he didn't really buy it because he wanted to make decisions. And he started doing some weird things. And when I say weird, I mean he would start pulling employees aside and having them work on little projects and jobs for him, and he would not communicate those to their managers, which became very confusing for those team members because they didn't know if they could say yes. It hadn't, it wasn't part of their plan for how to use their time. And when they would talk to their bosses about it, those managers didn't know what Mark had done, and they didn't know what their team members were talking about. So it became extremely messy. And Mark started taking his managers out of meetings that he needed them to be in because they were their role in these meetings was to provide context for information. So he started going directly to the team members who held the information. But again, what those managers held was the context for it. And to make a good decision, he was going to need the context. But he refused it. And so he started pulling team managers out of meetings, was tremendously confusing to those team members, saying, I'm not the person who can answer these questions for you. My manager is. And Mark would just brush that off. No, no, no, no, no. You're the one that I need. It created so much chaos and it created so much distrust among the members of his team, the people who were reporting directly to Mark, had really no understanding of what was going on. And when questioned, when somebody decided to push back, one of the team managers pushed back, they'd finally had enough and confronted him and said, Mark, you need me, you need the context that I can provide for this meeting. What's going on? Mark blew up. He became so angry immediately, and he said, I am the decider. That is my job, and that's what I'm going to do. I decide. I decide what happens here, not you. And I'm going to make these decisions and I don't need your input. I don't need you. Wow. His actions had already made that clear, but then he made it crystal clear to his team managers that their input was not desired. I really wondered, is that what the coach was going for? Like if you brought the coach into the room and said, I want you to hear what Mark is saying, is this what you told him? I really think it probably wasn't. And that coach would say, uh no. This is not what I meant. This has been wildly taken out of context and completely misunderstood. Because when you put yourself, when a leader puts themselves into the position of decider and becomes super hyper focused on that role, they can very quickly start to miss all that extra information that they really, really need in order to make the best decision possible. Can they make decisions on their own? Of course. Of course. Sure, they can. But are they making the best possible decision for their organization and even themselves? Um. I would argue no. They're not. They're making decisions with small or non-contextual bits of information. And they're not letting their managers who report to them do their jobs. They're cutting them off at the knees and saying, like, yeah, you have this title, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna respect you. I'm not gonna bring you in to this decision. And you know, just because you get input from managers doesn't mean you're gonna do what they advise you either, and that's fine. But it's really bringing people into the process that often really makes the difference. And if you are in decider mode and you decide that you're not gonna get input from anybody else, you're creating your own problems and you're gonna have to deal with them. And Mark did and didn't. I feel so bad for him in a way. Like he was so over his head. He had no idea what he was doing. And he needed actually the most basic leadership development he could have possibly gotten. He would have been great in a cohort. Because any leadership coach he talked to, he wouldn't be honest with them about the actual amount of experience he had leading people. I do think that if anything similar to a decider has been lumped into other categories before, that's the most likely place where it's been found. But I'm actually not a huge fan of the traditional canonized leadership styles. And one of the reasons is I think they tend to be pretty general. And I'm I think it's hard for a lot of people to find themselves in those styles, particularly women and people who do not fit the title of a typical leader. So people of color, people who identify as neurodivergent, people who are part of the queer community, as well as women. I think that those styles are a little bit more difficult to find ourselves in. And that's why I prefer to create my own style names. And it's why I've talked about the buddy leader, the equipping leader, the visionary, and now the decider. Because to me, these describe, I guess, maybe smaller points of someone's behavior in a leadership or management role, things that are easier to pinpoint from a smaller viewpoint, so that someone could be multiple of these styles together, but because they're describing certain behaviors as well as mindsets, but not some sort of highly generalized way of leading. I'm not I'm not such a huge fan of those. So I think that it's it's instructive to use a story like that to think about where you may have seen this behavior because it may, of course, not have been a way that a person generally was who you worked with, but it could have been a style that they adopted for a time. It may be it they got into a certain mode and that's how they started to behave. So I hope it was helpful for that. So your challenge for today for this week is to consider when have you seen someone start to behave as a decider? I have a feeling that even though it's not a style that's often discussed, I have a feeling that it's pretty common, that it's a bit more normal than we might want to think. It's not a pleasant leadership style to work under because it just becomes frustrating all the time. But I want you to think about when you've seen this, and I want you to also think about when you might have slipped into the role of a decider, because I think it's also something that we can easily do ourselves. We can look at it from a distance and say, these are not leadership qualities that I want to have. Fine. However, I think especially, I think about myself, because when I'm operating in an area where I'm not really sure what I'm doing, I can slip into this, which is kind of counterintuitive until you realize the best leaders are the ones who are so confident in what they're doing that they can afford to be generous with everybody else and make sure that everyone has a seat at the table, that everyone's voice is heard. It doesn't mean they're necessarily going to do what everybody else says, but they see the value in having all those different voices present. And it's when we're not performing in a place where we have expertise and comfort that we start wanting to exert that authority and that power to show everybody who's actually boss. There's a lot of traps here. There's a lot of traps here. And I hope that you can see them. And I hope that the story of this imaginary mark has somehow been illuminating for you when you consider what leadership looks like for yourself and what you've seen in others. And wow, what kind of leader you want to be going forward? Because that's in so many ways the biggest point of all. That's enough for today. Thank you so much for joining me. You can find us on Instagram at unleaderlypodcast. No parentheses, no punctuation, all one word. You can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us on YouTube. If you're on YouTube, I would love it if you left a comment after you listen or watch one of the videos. Big thanks as always to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.