When I work with managers, I occasionally ask them what they consider to be team No 1 and team No 2. Most of the time, I get the answer that team number 1 is the team of their subordinates.
When you are the number 1 team leader, and your subordinates are your team, you will have silos, unresolved tensions between departments, underperformance. However, if the number 1 team is a team of (equally skilled) managers, the chances of achieving greater results are much higher.
Leadership is the implementation of your ideas through your colleagues. If you as a leader want to make a change across the organisation, but your leader is not buying in, then build a coalition of peers at the same level, sharing your ideas, getting feedback and watching it slowly spread and as it becomes a public desire, soon something will start to change in the wider organisation. If your goal is to make your idea a reality, it doesn’t matter whether your name is on it or not. As long as the desired approach takes root. When the sea level rises, all boats rise higher.
The bigger the organisation (especially the public sector), the slower it is for new ideas to become reality. However, it has been said that it takes 5-15 years for new ideas to reach the mainstream. But that doesn’t mean that people should wait for senior management to be ready and that they can’t make a difference on their own. You have to start.
If you are excited about your idea and solution, it will take time for the other person to buy into it. They have their own ideas that they want to realise and at the moment they just don’t have the resources to deal with your idea, and since for many it is you that is important here, it can also get caught up in ego defence mechanisms.
But ideas stay in people’s subconscious, and the more people who remember it, the greater the chance that you’ll get more allies for your ideas, for whom it came at just the right moment, or they’ve also thought of something similar but failed to formulate it, let alone act on it.
When managing upwards, it should be borne in mind that the more management levels upwards, the more you need to engage in politics and conscious management of relationships.
Upward management is not done for a variety of reasons, the most common of which in my experience are:
- childhood belief that you don’t argue with authority (you don’t argue with your parents).
- fear of being told no
- Fear of being punished, being out of favour, being thrown out of an organisation, life being made uncomfortable, etc.
When going to give feedback or suggestions, it should be borne in mind that not all suggestions will ever be 100% implemented. When managing upwards, you need to be aware that the next level manager will have a much wider range of stakeholders than you initially think. While professionals’ perception of leadership is usually limited to the image of “being in meetings”, when people move into leadership they realise that it is much broader than that.
The same is often said of a middle or top manager, who doesn’t understand our problems at all, and all suggestions and possible solutions run into the sand. The manager might write down the suggestion in a notebook and say that it’s a really good idea, but then that notebook was the only action and that’s where the idea stays. Selling an idea, however, does not come from a one-off talk or email.
The manager at the top of the organisational hierarchy has many more stakeholders to look after. Your idea is great in the context of your own team or business, but because everyone is interconnected in an organisation, the impact of one on the other can be greater in terms of harm than the benefit you get. That’s why it’s always worth thinking in your leader’s shoes – policy is a choice between the needs of different stakeholders. The higher the level of management, the more choices have to be made that work against each other – policy has to be made.
For an idea to become a reality, you need to be unattached and unattached to your ideas. In this case, you can avoid being offended (NOTE: offence is a manipulative decision!) that the driver did not listen to me. We create relationship problems because people are attached to their ideas and their worldview and are not flexible. Persistence leads to suffering, because we begin to feel that the world is against us. No one in management understands my concerns and does not want to address them. Let’s start hating politics.
When working with first level managers who have not yet developed conceptual thinking (they can’t have it, they haven’t had such experiences yet), they very often see themselves as an arrogant victim who gives everything for their team, but is not valued by their manager. This is a situation where it’s very important to ask yourself: who is my team No 1? If a leader’s No 1 team is the team of his or her subordinates, how do we expect to achieve shared results across the organisation? The leader equals the organisation to the team, but if the leader equals the team, then you have a dead circle.
A change of mindset in teams 1 and 2 does not mean that the manager does not deal with his subordinates, these tasks should always be taken care of. But the end of leadership and leadership without leadership is, by its very nature, about giving your subordinates a degree of freedom so that they can be you, not carry out your agenda.
Only when you position yourself as a leader as a member of the leadership team and treat it as team No.1, i.e. you are a team player in your own leadership team of the same level, can we get rid of our attachment to solving the problems of our subordinates (the role of the saviour) and achieve more than I could achieve myself.
This is an extremely important point of mindset change, which people who have moved into management do not realise for years after becoming a manager. They get emotionally stuck in their previous role and identify with the team below. If you are identified with the team below, you will also underperform.
