You can't turn down just the annoying part of you
Readtime: 3 minutes
It takes me a very long time to book a hotel.
Or choose a restaurant.
Both turn into full-on research exercises. I read the reviews properly, work out what the trade-offs are, put together a shortlist, and eventually choose something.
The choice is usually good. But I'm normally choosing between several good options, so those are hours I probably didn't need to spend. And it can be frustrating for whoever is waiting on me to decide.
Two of my strongest traits are judgement and an appreciation of excellence. (Yes, I've done the various psychometrics to arrive at these…). At work, they're a real asset. On a Tuesday evening, in front of a booking site, they're a menace.
The same two traits also used to have me commenting on work that didn't need me. I stopped doing that, but the traits didn’t go anywhere, they just turned up somewhere else.
What people get told is too much
I've been thinking about this because of three executive coaching conversations I’ve had in the last fortnight, with three senior leaders in three very different roles. But underneath, they were more or less the same conversation.
Each of them had been told, more than once, that something about them was too much. Too direct, too intense, too caring.
And in each case the thing they'd been asked to tone down was a large part of what makes them distinctive and successful.
Look at what those words also describe.
Too direct usually means everyone knows where they stand. Too intense usually means you'll drive a better outcome than others. Too caring usually means people will tell you things they wouldn't tell anyone else.
I read a lot of stakeholder feedback for clients, and the strengths section and the development section are often, I think, describing the same underlying trait showing up in two different behaviours. One person has benefited from the trait, another has been on the wrong end of it.
There's no dial for just that bit
The advice is usually to dial the trait down. Which assumes there's a dial that only controls the part you'd like less of.
One of my clients, the CEO of a charity, said she can't tone down being affected by the world without caring less about what she's doing.
Turn down the intensity and you don't get the same leader with easier meetings. You get a leader whose work isn't as good as it was.
The compromise
I think most feedback of this kind is actually just a request to be less like yourself in certain specific situations, but it gets heard as be less like yourself everywhere, always.
You get told that you "come across as quite intense", so you apply it to everything.
Most people compromise. They carry on feeling the underlying emotion, but stop all the associated behaviours.
Which is different from what I did with commenting on work that didn’t need me. I didn't stop caring about the quality of the work, I just stopped using the trait on that specific thing where it wasn't needed.
When you stop all the associated behaviours, you ruminate on situations you would have previously dealt with differently, because you've created an inner conflict. Feeling something strongly, and doing nothing with it.
Nobody else sees any of that. They just get the slightly toned down version of you.
20 years of this
Compromise like that for long enough and there's a bigger problem.
A lot of senior leaders come across as much the same. Reasonable, measured, and hard to disagree with.
That sameness comes from years of toning down traits that other people found inconvenient. But those were also the parts that made them better than average.
I can think of a few leaders who took every piece of feedback, in full, in good faith, over many years. They're easier to work with now, and I don't think anyone would say a word against them.
But they're also quite hard to describe.
If you asked their team what they're like, you'd get a pause, and then something about them being very fair.
Fair is obviously a good quality in a leader. But so is being distinctive.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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