Your team is watching how you live
Readtime: 3 minutes
When I look back at the decisions that actually changed my life, hardly any of them came from advice.
They came from watching how someone else was living.
We take in an enormous amount of advice: books, podcasts, newsletters, courses, the lot. Leadership might be the most advised subject there is. And yet we still ignore most of it, because advice doesn't ask anything of you.
Watching someone actually live a certain way is different. It gives you something you can't argue with.
The people who’ve changed the direction of my life probably weren't trying to. Nobody sat me down. I was just close enough to see how they did things, and some of it rubbed off. A lot of them would be surprised to know they'd had any effect at all.
When I eventually left KPMG to do my own thing, that decision owed far more to a few people I'd watched build something of their own than to anything I'd ever read about it.
I'd had the arguments for and against leaving on paper for years. What tipped it was seeing people, up close, for whom it had worked out, and who seemed more themselves for having done it.
I got reminded of all this last month in Lisbon.
I've read Justin Welsh for years. If you don't know him, he writes about building a small, deliberate business as a solo operator. One of the things I've always liked is how careful he's been about the life he's building, and the size of business that supports it. He's chosen to focus on the parts of work he enjoys, and to protect his life outside work, at the expense of building something bigger. He’s been very successful, but he could have gone for much bigger scale. He decided not to.
I knew all of this from his writing. He writes so openly about all of it that in theory I already knew everything I was going to hear.
But then I actually spent an evening with him and his wife, Jenn, and it landed in a way that years of reading him hadn't.
Meeting a real person who's made that trade, and is clearly happy with it, does something that reading the same idea a hundred times doesn't. It stops being a nice idea and starts being evidence. A life that someone is actually living.
Justin, Jenn, Mostyn
That's the bit I keep coming back to. You can argue with advice. "You don't have to keep doing it this way" is easy to agree with and then ignore, because there's always a reason it wouldn't work for you. It's much harder to argue with a person sitting in front of you who's done exactly that, and is very happy with it.
Which might be why we consume so much advice in the first place. It feels like progress, and it costs us nothing. Watching how someone lives costs a lot more, because once you've seen it done, you lose the excuse.
There's an uncomfortable flip side to this, and it gets sharper the more senior you are.
A lot of a senior role is telling people things. Feedback, direction, the occasional bit of hard-won advice. And if any of this is right, very little of that is what actually shapes the people you lead. They're taking far more from what they watch you do – whether you guard your own evenings, whether you reached for the bigger job, whether you seem to enjoy any of it – than from anything you say in a one to one.
Your team is watching how you live. So are your kids, if you have them. And somewhere out there someone is deciding what's possible for their own life partly based on how you're living yours. You'll probably never know who, or when, or which bit of it they picked up.
So I'm trying to pay a bit less attention to whose advice I should be following, and more to who I'm close enough with to actually watch.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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