Is it possible your leadership seniority is making it harder to see?
Last week I read a Harvard Business Review article, ‘You Think You’re a Good Collaborator. Do the People You Manage Agree?’ It surveyed more than 10,000 professionals and 400 senior leaders on collaboration.
The research found that as people rise into more senior leadership positions, they increasingly underestimate two habits that erode collaboration in their own teams: dominating conversations and micromanaging.
It echoes my research of 1,000 people leaders. Collaboration ranked first among the five culture builders that strengthen team culture.
Dominating conversations and micromanaging behaviours don’t just affect collaboration. They undermine the foundations of great culture.
However, the research revealed a deeper issue that we need to talk about, and that we’ve all likely been a bit guilty of.
The research found that the more senior they got, the less they seemed to notice it in themselves.
Seniority didn’t just change what a leader did; it seemed to change what they could see.
Lately I’ve been speaking more about ‘The perception gap’. The space between how a leader experiences their own behaviour and how their team experiences it.
One of the most important things a leader can do as they gain seniority is stop trusting their own read of the room and start asking the people in it.
When seniority climbs high without safety running deep, fewer people tell the truth, survey results turn overly optimistic, and it becomes all too easy to mistake silence for agreement.
If you lead a team, it’s tempting to reassure yourself that you’re not one of the dominators or the micromanagers. The more useful move is to ask the people you lead, directly, and be ready for an answer that doesn’t match the one you’d give about yourself. And keep asking. A regular check-in will tell you more than a question saved for the annual review.
Ask “When I’m in the room, where do I take up too much space, and where do I hold on too tight?”
If you want to build culture by design, not by default, then your team needs the mechanisms that surface what seniority can hide. An anonymous check-in, a survey, a conversation one level up, a colleague who will tell you the truth rather than the version you want. None of it is complicated. Most of it just asks a leader to be willing to hear something they didn’t expect.