Closing the Leadership Gap Between Talk and Walk
The gap between who you are and who you want to be is a blessing if you notice it. It’s a curse if you don’t.
I paced my kitchen floor from midnight to 1:00a.m swapping my 20lb, 9-month-old son from arm to arm. I walked. He cried. I prayed for him to stop. He yelled.
We’d already been at it for an hour and my patience had waned.
I rocked him. I hummed every nursery rhyme I could remember. Most of all I tried to hide from my complete annoyance with him. I was short with my wife when she was helping and snappy at both of them.
We finally got him back to sleep but a new feeling rushed over me the second his eyes closed. Regret. I regretted the gap between who I want to be in those late night moments – patient, loving, calm – and who I was.
There are many times in life where that gap between who we are and who we want to be shows itself. It happens to everyone.
- The boss who goes off the handle when an employee is late only to hurt their reputation with the other team members.
- The husband who wants his wife to help clean up the dishes but instead of asking says something like, “you really don’t pull your weight around here!”
- The person who sees the homeless man on the street and gets the nudge to help them out, but keeps driving only to have that nudge continue knocking hours later when the opportunity is gone.
As a leader, you’re not parenting your team, but you will often face the gap between who you are now and the leader you want to be.
95% of American adults say Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was effective and had a positive influence (the real question is who are those other 5%, but we’ll move on). We can extend that to say most leaders would want to emulate MLK. But, most probably don’t reflect his courage, speaking prowess, patience, and strategic vision.
That gap hurts. In a world full of pie in the sky self-affirmations, that gap shuts it all down. No matter how many times you high-five the mirror in the morning, or tell yourself you’re the best thing ever, the gap still shows up.
So, how do you make sure to use the gap and not let it destroy you?
A few big ways:
Don’t outsmart the gap. Morgan Housel noted that, “Very smart people can fool themselves with elaborate stories about why something happened.” Most leaders I know are pretty smart people. They’ve got the degrees, read the books, and genuinely care about learning. Yet, I’ve also never met a leader who couldn’t tell me something they regretted doing.
It’s easy though to outsmart the gap by adding intelligence to it. “Well, we were under a lot of stress at the end of the quarter!” Or, “Yea, but that team member had caused issues for months before I finally lost it.” Maybe, “I read this book once and they said sometimes you have to set the tone of excellence.”
Don’t outsmart the gap. Notice it for what it is and let the excuses go. No credible leadership course or book will tell you to be impatient, angry, passive aggressive, or snide. You can try to find the logical defense of your action, or you can accept that you have a gap between your action and the leader you want to be.
Acceptance is the first step to improvement.
Have a clear picture of the leader you want to be. It’s fairly obvious to know you don’t want to be a crappy leader, but if I asked you to define “crappy” you might get stuck. In order to notice and learn in the gap, you have to know who you want to be. You need some role models.
Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL and multiple times best-selling author has said, “If you have to yell as a leader, how many different mistakes have you made to actually get to that point? Yelling is a weakness.” Most leaders agree. Yet, when I’ve asked leaders who they look up to most, it’s not uncommon to hear about a champion winning coach or tech moguls for whom yelling and anger were everyday actions.
Famous coaches like Bill Belicheck and Phil Jackson yelled at players so often that there are famous meme’s of it. Steve Jobs once fired the head of MobileMe in front of the entire company after he asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When the team answered, Jobs replied, “Then why the f*** doesn’t it do that?” No famous leader will go without repute. Perhaps Gandhi, Mandella, or Thatcher are close, but emulating them also leaves much to wonder. How Gandhi would have handled a team member late to a meeting, how Mandela would have hired a new IT manager, or Thatcher would have approached a new AI policy aren’t knowable.
So, who do you want to be? If you want to be the next Steve Jobs, are you ready to be maniacal and tyrannical at times? If you want to be Gandhi, are you ready to give up everything you have to get the work done? If you admire Marget Thatcher can you handle the ridicule of being “the only” in a sea of historical precedence and discrimination?
It’s worth thinking about your leadership hero with a careful eye. You might be better off emulating the local business owner who will never be on the cover of Forbes, but has steadily taken care of her business and team for years. Or maybe you need to put together a “best of” list from a variety of different people.
No matter how you come to it, you need to know who you want to be even if – especially if – you’re not there yet. I personally look to Jesus of Nazareth a lot for leadership lessons, but I have to think, as John Mark Comer points out, not “what would Jesus do?”, but, “What would Jesus do if He were me?”
That’s the question to ask of any hero. It’s the question to ask ourselves: “How would the me that is past the gap handle this situation?” Then act accordingly.
Find an outsider who can help you see the gap. We’re typically awful at seeing our own blind spots. Our teams aren’t going to tell us about them either. As much as we try to build trust for people to be honest, we pay them and their livelihood depends on it. Are they going to risk that to help us be stronger leaders? Probably not.
Every leader should have an outside person to help them see the gap. Someone on the outside of your team who can look in without the emotional connection to the work and its outcomes. It could be a coach, colleague from a different area of the company, mentor, or whoever else you can find. Offer to trade with them – you’ll be their outside coach, if they’ll be yours.
Whoever it is, they have to be honest with you. They have to spend time with you and watch you lead. They can sit in meetings, you can share emails with them, or find other ways to give them an honest look at how you act. Tell them all about who you want to be as a leader (see #2 above).
I personally love the outside role and have been fortunate to work with a few leaders doing so. I get to sit on the sidelines, observe, and offer feedback. Things I’ve often noticed and asked about are,
- “Why did that person talk the whole meeting? Did you notice that other person’s body language? Seemed like they didn’t feel valued there.”
- “That email you sent sounded intense. Did you mean that?”
- “You gave them the task and then stepped right over them to do it yourself. I wonder how that made them feel?”
I can see what the leader can’t because I’m separated from the minutia. I’m not concerned with the content of the meeting, email, or task. I am looking only for the leadership actions to move them forward.
An outsider is perhaps the quickest way to bridge the gap. Find someone in your network or hire one. Be vulnerable with them. Let them into your leadership world. There’s no book in the world that could elevate your leadership as quickly as someone who knows you helping you grow in the big and small moments.
Leaders who mind the gap between who they are and who they want to be continue to grow. They change organizations and create meaningful work. Those who don’t often go down in flames.
Make the gap a blessing in your leadership and your life. Use it as the motivation to be a stronger leader. Don’t try to outsmart your gap and pretend it’s not a big deal, create a vision of the leader you want to be, and find an outsider who you can help you take an honest look at who you are and how to bridge the gap to who you want to be.
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