Our actions as leaders create expectations. As you move higher up in an organization, people start looking at you more closely. They look more closely at what you wear. They look more closely at what office hours you keep. They look more closely at the words you use. When I was working with the design team on my recently published book, I tended to send them materials and edits and ideas on the weekends. The weeks were so full so I pushed my book work to the weekends. Then, I noticed that some on my team were responding back to me on the weekends. It dawned on my that my weekend communications were creating an expectation that they should be working (or at least responding to me) on the weekend. The following week I corrected the expectation. I explained that they should expect to get stuff from me on the weekends, but that I didn’t expect any response or work until their normal business hours. I missed a rookie leader blind spot: Our actions as leaders create expectations. If we aren’t careful we can signal expectations that may not be what we intend.
With your teams, don’t get out of the way, do this instead
"Get out of the way!" I often hear some version of this sentiment when talking about building a culture to incentivize high performance teams. "You have to find the right people, equip them, and then get out of the way." People who talk about getting out of the way...