What Does a Leader Do? Part I: From Clueless to Clarity

Pete Behrens exposes the light on a common myth in leadership focus - that leaders need to shift their focus from doing work to leading others to do that work to coaching others to develop their competency in that work.

Transcript

Pete Behrens:
What does a leader DO? Welcome to another episode of (Re)Learning Leadership, where we explore a specific leadership challenge and break it down to help improve your leadership, your organization, and just possibly, your personal life!

I’m Pete Behrens, and today I want to explore what a leader DOES. Does that sound obvious? Well, stick with me, and I hope, by the end of the episode, you might actually rethink about your leadership. Let’s dive in!

Okay. Many, many years ago, I was hired as a senior engineer. And it was just an incredible experience—one of these small startup, family environments, where I was a critical player. I was the engineer taking the designs from the early prototyping of a consultant and had a lot of great responsibilities.

I had weeks and months of—what we call in engineering-speak—being “in the flow”. You live and breathe and eat your work. It’s with you 100% of the time. I was working on some significant design and coding refactors.

But the bliss didn’t last all that long, as we hired a junior engineer to help with some of the work; there was a lot of work to do. And I recall that my flow state got disrupted, from me zooming in on that work to, all of the sudden, directing, assigning, delegating work to someone else. Someone that didn’t think like me and didn’t have the same experience I had. Frankly, from my perspective, it was a bit of a pain in the ass. But that’s what happens when you’re, you know, not a great leader.

So, what did I do? I found an area that needed work that was probably the most disconnected from mine, the most separated from mine, and delegated—“Okay, work on this.” And I kept doing my work. And thinking, “Okay, that’s a way to get them going.” But come to find out, once we started to bring this stuff back together, all of my redesign work completely impacted his work, and we ended up having to redo all of his work. Not only did he feel like a failure, I felt like a failure. The whole system just broke.

You might think, 30 years later, I’ve improved my leadership. And while, yes, I am more self-aware and likely a little bit more effective, I still find leadership focus to be one of the most challenging aspects of my leadership every single day. Let me explain.

We can think about the work of leadership in three different dimensions. First is the work leaders DO. Doing is very heads-down work. Like writing a document or a spreadsheet. It’s like preparing a plan or a presentation. It’s problem-solving. It’s taking action. For me today, a lot of times, it’s when I teach or when I coach. That’s my heads-down work today. In fact, even doing this podcast is DOING, for me.

LEADING, on the other hand, is coordination work. Leading is facilitating a discussion or a team meeting. Leading is managing teams, or projects and programs. It’s managing that kind of work, coordination work.

And leading is also how we influence others, how we direct work, assign work, and delegate activities to be done.

And then, finally, we have coaching. COACHING is development work. Coaching is when we are focused on the growth of others, employees and their development. Coaching is also organizational growth—right?—when we start to think about culture and structures, those other systems, measures of success. And finally, coaching is also an engaging, kind of co-creative aspect of being involved in that, where we’re really thinking about the ownership and empowerment of how others are growing in that work.

So, when I look back on my story, I was definitely in the DOING, right? As that senior engineer, I’m in that doing. I was forced to shift just a tad bit into leading, assigning, delegating work, with very poor results. 

So, what should I have done? What should a leader focus on?

Many believe that shifting from DO, to LEAD, to COACH as you grow as a leader is the right thing to do. And while that does improve your impact and effectiveness as a leader, I want to dispel this to a degree.

When I think about leaders who have moved and shifted in that direction, and then they abandon the former—meaning I let go of DO, what I find is we get very hollow, or what we call a shell of a leader. I think we’ve seen these leaders. They’re kind of disconnected, disengaged, a bit aloof to what’s actually happening on the ground. For me, to retain authenticity, to retain a sense of connectedness, to be grounded and even be respectful to those doing the work, I find that I need to be somewhat in that work too. For me, what this means is—I need to stay engaged in teaching and coaching leaders. I need to stay somewhat engaged in the program development for me to retain that sense, as a leader, of what that work is like.

So, instead of shifting, what I want you to consider is a blend. Okay, so as we go from DO to LEAD, we’re not shifting. I want you to think that we’re blending some leadership with some doing. And then, again, as we shift from LEAD to COACH, it’s not an abandonment; it’s not a letting go. It’s another blend. Real effective leaders find the mix they need between DO and LEAD and COACH based on themselves, their situation, their goals, and even their emotions! Let me explain.

Let me give you an example from my own experience. I’m the leader of the Agile Leadership Journey, and I’m responsible for guiding the development of many of our education and coaching programs. In the past, I would simply build these programs myself. That’s me doing. I’ve also delegated the development of some of these programs. That’s me leading. But I’ve found the most impactful solutions have come when I’ve led the construction, the formation, of these programs, but I stayed engaged as a subject-matter expert, involved in the development, and also provided some clearer empowerment ownership of key aspects, or even the entire program, to others. And what I’ve found is—the end result is tremendously more impactful. But also, in that process, I grow as a leader, and the people that have additional responsibility are growing.

You might think, “Okay, so what’s the ‘right’ blend? And how do we know?” I’m sorry to say there isn’t a right here. There’s no right answer on how to blend these. The real key we want to look for is shifting from an unaware to an aware state. Cluelessness to clarity, so to speak. And most leaders—they’ll operate in what we call a default or a clueless mode. I did this for over a decade in my leadership, with not-so-great results. And it wasn’t until I became intentful with my focus and then aware of how to apply that that it grew, exponentially, my leadership capacity.

I’ll give you another example. I provide leadership for two different organizations. Trail Ridge (our consultancy) and Agile Leadership Journey (our licensing program and Guide community). And when I look at this mix of “Okay, what’s the situation? What are the goals? What’s my background, emotionally?” I look at Trail Ridge, and I say, “Okay, that’s pretty well-established. It doesn’t require a whole lot. There’s not a lot of new stuff that we’re investing in there. It’s not an area of interest of mine, to continue to grow that.” So for a lot of those reasons, I’ve shifted my blend towards much more LEADING, COACHING, and coming in when necessary. And that’s left me a lot of space to be the DOER over in the Agile Leadership Journey side, which does need some growth and subject matter expertise. And I think about that emotional state. What brings me joy? And what brings me frustration? And the more I can find somebody who would love to take the things that frustrate me as a leadership growth opportunity, it’s a win-win.

I’ll give you another example. I was just engaged with thirteen Chapter Leads in a classroom setting. Chapter Leading is really the blend of three different responsibilities. Number one: manage people. Number two: guide your discipline area of the chapter. This would be your functional discipline.  Number three: be a team player to contribute to the goals of a team. So you think, “Great! It’s got a nice blend. It has the COACH, it has the LEAD, and it has the DO.” The problem came when one of the Chapter Leads from Development Operations came and said, “Well, yeah, but the expectation for me is 70%—I’m supposed to be the team player.” Leaving very little space for the leading and coaching. I find the best organizations provide leaders that opportunity, the space, based on their situation, based on their goals, based on the needs of the organization, and their emotions. What’s the right blend for them?

So, just a quick side-note on doing LEADING work. (A little play on words here!) Leaders often ask, “Well, if I’m working on the strategy or the budget, or the plan, is that leading? It’s in service of aligning people towards a common goal.” While that’s true, it depends on how you engage with that work. Are you heads-down working on those things? That’s doing. If you delegate or assign that to someone else, that’s leading. But unless you’re actually engaging others, unless you’re actually staying engaged yourself, it’s not a blend. So, I encourage you to find even these types of activities to see what kind of blend you can create to not only create a better outcome, but also to create a better, more impactful leadership for yourself and grow your people, at the same time.

My ask for you is that you shine a light on your leadership focus. Begin to tag your work along these three categories. And my guess is that you’re going to start to identity something that will intrigue you to improve your leadership. Stick with us because our next episode is going to be on how to help rebalance your blend.

Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy the journey!

(Re)Learning Leadership is the official podcast of the Agile Leadership Journey, together we build better leaders. It’s hosted by me, Pete Behrens, with contributions from our global Guide community. It’s produced by Ryan Dugan. With music by Joy Zimmerman. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share a comment. And visit our website, agileleadershipjourney.com/podcast, for guest profiles, episode references, transcripts, and to explore more about your own leadership journey.