How High Are You Setting the Bar?

Any time Cindy and I provide teams with tools to build more effective communication into their organizational culture, I emphasize how the most Outgoing and Task-Oriented folks often come across as being very DEMANDING but they almost always expect far more from themselves than they expect of anyone on their team. As we build on the qualities of a bad leader that we looked at in Do as I Say, Not as I Do and It’s Not My Problem, let’s up the ante a little bit…

Skirting a few of the rules is bad enough, especially when we hold the people around us accountable to comply with the letter of the law. And failing to accept responsibility for the things that absolutely depend on whether or not we perform effectively is a quick way of forfeiting any positional influence we may have based on our title. But if we demand an extreme level of performance from our team on a daily basis and we’re not delivering anything even close to that, we may soon be facing a mutiny!

I’m sure you’ve seen just as many examples of this as I have so I won’t even bother sharing another Lord Farquaad or Donkey story here. I will, however, take this opportunity to brag on two great examples I’ve seen recently where leaders held their teams accountable to contribute more than normal AND set a great example by setting the bar even higher for themselves! One is in a supervisory role and the other two own their own company, but all three were willing to show their team that they’re willing to carry more than their share of the load! And that’s why I referred to them as leaders!

The first scenario was in a manufacturing facility. The supervisor had to have several tough conversations with team members about mandatory overtime. They had a detailed system for how it was handled, but that didn’t make the issue any more popular. When he had to show up on one of his days off to attend a training session, he could have checked the box by walking in the door at 8a and heading right back out when it wrapped up at noon. Instead, he arrived around 4a like he would for his normally scheduled shift and stuck around for a while after the training session wrapped up so he could interact with his team members. He didn’t have direct supervisory responsibility that day but he wanted to show his team that he was willing to do his part and not just expect it from them.

In the other scenario, the owners of the company have a few months each year where the overall workload nearly doubles. They can add some additional staffing but most of it needs to be handled by very experienced personnel. For that period of time, they expect nearly all of their team members to increase their weekly hours by about 50%. While that’s a big ask, they really do provide a huge amount of flexibility throughout the rest of the year. In all the years I spent in manufacturing, it seemed like most of the management team averaged 9-10 hours each day, Monday through Friday, all year long. The shop floor employees had significant periods of mandatory overtime, and the supervisors had to coordinate their schedules to provide coverage for that overtime. Rarely do I remember seeing one of the management team members in the building on a weekend… With these owners though, it’s the exact opposite! While they do ask their team to pick up additional tasks during their busy season, both of them increase their workload even more. They typically average 50 or so hours a week in their slow season but they each put in 100 to 115 hours each week during their busiest time of year.

If we set the bar really high for our team members, positional authority will certainly help us get results for a period of time. But when we’re willing to provide a great example by setting the bar even higher for ourselves, we can earn influence we would never receive by just cracking a whip. We’ll wrap up this look at qualities of a bad leader in the next post by digging into one final thing that Cindy and I cover in depth in our Emerging Leader Development course...