Your team needs support. As I wrote about last week, in low-support environments, people will trend toward hopelessness or defiance. But, there is a fine line between providing support and stifling people. I’ve crossed it many times in my career as a manager, leader, and business owner. It sucks for everyone involved.
Self 1 vs Self 2
I’ve recently been reading Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. I don’t play tennis, never have, and am not interested in learning. However, I don’t think you can find a better book on leadership than this short book on improving your tennis game. I wrote about Gallwey’s distinction between inner selves last month. To do a quick recap, he splits our inner selves into Self 1, the Logical Self, and Self 2, the Physical Self. Problems arise when the logical self tries to control the physical self.
Galwey argues that it is better for the logical self to set a goal and ask the physical self to achieve it. In the world of tennis, this can be as simple as asking your body to recreate a specific sound when the racket hits the ball. The logical self isn’t trying to control the action of the body. It is asking the body to figure out the actions it needs to make to reproduce a sound. Self 1 will never be able to recreate it on its own. That’s not the job of the logical self. It is there to set a vision and ask the physical self to achieve it.
Micromanagement anyone?
It was really uncomfortable for me to read this book on tennis, which is so clearly not a book about tennis! Here’s Gallwey’s take on micromanagement, disguised as tennis advice:
As long as Self 1 is either too ignorant or too proud to acknowledge the capabilities of Self 2, true self-confidence will be hard to come by. It is Self 1’s mistrust of Self 2 which causes both the interference called “trying too hard” and that of too much self-instruction.
The Inner Game of Tennis, Kindle Location 555
Gallwey is talking about the body, but it can so clearly be related to teams, where Self 1 is the team leader, and Self 2 is everyone else. If the leader tries to control the team, telling them what to do and how to do it, you’re doomed. I was just on a call with a small team. I was expecting only to be on the call with a contributor, but the team lead wanted to be there to protect her. Not only that, he also brought the entire team. In fact, they were all in a room on a single Zoom feed, instead of each joining from their own desks. On top of all this, he was physically sitting in front of everyone else. Guess who did more and more of the talking as the meeting progressed. Guess who eventually checked out and started doing other stuff.
When being kind gets in everyone’s way
I feel like it is ok to call this out because I used to do it all of the time. My instincts still take me there every – thankfully infrequently now. I go there, like he does, out of kindness – a sense of duty to protect. I don’t want my team members to suffer the embarrassment of making a mistake. I don’t want our mistakes to negatively affect our customers. It’s cringeworthy to say, but the truth! Mistakes, when treated right, lead to growth. Unsurprisingly, both of us have very active inner perfectionists, who will do anything they can to keep us from looking foolish. As I’ve written about earlier, our inner perfectionists hold us back from growing in any significant way. Unsurprisingly, the same holds true for team members who we’re trying to protect!
Photo credits: This one is mine – a sunset on the island of Bonaire!