Another Leadership Dilemma or The Queen of Hearts is Not Your Role Model

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The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking around. Lewis Carroll

Every leader out there knows some weeks are just not your week or as an old friend used to say, "Some days you get the bear, and others the bear gets you." I'll just put this out there: a) What is life without irony? and b) How funny is it that after eight years of writing about leadership as a follower, now the shoe is on the other foot?

I understand what it is like to be on the receiving end of a leader who can't apologize or who can't make decisions to save their soul. I've thought deeply about what it means to be bullied at work, to have your colleagues shun you because supposedly you can't get along with the person who's bullying you. But in those situations I was only responsible for myself. Leadership is different, right?. I know, duh?

As a leader I'm responsible not just for myself, but for my team, for their well being and professional growth at work. So here's what I've been thinking about: I have a team member who appears to collaborate, who appears to listen, who seems friendly and nice, but I've come to realize maybe what's happening is more like a facade where credit is given, but where collaboration is absent. Why? Well maybe there are some control issues going on, maybe there is some insecurity, but I'm an interim leader not a psychologist, and all I know is absent real collaboration we don't get a multiplicity of skills, voices, and creativity.

Let me pause and say that the work in question is good and in some instances very good. It's brought our team attention, compliments, and respect. So what's not to like? Well, sharing credit with your colleagues isn't sharing ideas. And despite the rhetoric, it's exclusionary. People are left out, and when they're excluded often enough, they stop trying, which in a weird way fulfills the bias of the bossy team member who acts as though they weren't good enough in the beginning. What makes a person want to do everything themselves? Why don't they trust their colleagues? I don't honestly know, but here's the journey I've been on this week:

1. First, I had to get my own feelings out of the way. I'm someone who would likely walk over broken glass to avoid out-and-out conflict, so there's that. Sitting down to explore something negative isn't my go-to place as follower or leader.

2. I also had to figure out whether my distress was because another team member had been hurt or because my own ideas were being stone walled. That meant exploring this pattern of someone who says they're happy to partner, but only if things are done their way, while making everyone else feel a teensy useless. Was I just cranky because my own ideas weren't being applauded? The answer was maybe, until I realized this wasn't about me. Projects and programs are outward facing, and in this case, the community needs to decide what's useful, not an individual, and particularly not me.

3. Next I had to talk about what was happening without making it personal, and hopefully to help our team member be not only self-aware, but socially aware, conscious of how their colleagues are feeling.

4. Then there is that old saw, listening. Perhaps we all need periodic re-sets on whether we're really listening or just waiting to speak.

5. And last, as part of listening, to discover a way team members can identify their strengths so when they do collaborate, they contribute the best of their skillsets?

Change is a challenge, but it's necessary to keep us all growing. There are too many days when like Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts we'd like to say, "Off with your head," rather than ask open-ended, thought provoking questions that create a safe space for creativity. But it is creativity we all need to move our team, program, museum or heritage organization out of mediocrity. So let's play to our strengths, listen, and let ourselves be vulnerable. Who knows how we'll transform.

Stay safe,

Joan Baldwin

P.S. In one final nod to the ongoing deaccession discussion, if you haven't read Glen Adamson's In Defense of Progressive Deaccessioning in Apollo Magazine, read it. It's beautifully expressed, thoughtful without being ranty, and it makes it clear deaccesioning is more than a binary choice of keep or sell. Done right it is thoughtful, nuanced and about the future, not an apology for a century of bad choices.