You're a leader running a business unit, a function, or an entire organization. You know that your job is to put the right people in the right roles, and then create the environment that allows them to do their best work. In this capacity you have plenty of work to do yourself: setting strategy, hiring and firing, coaching and development, obtaining necessary resources, making certain decisions while delegating others, and embodying the culture you wish to foster.
But as a leader there is also work you must not do, and if you're like many of my clients, it can be very difficult to stop doing it. In my practice I typically see leaders struggling with this in one of two forms:
- Work that's a misguided effort to ease anxiety.
- Work that you once did, still love, and miss doing.
In all cases this work is now someone else's responsibility, but it's very tempting to stay involved--and because you're the leader, very few people will be bold enough to tell you to back off. And yet if you don't check yourself, bad things will happen. The people who are responsible now will remain dependent on you, will fail to grow, and may come to resent your continued involvement. Other, more important work will be ignored, not just by you but also by others, because everyone pays attention to what the leader is paying attention to. And while you're busy dealing with the symptom, you're ignoring the underlying cause--your own emotions.
The key is recognizing that in both categories the impulse to continue doing the work you must stop doing is an emotional one. You know what you need to do (and not do), but, as in so many cases, mere awareness isn't sufficient on its own to overcome the emotions driving your behavior. The task is to regulate these emotions, which doesn't mean suppressing them. What does this look like in practice?
Talk about them. We know that talking about distressing feelings mitigates their impact (and recent neuroscience research is helping us understand why)--but note that this won't happen by accident. You need to cultivate trusting relationships in which it's safe to have these conversations as a leader.
Distract yourself from them. When you're wrestling with anxiety, this can involve substituting an immersive activity for worrying, such as intense exercise or a stimulating cognitive task. When you're yearning to keep doing work you love (but must stop), this can involve finding other sources of meaning and purpose.
Learn to simply sit with them. While these emotions are compelling you to engage in counter-productive work, that doesn't mean they're necessarily unhelpful. As Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön has written,
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us. [When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, page 66]
Rather than trying to extinguish these difficult emotions, acknowledge the discomfort they're causing and consider what they might have to teach you.
For Further Reading
Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
VIA Survey of Character Strengths
Open Loops (Leadership and Uncertainty)
Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management
Photo by Craig Chew-Moulding.