Perhaps this behaviour endeared Susan to her team initially, but it had other unintended consequences, especially as the team’s scope of responsibilities grew. Her peers and cross-functional colleagues didn’t see her as collaborative, partly because she was often perceived as a blocker. Her behaviour led her team to adopt a disempowered stance, and they became dependent on her to fight their battles. Worse, it put a lot of pressure on her to be present in all major decisions. As her overwhelm mounted, her performance slipped, both in terms of her ability to stay on top of key projects and to show up at meetings with a calm, clear perspective. Ultimately, the behaviour caused senior leadership to view her as volatile and not in control.
We call leaders who engage in this kind of behaviour “umbrella managers”: well-intentioned leaders who want to protect their teams from all inclement organisational weather. But this type of leadership comes with a heavy price for the manager, the team, and the organisation:
In our experience, this behaviour is not uncommon in emerging leaders. Many individuals leading highly sophisticated teams for the first time need help to figure out the balance between supporting their teams and delegating effectively.
We recently caught up with Susan and asked about the “lightbulb” moment that led her to stop protecting her employees and start supporting them:
As I progressed in my career and began to manage more senior staff, it became increasingly clear that I needed to put away my umbrella and look for more effective and scalable ways of helping the managers on my team navigate challenges. I let go of the need to protect my employees and adopted a different mental model that more closely resembles handing out rain ponchos than opening an umbrella. Instead of putting myself between my reports and difficulty, I now support them by providing the tools they need to navigate these challenges independently.
To move from protecting your employees to supporting them, you need to make a few key mental shifts:
The first step is understanding what beliefs underpin your current behaviour. Where does your instinct to “protect” come from? Do you worry your employees will crumble under pressure and, as a result, make you look bad? Do you believe that their wrong decisions will compromise project outcomes and jeopardize their own success? Are you concerned that your value to your team depends on your ability to represent all aspects of their work fully? Ask yourself if other leaders in the organisation are operating under the same assumptions. Challenge yourself to figure out what would need to be true in order for you to let go of this underlying belief. Additionally, ask yourself how your current approach might be harming your team.
By empowering your employees to solve their own problems, you can demonstrate your trust and confidence in the team’s abilities. For example, when people raise a challenge, they often don’t need help finding the solution — they either have one already or can come up with one by talking the challenge through with a trusted partner. You can turn yourself into that partner to improve your leadership effectiveness and avoid offering solutions too quickly. Doing so also encourages team members to think independently and come up with creative solutions to issues. To help them identify workable solutions and pick the right course of action, consider asking, “What options do you have?”
Short-term stumbles provide learning experiences and opportunities; they can uncover weaknesses, areas of opportunity, and improvement. Allowing your team to “fail” (and learn) independently is a faster path to growth and long-term success than ensuring the short-term outcomes are well controlled.
For Susan, this realisation was central to her realization that she was stifling her team. As she put it:
Early in my career, I thought the objective as a manager was to ensure a good outcome for every situation, large or small. However, when I moved to manage a larger organisation, I had to get clear on what the truly high-stakes decisions were and help myself and the team build capabilities around recovering from small setbacks or missteps. This perspective allowed me to let go of many of the decisions I had been making, which gave me more time to coach emerging leaders on the team and for higher-level strategic thinking.
As leaders grow and their scope of responsibilities expands, their functional knowledge becomes less relevant as leadership skills take priority. Many managers struggle with this identity shift. They worry that if they’re not personally on top of all the details, they’ll be perceived as ineffective when in fact the opposite is true.
Stop chasing down every detail and free up time for activities like figuring out which decisions are critical, clarifying “what good looks like,” and getting alignment with your peers and other parts of the organisation.
Once you’ve adjusted your mindset about how you support your employees, you can start to take action:
Whether the issue is technical or interpersonal, your job is to help your team develop options for handling the situation now and in the future. When an employee brings up a challenge, ask what kind of support would be helpful, but avoid putting yourself at the centre of the challenge. Sometimes information and context gaps need to be closed, and the solution can be as simple as directing your team member to the right person to talk to.
Other times, you might find yourself carrying around a huge amount of company- or domain-specific knowledge that needs to be transferred. In these cases, there’s no way around spending the time it takes to bring your team member up to speed. However, when you couple this time investment with the additional expectation that your team member will create reference documentation for future members, you reinforce learning and build a stronger knowledge base for your team.
That’s not to say that you should never play a role in navigating challenges; in fact, managers are often better positioned to see the systematic forces creating the challenge. If a systems-level challenge is best addressed at a higher level in the organisation, you must work with your leadership and/or peers to find solutions at a systems level. For example, a lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities can cause persistent friction between teams, and misaligned goals can unnecessarily bring different parts of the organisation into conflict and create power struggles. In these cases, the leader has an essential role to play in removing ambiguity, finding alignment, and prioritizing solutions.
It’s never comfortable to navigate new challenges — even the most emotionally resilient among us still have moments of insecurity when stepping outside our comfort zone. However, you can provide a few mental models to support your team and encourage them to tackle difficult situations. For example:
Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organisational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.
For Susan, transitioning from protecting to supporting her team was transformational. Reframing the value you bring to the organisation, shifting from doing to coaching, and focusing on creating the right team environment and processes instead of concentrating solely on individual outcomes are all foundational to this transition. Getting out of the middle makes space for the perspective needed to see organisational context more clearly and spend the requisite energy on addressing systems-level challenges. Putting away the managerial umbrella and fitting your organisation with ponchos is not easy, but the payoff is worth it.
by Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman
March 01, 2023
*Name has been changed for privacy
