opposite of Good Authority isn’t Bad Authority—it’s Borrowed Authority. Borrowed in the sense that the authority is not our own. It’s the one we learned—from our parents, from our culture, from our teachers. And, for the purposes of this book, authority also consists of the strategies and tactics we’ve learned from the coaches, management consultants, and gurus who have promised us that they have the answer. There’s only one authority we haven’t tried, though it takes a lifetime to discover: our own.
I was working with the owner of a small technology company. In his early 50s, Mike was the picture of kind leadership. He was skilled in his craft, quick with a smile. He cared about the lives of the people on the team and had the drive of a man who knew that the world makes no promises. There was only one problem—his business had been stuck in neutral for the better part of a decade. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t get people to own their work. He wasn’t attracting a next generation of leaders, people who would carry the business beyond where he could on his own. The symptom, the day-to-day form that all of this took, was a lack of accountability across the organization.
One day, on a video call with half a dozen business owners I was working with at the time, we got into a conversation about authority—Mike’s. After a minute or two—I’ve never been able to play the part of the patient, “wait for it to organically arise” coach—I asked him a question. “Mike, what’s your greatest fear when it comes to authority?” (And, Mr. President, I have a follow-up question.) He pondered for a few moments and a knowing smile washed across his face. “I don’t know if this is what you’re asking, but I have a thought that comes to mind.”
“Oh, really … what is it?” You could hear the other six people on the call breathing.
“What I’m thinking about is my father. You see, he was an engineer—pretty high up in his firm but not the boss. My whole childhood all I heard about was how the higher-ups were screwing people, this, that, or the other way.”
“How do you think that informs the way you lead the team now?”
“Oh, it’s obvious now that you ask … everything I do is to not be that kind of authority.”
Without ever intending to, Mike had invented an antidote. In order to not be that kind of authority, he took on one of the three leadership archetypes that you’ll learn more about in Chapter Twelve, “Fixer, Fighter, or Friend.” He had taken on the role of the friend. The problem was that Mike’s cure, like each one of them, had serious, viral side effects. Your team can’t treat you as a friend and the boss at the same time.
Mike started to make the connections. He started to see that he had a real problem. In order to step into the role that his team needed—to be willing to be tough when tough was called for—he had to discover a kind of leadership that his father’s influence kept him from being able to see. He had to open himself up to a kind of tough that wasn’t cruel, as his father’s bosses were, but was simply firm and clear in its boundaries. In other words, Mike had to let go of the picture of authority that he had borrowed from his father.
The irony was that Mike couldn’t be that kind of authority—the kind of authority his father was so disgusted by—even if he tried. His style, the man he’d become over his many years as an employee before breaking out on his own, was one of personal warmth and curiosity. He knew what it was like to work for someone else, and erred, often to a fault, on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Over the next few months Mike took up this new challenge. He started showing up with some more toughness. Not tough as in harsh, but tough as in firm. He stopped being available at all hours on his cell phone. He stopped replying on group emails that his manager should be handling. He had tough conversations with each person on the team about what personal responsibility looks like in practice, using examples from things that had happened that day. He started embodying accountability instead of talking about it. He required others to think, do, and adapt without his oversight, at every chance he could find.
This was anything but a cakewalk for Mike. He would show up on our call week after week and report on how it was going. Like all real change, his was often a case of two steps forward, one step back. But, at some point, he crossed a threshold. The team realized that the new Mike was there to stay. This wasn’t a cakewalk for them, either. It wasn’t as comfortable to work there anymore. When you’ve been working for someone for a long time, you get used to their style. Out of self-preservation, you quickly learn what riles them up and what calms them down. You use your strengths to compensate for their weaknesses. The team had to re-learn how to operate with the New Mike, and they didn’t always like it. But when we talked with them (which is part of our approach, we don’t work with CEOs without working with their team), we started hearing about how they appreciated having clarity and knowing where they stood. And they reported a feeling they hadn’t had in a while: inspiration. They looked forward to coming to work with a sense that the business was going somewhere again. And Mike hadn’t uttered one word of theory or made one big speech. He just stopped being the guy who was afraid of the past.
And, as Mike found out, when you change your leadership style, disrupting these long-held patterns of authority, the people on your team will be confused for a while. However, in my experience, most people will also see the upside and use it as an opportunity for growth, because you’re finally alleviating the burden they’ve been living with for a long time. And then there will likely be a few people on your team who, for whatever reason, are at a place in their lives where they are looking for stability and not growth, with its more dramatic ups and downs. They will be more reluctant to make the pivot. The key is to remember something you’ve probably already experienced multiple times in your career: When someone on the team discovers that where they are is not the right place for them, and decides to move on, it ends up being a win for everyone.
What Mike had been doing, until he started changing it, was what we all do in one form or another. It’s human. It’s natural. It’s reasonable. As children, and for all the years of our lives until and even after we find ourselves in a position of authority in our career, we rely on the authority stories that we internalized in the formative moments of our lives. The task of becoming a Good Authority is to find these stories, to understand how and why they got there, to respect the truth and lessons they contain—and then to let them go.
That’s the journey. It’s a journey that leads to a profound new space that is less cluttered by the pictures of the past—where you can listen to the people on your team in a new way. When you clear out your own baggage around authority—which is what Part II is all about—you will automatically start noticing that baggage in others. You’ll start to see it and hear it and be able to help people discover how the things they’re struggling with—accountability in themselves and others, taking creative risks and drawing that out of others, focusing on the important details and being able to train that in others—are all sourced in the most important management tool there is: the human heart.
What’s your authority blueprint? Download the free worksheet from at refound.com/resources
The Employee Engagement Fallacy
People are people, so why should it be
you and I should get along so awfully?
—Depeche Mode
The road to a disengaged team is paved
