First and Only Leadership Report

Did you know there are a handful of counter- intuitive, common, unforced errors that get in the way of many leaders’ achieving their full potential— often spelling the difference between getting stuck in one’s career versus creating real impact?

If the leader is a “first” and/or “only”, meaning he/she is the first from his/her family or community or the only one like themselves in the room (e.g. a person of color, an immigrant professional, the youngest, the oldest, differently-abled, not from a dominant population), these errors have an amplified effect—going well beyond getting into a rut, the unintentional mistakes foster consistent feelings of imposter syndrome and/or possibly a career-limiting collision with the glass ceiling.

Revising the three most commonly recurring obstacles has the potential to make a profound difference in the workplace. And, if we want to talk seriously about what more systemically- and racially-just institutions look like across business and government, it’s critical we have executives who can lead in a novel way, sourced from their unique wisdom—so that they do not re-create structures that leave important groups out of the conversation.

Mistake #1
Let’s do a quick thought exercise to get a sense of this. Finish the following sentence/phrase with the first words or feelings that come to mind –

Power is _______________

Authority is _______________

Take a moment to notice if the tone and feelings of the words are generally positive or negative. In the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), this exercise in Complex Equivalents (CEq)—defined as the way our internal coding other people’s behaviors—is a shortcut to understanding core beliefs about a complex topic or word.

Some of you may be surprised to realize negative connotations and associations with these words. This is the first mistake: an unconscious negative bias towards Power and Authority. If this bias stays unconscious, you may notice a pattern of difficult bosses throughout your career or repeated situations where you can’t fully articulate your point of view; you feel uncomfortable and may feel like you can’t get ahead without seriously compromising your values or your health.

For many first and only leaders, they are surprised to notice they have generally negative beliefs about Power and/or Authority. Some client examples of statements –

“Power is Domination”
“Authority is Scary”
“Authority is…(stops breathing/ holds breath)”

This level of negative association with power and/or authority puts up an invisible barrier. How can you authentically step into a leadership role if it's something that creates fear? One smart, talented client couldn't seem to break through in connecting with her target audience and growing her business. She expressed high levels of judgment about people in power and the structures of the business world. For her, power and authority felt dangerous and automatically set up to work against women like her—and she did not want to be thought of in this way as a leader, herself. Once she understood her bias, she was able to choose how she showed up as powerful and as an authority figure, creating a significant increase to her energy and business.

Mistake #2
When you achieve an important goal or success, how does it feel?

Surprisingly, the second mistake I see is feeling fear and/or guilt, no matter how small, after achieving some success. I know this sounds a little backwards, but stick with me...

In some cases, this fear-guilt looks like “tall-poppy syndrome,” where a leader is afraid to stand out (often rightly so) because they believe they will get “cut down.” In other cases, expected leadership behaviors go against long-standing family or cultural conditioning and feel “wrong.”

For example, I have Asian and South Asian clients where in their family of origin, it is not OK to question the authority figure, i.e. mom and dad. But in the American workplace, a healthy level of questioning and interacting with one’s supervisors shows one’s excitement and engagement with the work and is often a way to come up with better solutions. However, if questioning or disagreement often meant punishment in the past, how can one feel safe enough to do so in the workplace? If the leader does interact in the way that is expected in the workplace, it tends not to feel natural—and there’s a fear they’ll be found out sooner or later as a fraud, either by their family or their colleagues at work.

The net effect of experiences of tall-poppy or imposter syndrome or “not in my family” fear-guilt is that success and achievement do feel as good as expected—and so the leader keeps reaching for the next achievement, and the next achievement, without ever sensing satisfaction.

Mistake #3
Doing your job well should be enough to get ahead, right?

The third unforced error I often notice with my clients is a focus on competency versus engaging in the work that will create results. The behavior pattern is one where the client focuses on doing good work and expects they will be recognized in due course. Many clients will voice that they “like getting the work done” and they “hate playing politics or playing the game.” Most leaders can ride this approach to middle management—but they won’t get further.

Unfortunately, even in the most meritocratic workplaces, the impact of this head-in-the-sand behavior is that a first and only leader misses his/her opportunity to make a difference and stand out in a positive light. One CEO client, who identified himself as a hands-on technical leader and was the only of his nationality on his leadership team, was facing an overhaul of his company’s core technology product while noticing increasingly higher churn in his customer base. Something needed to change fast, but he was focused on day-to-day project management and didn’t see how all the work would get done. When asked how his actions connected to the bigger goals of the organization and what needed to be achieved, he realized he was doing the work where he felt safe and knew what to do—not the work that would make the real difference for his business, which it turns out was way more exciting for him anyway. The technology overhaul was delegated and completed successfully and his focus shifted to customer retention and growth.

If this client had continued with the focus on output and project management, over time it’s likely things would have fallen apart. Competency feels great and is important up to a certain point in one’s career—but after that point, success stems from the way you frame the issues, understand relationships, and communicate a different future, i.e. from your Power Fluency. To excel at these higher-order leadership skills, you must be willing to focus on issues where you don’t know the answer.

Are You Getting in Your Way?
These internal obstacles are often subtle and difficult to tease out. But if you start to notice you’re dreading going to work and even fantasize about quitting and starting over, if you’ve been passed over for a promotion and wondering what to do next, if you get the sense your magic isn't landing at work, or even just feel you’ve been “off your game” for a while, chances are at least one of the mistakes is operating in the way you think about your leadership and your work.

If you’d like to create some movement, here are thought experiments to help with each of the mistakes I mentioned:

1. Consider your definition of the words “Power” and “Authority” - Is being in a leadership position something that feels good (or does it produce some pressure or anxiety)?
2. Think about work expectations of you and family expectations of you - Are they aligned or are you setting up a situation where nobody’s happy?
3. Reflect on your projects and how much attention each gets - is this the best mix to achieve the results you want?

If nothing changes, what does your life look like in 6 months or a year? If you focused on one of these areas, what could be different in your life in a month, 6 months, or a year based on your answers?

The Good News, Bad News, and Next Steps
A negative bias towards power and authority, feeling guilty after a success, focusing on competence rather than results—these are just a few of the challenge patterns I’ve noticed in my leadership clients, especially the firsts and/or onlys. The good news is that once the limiting dynamics are identified, the solutions tend to be straightforward— and a lot of fun to implement.

The bad news? These are just three (3) of the most common mistakes. There are other challenging patterns such as feeling the need to always go it alone, naming and regulating intense emotions, and delivering twice as much to go half as far that seem to get in the way of sustainable, satisfying, long-term success for first and only leaders. And if these errors aren’t addressed in our discussions of more racially-just government and business institutions, we are doomed to repeat and recreate, and possibly worsen, structural patterns and dynamics from our past.

When these obstacles are no longer handled as one-offs, when we put them into the context of an internal landscape of leadership—the unique beliefs, mindsets, ways of framing power and authority, and the resultant behaviors that are different when you come from a non- dominant population group—we have the start of a map that leads to workplaces where we all belong, and a world in which we all thrive.

If any of these examples resonate for you or you’d like to explore your internal landscape of leadership or what Power Fluency might unlock, contact me.