Every leader hits a point of extreme exasperation with the people they’re leading. My own frustrations often happen at home. One of the boys asks for permission to do something and I don’t want to give it.
“Hey, Dad, can I play disc golf this Saturday?”
[Checks calendar. Nothing on it. But still not sure I want to approve.]
“I’m not sure. It’s only Monday. Can we talk about it later?”
“You always tell me you want to talk about it later.”
“Okay. But can we?”
“There’s nothing on the calendar.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Now I have a choice to make: Do I enter into the conversation or do I bail out?
The temptation for any leader—in or outside the home—is to leverage positional power to get things done (or avoid them). You want people to do something, and you saying it should be reason enough for them to do it.
“I need you to do that because I said so.”
It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Makes us feel important. Like we matter.
But it doesn’t accomplish what we think it will.
Pulling Rank: Your Reserve Chute
If you jump out of any plane, you are jumping with a reserve chute. Pulling rank is the reserve chute of leadership. When it comes out, you should be running out of options.
Too many of us run to the reserve chute of authority to solve almost all of our leadership problems. Why actually confront a team member when we can just sit in our office and shoot off an email giving a new command? Why take a strategy question from a confused staff member when we feel like we’ve been crystal clear?
“Please just do what I said.”
Many times pulling rank means you can’t trust the relationship—it can’t stand up under the test. It reveals we don’t have the relational clout to lead and we have to resort to the position because we’ve lost everything else.
There’s Certainly a Time For Authority
Reserve chutes are for a reason.
There’s necessary (and beautiful) merit in responding to authority properly. When a decision gets made, we should abide. There are chains of command for a reason.
A decision was made that I took the liberty of questioning. (If you know me, you are not surprised.) I wanted to offer a different perspective on the conversation but I didn’t realize it wasn’t actually a conversation. Another person, over 20 years my senior, said to me, “Hans, the decision has been made and you need to align.”
It was the only time I can remember where rank was clearly pulled and clearly needed. A lesson in what nagging does to people in authority.
I think that was the last time.
A Better Way: “What Am I Missing?”
Exasperated leaders live and die by the reserve chute when they are out of options all the time. The result is a demanding culture with unclear reasoning and a good bit of confusion.
“Why can’t anyone listen to me?”
But we are often far less clear than we think and don’t know how much of the confusion we’re creating.
Rather than say, “Because I said so,” consider asking others, “What am I missing?”
“What Am I Missing” is Harder to Ask Than We Think
A few weeks ago I was in a staff meeting and it didn’t go nearly as well as I had hoped. We were ill-prepared for a conversation on an agenda item I had given a week prior.
I said, “Well clearly we aren’t ready for this item so we’ll move on to the next,” but my face said, “Why was this so hard and why weren’t we prepared for the thing I said we were doing?” (When I say “clearly,” I am really saying “ugh.”)
But the entire week I was bugged. I was bugged because at least 70% of the meeting kerfuffle was my lack of preparation of the team. I was asking for serious reasoning and unfiltered conversation. I didn’t prepare them in advance. I didn’t give any parameters on how we were going to talk. I didn’t remind them of the importance of the topic.
It was on me, not them.
When my son wants to schedule a disc golf tournament with me at night and I say, “Not right now,” it’s because I’ve been gone all day—not because he wants to be a nuisance. It’s me, not him.
“Because I said so” is often not a way to help someone recognize the chain of command—it’s a smokescreen for ineffective leadership that wants outcomes the easy way.
When it comes to your desire to pull rank, what have you found you’re missing?