Single point of failure

Last week I was writing about geese, and the way the lead position rotates through the migrating flock to share the workload and responsibility. No goose stays at the front for the whole journey and the whole formation's success depends on that sharing. This week I've been thinking about what happens when a leader does the opposite. Not just staying at the front, but actively working to make sure nobody else can find each other.

A little while ago now, when I took over as the director of a team I'd inherited, one of the first things I noticed was a queue. A succession of people in my team, all senior leaders themselves who knew their jobs inside out, coming to me one by one with problems they could have sorted out with each other. Disputes that had festered because there was no culture of just chatting things through together. I will never know the full picture of what had gone before, but the shape of it lingered. When a leader controls the flow of information and keeps their direct reports from building real relationships with each other, people stop trusting each other. They come to the top instead. The person at the top, whether they realise it or not, whether they even intend to, becomes a blocker, maybe even a single point of failure.

Fear plays a part here, I think. Fear of being compared, fear of being found out, fear of what people might say if they're left in a room together without you. There is also power at play. The leader is dividing and ruling in the guise of something else, something about consistency or clarity of communication, but underneath it the motivation is self-protection. The problem is that it produces teams that are only as strong as the person at the centre, which means they're actually quite fragile, and certainly fairly miserable to be part of.

Having been on the receiving end of this way of working in a previous role, I did the opposite. I actively encouraged my senior team to meet without me, to sort things out between themselves, and to take their own decisions. It did not always go smoothly. People had learned, over time, to come upward rather than sideways, and unlearning that took a while. Some people moved on, new people joined and the culture started to settle into something different. It was years, not months, but things did improve.

What also made a difference was pushing the connections outward, not just within my team but across into other teams. Encouraging people to build relationships with their counterparts in other parts of the organisation, to plan together, to identify where their work intersected before the competing dependencies hit and created bottlenecks. That kind of joined-up working does not happen on its own. Someone has to create the conditions for it.

If you're a leader reading this, ask yourself whether the people around you are connected to each other, or just to you. Do they solve problems together, or do they bring them to your door? If it's the former, how does that make you feel? If it's the latter, what does that tell you about the culture you might be inadvertently creating?

What am I reading? 📚

Margaret Atwood on Substack

What am I watching? 👀

All you fascists bound to lose performed by "A gaggle of little old ladies promoting peace, justice, social, environmental, racial, gender, and economic equality through song and humour".

What am I listening to?👂

As an occasional superfan myself, I'm really enjoying listening to my friend Amy Lamé's Superfans series on BBC Radio 6 Music. The Kate Bush episode recently was fascinating.

Joy-giving things 😍

It was my birthday this week and we had some neighbours and friends and my dad round and sat in the garden and we didn't take any pictures! It did happen, honest 😀

Have a great weekend.

Lots of love to all

Lucy

ChangeOut is created by Lucy Caldicott. You can find more about my work at ChangeOut.org.

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