A person who reports to me is not doing his job. He promises and promises and promises, but does not deliver. And yet he insists that I should not be giving direction directly to people on his team. What's a leader to do?
Did you ever sit in traffic? Thousands of cars moving at a snail's pace. You think there must be a huge accident up ahead to cause this much delay. When the traffic finally breaks loose you realize that there was one car sitting on the side of the road with a flat tire. All that waiting because of curiosity about a simple flat tire. Wouldn't you like to shake the first person who slowed down to take a look? If no one had looked, all traffic would have continued to flow freely and you'd be at your destination by now.
One person in a position to move forward or slow down chose to slow down, forcing all the rest of you to slow down too. That's a bottleneck. The best you can do is not to fall into the "look-there" trap and keep moving.
This is a leadership lesson too. If one person on your team is a bottleneck and you've offered help, you've patiently urged them forward, you've been sympathetic to the challenges of the work--in short you've done all you can and yet this person is still not performing (and you cannot terminate them)--what do you do? You go around them. You do not accept that the bottleneck must continue.
Sometimes the best leadership action is to move ahead yourself. Go around or over the blockage. The person lagging will get angry and demand respect. Your answer is to calmly remind them of your patience, your offers of help and your determination to reach the goal with or without them.
Leadership is not harping on people to get their jobs done. It is not deferring to organization charts no matter what. It is also not waiting endlessly for the person to change their ways.
The whole organization is depending on you and you must act. Do not get stuck in traffic for one person who won't keep moving.
How do you handle resistance to your leadership? Share your stories through our comment link.
Comments