Leading People and Leading Work Are Two Different Jobs

You don’t have to study organizational psychology to know there’s a bad boss problem in the U.S.—you just have to work.

The research confirms what we all experience. Only 1 in 10 people are natural leaders, and organizations make the wrong decisions when promoting leaders 82 percent of the time.

It’s not just their teams that suffer. It’s estimated that poor leadership costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion per year.

It’s easy to blame the bosses themselves, and sometimes they deserve it. But that’s not why there’s a leadership problem in corporate America.

The issue is systemic. People with the wrong orientations are chosen and then aren’t provided the resources they need. The most talented leaders in the world couldn’t cover the insane range of responsibilities thrust upon them.

The one metric that most directly reflects leader effectiveness is employee engagement, which recently clocked in at 32 percent. That makes you an All-Star in baseball but a failure in everything else.

Despite the data and experience, most companies aren’t doing anything meaningful about the problem. The ways we train leaders have changed, but the ways in which we select and incentivize them largely have not. This is a failure but not a failing; it’s human nature which cannot be overcome. But it can be counter-programmed.

Top Heavy Status

In theory, there is sufficient status within an organization for everyone to thrive. In practice, status is reserved for those at the top of the pyramids: leaders.

The “independent contributor—team leader—org leader” career track is so hardwired into the culture that no one actually asks themselves whether they want to lead. They ask themselves whether they want to succeed.

By making leadership the (almost) sole source of status, we incentivize everyone to aspire to it, including those who are not only ill-suited but hate the actual work involved. Even those who know they don’t want to lead also know that they will limit their careers by not doing so.

In the race for status, the most talented leaders win far less often than the most talented workplace politicians. And based on personalized motives, workplace politicians are the least suited to lead people.

Until organizations can offer equal status to non-leadership roles, this problem cannot be solved.

What “Achieve” Meant

People are usually promoted into leadership roles for achievements in something other than leadership; the best salespeople become sales leaders, the best coders become tech leaders, etc. But as the data indicate, the correlation between high achievement and successful leadership is quite low. It’s not hard to understand why.

Leading people requires patience, empathy, and a tolerance for irrationality. It is best suited for those who feel most fulfilled by connection.

Achievement-oriented people are usually the opposite. They like hitting clear, unambiguous goals and moving on to the next challenge. They are used to being the star performers, receiving the accolades rather than providing them. The idea of tending to others’ emotional needs is beyond unappealing. People responsibilities drain and slow them down.

Very few people can be exceptional achievers and exceptional leaders. For achievers, managing people usually means giving up what they love, a punishment for them and the people they will lead.

But because achievers want status by nature, it’s a punishment they demand, even though it will make them unhappy.

Why are we rewarding star performers by giving them different jobs? I guess Chicago Bulls fans should be grateful Michael Jordan’s playing career didn’t end because he was promoted to GM.

Mission Farcical

The amount of responsibility heaped upon the modern team leader is absurd: strategy, execution, and team engagement, all in a 24-hour day.

Strategy is planning, and planning never stops. They may teach strategy models to MBAs, but they don’t teach internal politics. At large companies, that can eat up more than half your day, and a failure to engage can dramatically constrain your career.

Execution is hitting numbers, the biggest determinant in job security and the top priority for virtually every manager and leader. (And, at the end of each quarter, it is the sole priority.)

Engagement is the process of motivating, developing, and guiding teams. It requires trust-building. It is a time-intensive process with non-guaranteed results.

Is it a surprise that most leaders continue to focus on strategy and execution, leaving their teams effectively un-led? Even if new leaders are enthusiastic about engaging their teams, when, exactly, are they supposed to do it?

Everyone loves employee development until you miss your numbers because you spent your time teaching instead of doing.

Threading the Needle

There is a way for organizations to grow status exponentially while giving everyone what they need. It happens by separating work leadership from people leadership, the equivalent of adding a functional psychologist to every team.

Work leaders continue to lead strategy and execution, engaging directly with team members while overseeing deliverables. But work leaders are not responsible for 1:1s, engagement, development, or psychological safety.

That is the purview of the people leader.

And if the work leader is dissatisfied with performance, they don’t address it. They tell the people leader, who does.

This may sound somewhat like HR, but HR practitioners cannot play this role effectively because they are outsiders. Teams don’t trust them, and they can’t defuse problems before they become crises.

The talent function has to be brought within teams to be psychologically effective for team members. And to free up work leaders from conflicting responsibilities.

Work leaders maintain their status while losing the responsibilities that drain them the most. People leaders gain new status by taking on work they love. And team members gain new status by receiving the type of attention and support they need.

Now that’s what I call threading the needle. We all may end up status-fied after all.