This is the time of year many leaders are thinking about the kind of culture they want to build on their team.  We’ve worked with nine different teams this summer to help them get more deeply connected and more aware about what’s really happening with each other.  And in some cases, that’s meant helping them unlearn some of the previous ideas they’d internalized about what “good teams” are and feel like. One of the biggest ideas to “unlearn” is one that I spent most my career propagating: that good teams are “positive” – all the time.

The research is really clear - and there has been a LOT of it - that effective teams are not positive all the time. 

Technically, we may only be a few weeks into summer, but for many education leaders across the country, “summer” is over.  And they are hard at work preparing for the next school year. 

I remember this time so well from my years as a school and network leader.  Feelings of optimism and excitement about the new school year were tempered with anxiety about being ready for it - along with a sense of disbelief that my long-anticipated summer break was already over, and here I was, already feeling behind and overwhelmed with under enrollment and vacant positions.

We were just getting started again, and somehow it was already “crunch time”…

The definition of the word “urgency” is “importance requiring swift action.”  Teams that operate with this kind of urgency learn what’s most important and then stay focused and disciplined on applying their effort in a timely way.  

But what do most of us really mean when we say we want “urgency?”  For me and for many of the teams we work with, the implicit definition of urgency seems to be “constantly moving fast.”  When we’re in a meeting, we have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that seems off-topic or not on the agenda.  We might have a visceral negative reaction to people that talk slow or have a harder time getting to their point.  We might jump to fix things that are “off vision” without trying to understand why or how they got that way.

Is a good leader “emotional?”  

Depends on how you define “emotional.”  A lot of us probably imagine the leader who ACTS on their emotions - without actually saying them.  For example, picture the leader that raises their voice in anger, or withdraws into a sulk after being criticized in the meeting.   Acting on emotion without being honest about what you’re feeling damages psychological safety and creates an enormous distraction for the team.  Everybody knows what the leader is feeling but no one is actually saying it.  So everyone just dances around it, and the leader's emotions end up taking the attention of the team in an unproductive way.

So acting on emotion without actually sharing the emotion = not good.  

Your body, your heart, and your head are all keeping score.  Which scoreboard are you paying attention to? We have three intelligence centers.  First, our body is constantly speaking to us through gut feelings, tension that we hold in our muscles, cortisol responses, etc.  Second, our heart gives every experience an emotional quality that tells us something important - whether we’re aware of it or not.  And finally, our head is giving us all kinds of thoughts, ideas, and analysis about what we’re experiencing.  All of them guide us.  All of them keep score.  But at least within my leadership,  I was conditioned to focus on the scoreboard in my head. 

“Imposter syndrome” is the chronic self-doubt that - despite external evidence to the contrary - you are not fit to be “the leader.”  Many people experience this as a nagging anxiety that there is just something about them that is somehow not fit for a certain position or level of leadership.  But I wanted to shine light on the opposite problem:  what I’ll call “leader syndrome.”  And leader syndrome is the feeling or belief that there is something about me that makes me inherently fit to be a “leader.”  While it’s likely to be read as confidence, I think it’s the flip side of the “imposter syndrome” coin, and problematic for its own reasons.

The knee-jerk reaction to fix or change the people we are leading is so strong.  For most of my career, I tried to fix or change at the very first hint that someone or something was not what I felt it should be.  I might have had a 5% window into what was actually happening, and switched into action mode.  So many of the leaders we support have also been conditioned to operate this way, and often feel overt pressure to demonstrate that they’re aggressively fixing and changing anything that doesn’t meet “the bar.” There’s a BIG problem with this approach…

At some point in the next six months, is your team going to spend time stepping away from the work and focusing on “building team?” If so, I would love to make a case for team un-building. Before team “building,” spend time on team “being,” where a true opportunity is created to build awareness around what people actually experience and the only goal is honesty and curiosity.

Have you ever gotten a piece of praise that strokes your ego but makes your heart sink?  Perhaps you get the validation you’ve been chasing after, but somehow – on some deeper level – it doesn’t feel so good when you actually get it. 

Early in my career I internalized this idea that “feedback is a gift.” And I think there’s no question that highly functional teams utilize feedback in various forms as a powerful tool. But like any tool, it can be misused. And I’ve noticed within myself - along with hundreds of leaders that we’ve worked with – how the act of feedback can become performative or even harmful.