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You got promoted to your first management position. Maybe it’s something you have long wanted. You talk excitedly to anyone willing to listen, about your plans for yourself and your team. You decide to focus all your energy on it. You work longer hours to set an example. Maybe you still keep an exercise regime, but you cut down on other, “less essential” things in your life, such as your guitar and that amateur jazz band you were playing in. You no longer “have time for it” which essentially means
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it’s become much less important to you than the big career push you’re going for.
Things go very well, you are appreciated by senior management and by your team, you deliver success after success and you realize you are cut out to be a leader.
Then, one day, the tide changes. Maybe your boss changes and you don’t communicate quite as well with the new one. Or you get a “development assignment” in another area of the company and your new team doesn’t seem to care much about you. Maybe this other junior manager who is angling for the same promotion as you now are, seems to get better visibility and somehow to achieve more, and you cannot tell if it is all due to politics, or he really is better. Maybe it’s simply that you get your first 360-degree leadership report, and your team’s anonymous feedback shows they are much less impressed by you as a leader than they seem to show.
At first, you don’t realize how much this weighs on you. But your sleep gets worse, you keep having nightmares about people at the company shunning you or pointing at you as a fraud. You find it harder to summon the infectious enthusiasm you used to show, and the team starts to disconnect. Maybe some of them start to challenge your authority, to go for visibility with senior management by skipping you, and it’s subtle, you don’t quite know how to address it. You start doubting whether you really are a born leader. You feel guilty you don’t live up to the inspiring ideal you had in mind, and to compensate, you start working even longer hours, you do more and more tasks that you don’t quite know how to delegate to the team. You look harried and people start gossiping (or so you think) how you’re not quite “up to it”, how you don’t have it all under control. You feel you’re failing in everything you try, you sound strained and inauthentic. Your boss has a few talks with you where she advises you to work less. But at the same time, she expects results, and you continue to work long days to try to deliver them, to not disappoint her; still, you feel she is disappointed.
This scenario is similar to what many of the young managers I coach have experienced. You might say, no surprise there, that’s when people resort to coaching in the first place. Maybe there are well-adjusted, continuously successful young leaders who never go through crippling self-doubt. Still, in my interviews with experienced leaders at the top of the corporate world, they’ve almost all confessed they’d had some self-doubt earlier on in their career.
Self-doubt can be good: it can make you reflect, learn and adjust. But for that, you need to feel it’s a learning opportunity, rather than an existential question. If “I’m failing as a leader” turns into “I’m a failure”, you won’t learn, you will panic, start thrashing about and sink. “Sink” might mean you’ll give up the leadership career dream altogether and conclude you were rather made to be a “high value specialist”. Or it might mean that you’ll hang on and somehow continue as a manager, but by sacrificing and shutting up your inner voice, becoming less and less open to feedback, enjoying yourself less and less and making sure there’s no joy for your team either. You might become one of those inauthentic, uninspiring and uninspired bosses you used to dread, who push for their “KPI” only and talk about “our dream, our mission” without believing a word of it.
Rewind to… you guessed it, to the moment you’ve abandoned your guitar. What if you keep practicing every other evening, performing with your band from time to time, while taking on your new leadership challenge? You can surely still find time for it, because you love doing it, and the better you get at it, both you and the band, the more you love it. You are realistic, you know you won’t be the next Al Di Meola. But it brings you such joy, you express yourself, you are free, and there are these moments of pure “flow” when everything falls into place, when your hands move on the strings by themselves, when you are both fully detached and extremely focused, when time stands still. You are (not quite secretly) proud of it too: you might not be a musical genius, but you certainly are the best operations manager guitarist you know.
In this alternative scenario, will you not meet that moment of self-doubt at work? Yes, you will, but this time you will put it in perspective. “I’m not great at this leadership thing” is much easier to digest when you are good at something else, even something as seemingly trivial as a hobby. Practicing your guitar will give you that “me-time” when you can somehow see the problems at work on a higher plane and work through them in a constructive way. It will give you mental space to learn from the challenge and adjust to it.
Is a serious leisure interest a surefire way to succeed in leadership? No. Becoming a successful leader is a complex, subjective and ever-moving target. There is no fail-safe recipe for it. But serious leisure will support you and strengthen you in your leadership quest.
Keep your guitar close, when you get that management position. If you think “I’ll pause it for a while, just until I get the hang of this”, you will find yourself several years down the road, with much of the skill lost (and oh, how we hate being bad at something we excelled in, before! We’d rather never touch the damn thing again, than go through such embarrassing attempts) and then it will be doubly difficult to regain this precious source of identity and pride.
Then, one day, the tide changes. Maybe your boss changes and you don’t communicate quite as well with the new one. Or you get a “development assignment” in another area of the company and your new team doesn’t seem to care much about you. Maybe this other junior manager who is angling for the same promotion as you now are, seems to get better visibility and somehow to achieve more, and you cannot tell if it is all due to politics, or he really is better. Maybe it’s simply that you get your first 360-degree leadership report, and your team’s anonymous feedback shows they are much less impressed by you as a leader than they seem to show.
At first, you don’t realize how much this weighs on you. But your sleep gets worse, you keep having nightmares about people at the company shunning you or pointing at you as a fraud. You find it harder to summon the infectious enthusiasm you used to show, and the team starts to disconnect. Maybe some of them start to challenge your authority, to go for visibility with senior management by skipping you, and it’s subtle, you don’t quite know how to address it. You start doubting whether you really are a born leader. You feel guilty you don’t live up to the inspiring ideal you had in mind, and to compensate, you start working even longer hours, you do more and more tasks that you don’t quite know how to delegate to the team. You look harried and people start gossiping (or so you think) how you’re not quite “up to it”, how you don’t have it all under control. You feel you’re failing in everything you try, you sound strained and inauthentic. Your boss has a few talks with you where she advises you to work less. But at the same time, she expects results, and you continue to work long days to try to deliver them, to not disappoint her; still, you feel she is disappointed.
This scenario is similar to what many of the young managers I coach have experienced. You might say, no surprise there, that’s when people resort to coaching in the first place. Maybe there are well-adjusted, continuously successful young leaders who never go through crippling self-doubt. Still, in my interviews with experienced leaders at the top of the corporate world, they’ve almost all confessed they’d had some self-doubt earlier on in their career.
Self-doubt can be good: it can make you reflect, learn and adjust. But for that, you need to feel it’s a learning opportunity, rather than an existential question. If “I’m failing as a leader” turns into “I’m a failure”, you won’t learn, you will panic, start thrashing about and sink. “Sink” might mean you’ll give up the leadership career dream altogether and conclude you were rather made to be a “high value specialist”. Or it might mean that you’ll hang on and somehow continue as a manager, but by sacrificing and shutting up your inner voice, becoming less and less open to feedback, enjoying yourself less and less and making sure there’s no joy for your team either. You might become one of those inauthentic, uninspiring and uninspired bosses you used to dread, who push for their “KPI” only and talk about “our dream, our mission” without believing a word of it.
Rewind to… you guessed it, to the moment you’ve abandoned your guitar. What if you keep practicing every other evening, performing with your band from time to time, while taking on your new leadership challenge? You can surely still find time for it, because you love doing it, and the better you get at it, both you and the band, the more you love it. You are realistic, you know you won’t be the next Al Di Meola. But it brings you such joy, you express yourself, you are free, and there are these moments of pure “flow” when everything falls into place, when your hands move on the strings by themselves, when you are both fully detached and extremely focused, when time stands still. You are (not quite secretly) proud of it too: you might not be a musical genius, but you certainly are the best operations manager guitarist you know.
In this alternative scenario, will you not meet that moment of self-doubt at work? Yes, you will, but this time you will put it in perspective. “I’m not great at this leadership thing” is much easier to digest when you are good at something else, even something as seemingly trivial as a hobby. Practicing your guitar will give you that “me-time” when you can somehow see the problems at work on a higher plane and work through them in a constructive way. It will give you mental space to learn from the challenge and adjust to it.
Is a serious leisure interest a surefire way to succeed in leadership? No. Becoming a successful leader is a complex, subjective and ever-moving target. There is no fail-safe recipe for it. But serious leisure will support you and strengthen you in your leadership quest.
Keep your guitar close, when you get that management position. If you think “I’ll pause it for a while, just until I get the hang of this”, you will find yourself several years down the road, with much of the skill lost (and oh, how we hate being bad at something we excelled in, before! We’d rather never touch the damn thing again, than go through such embarrassing attempts) and then it will be doubly difficult to regain this precious source of identity and pride.