I learned something about one of my leadership bad habits today. The main one I am trying to deconstruct and integrate is how I make the people I am leading dependent on me. I dont empower them to grow into great leaders themselves. Instead, I train them to ask me about every single decision they need to make. This has held me back (if I am not making myself obsolete in the places I need, I am not making room for my own growth), AND of course it holds them back as well. On to the learning: In therapy I dug up a behavioral pattern that was imprinted by both of my parents. An example of which is: I would be in the kitchen (of our small, 2 BR apartment), and one of my parents would call out to me from the living room that I had (left clothes in there, forgot to put toys, books, etc away, not cleaned something well enough, etc), and then, as I got up to correct the mistake, or say I was coming to take care of it, the response from in the living room would invariably be, Nevermind, dont bother, I did it. It wasnt until today that I saw how this behavior wis ingrained in me. Dr. John Friel calls it a double-bind. I failed by making the mistake, and then I failed by not having the opportunity to correct the mistake. I was trained to be codependent by my parents in this way. Not only did I learn to not take care of myself, I learned that IT WAS POINTLESS TO TRY. Thus, I set up a similar dynamic in the past with people I have led. I train them that I will always be disappointed with their independent efforts, so they stop thinking for themselves, and then I train them to not try that hard because it will always be a disappointment, and then I do it for them or finish it for them when they bring to me their invariably disappointing effort. All day today, I have managed to stop the disappointed judgements from coming out of my mouth. Now, to do it for the rest of my life, in the hopes that those judgements will change form. If I can do this, I feel confident I will change the foundation of my relationships with people, and I will make it easier on myself to train people in order to make myself obsolete in any particular job.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:36:02 +0000
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