How Your Subconscious Beliefs About Leadership are Sabotaging Your Success

A surprising truth about the new paradigm of leadership, and how some of your subconscious, traditional beliefs are probably holding you back.

When I start working with a leadership team in any organization, I conduct a focus group to ask frontline staff about their perceptions of leaders. Just about 100% of the time, they say the leaders are controlling, not holding people accountable, and not trustworthy in some fundamental way.

Then, I ask that leadership if they are controlling, and they say ‘no, of course not!’ I ask if they are diligent about holding people accountable, and they say ‘of course!’ And I ask them if they are trustworthy leaders, which always gets a resounding YES!

What the heck is the disconnect here? Subconscious beliefs that are driving dysfunctional behavior. Subconscious beliefs that we all hold, because they’ve been programmed into us by people who have led us. And, let’s just be direct here; many of the people who have led us have exhibited a ton of dysfunctional, controlling, annoying, weak, fearful, and dominating behaviors. We may not like it when we’re on the receiving end, but we still learn from them, and start to inherit the beliefs that drive those crappy behaviors.

Most parents realize that we tend to take on the parenting behaviors of our own parents, unless we are intentional to do otherwise. I still hear my mom’s voice coming out of my mouth when I talk to my son! When we take on a new role, we all tend to model and replicate the behaviors of people we have seen in that role, without thinking too much about it. This is a powerful function of our brain, that sometimes works for us! Don’t use our precious mental energy to try to figure out the exact sentence we want to say, and all the implications therein. Just do what you’ve seen done, and hope for the best! And that would be GREAT… if we hadn’t all had such horrible experiences with leaders.

More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is disengaged, meaning they don’t care about their work. With the #1 influence on that disengagement being the behaviors of their immediate supervisor. That’s quite a clear indicator that there’s a lot of sucky leaders out there.

So let’s go back to those leadership teams I work with, who don’t realize how they are being perceived by the frontline staff. Specifically, let’s name some of those subtle, yet dysfunctional behaviors those leaders exhibit, without realizing they are controlling, eroding trust, and avoiding critical accountability conversations. Here’s a few, common, fun ones!

Giving advise when it’s not asked for or wanted.
Taking all the big, important projects for themselves.
Allowing toxic behaviors among people they supervise.
Controlling people with a ton of rules and policies.
Not taking the time to coach someone who is under-performing.

And now, let’s look at some of the subtle, often subconscious beliefs I help leaders identify as I coach them. You can clearly see how these beliefs will drive the above, dysfunctional behaviors:

“If I try to correct this person’s behavior, they will quit, and I’ll be screwed.”
“People are inherently lazy, so I need to constantly prod, or they will do as little as possible.”
“If I make people like me, they will do whatever I need them to do.”
“If I let my team members take on the most important projects, they will mess them up, and my job will be at risk.”
“My time is too valuable to slow down and teach and coach you on this skill; you need to just buck up and figure this out.”
“If I don’t have a lot of clear rules and standard practices laid out, people will do all kinds of crazy, stupid things that waste time and create problems.”

So, what do we do about this hot-mess of leadership dysfunction? Beliefs drive behavior. So, we change our beliefs. I’ve had to look at my own shit and pull the subconscious beliefs that are driving my dysfunctional behavior, and it’s not pretty. It’s powerful, liberating, enlightening, and transformative, but, I’ll admit, it’s ugly to uncover these beliefs within me.

A huge part of transformational leadership development is to examine these learned, habitual behaviors and uncover these old beliefs. Here are a four powerful questions to ask yourself to uncover these beliefs in your own leadership philosophy, IN THIS ORDER:

What is my actual intention when I choose this approach or action?
What is driving that intention?
Does it come from a place of fear, judgement or self-protection?
Am I treating my colleagues with trust and respect, and showing that I believe them to be capable and able to learn and grow?
If I was completely ignoring my fears, letting go of any judgements I hold, and acting from a place of respect, confidence, belief and empowerment, what approach or action would I take here?

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