People follow the leader. Act like one.
People follow the leader. When you have power, people will follow your lead.
I saw this in data when I was running the country’s largest employee giving program. I worked with the HR Analytics team to study usage of my programs and compare that to engagement, retention, and other behaviors.
(We eliminated any personally identifiable information when we did this research, by the way.)
One thing we found was that both charitable giving and employee volunteerism were higher in groups where the manager donated and volunteered.
In the old days, no one would be surprised. In the old days, the boss forced you to support whatever cause he supported. That’s less true today but still exists in places.
While there might have been a few managers like that in my company of 270,000 employees, I am quite certain that statistically speaking those cases were insignificant to the trends we saw.
What I learned from this result was that people unconsciously mirror their leader’s behavior.
How shocking! People follow the leader!
What’s shocking is not that people mirror their leader’s behavior. What’s shocking is that many leaders forget that, or they’re just so unaware of their own patterns that they can’t see their own role in how their employees behave.
A lot of managers and executives live a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality.
| What they say | What they do |
|---|---|
| Don’t work on weekends | Send emails every weekend |
| Delegate, don’t micromanage | Rewrite everything you create |
| Take time off whenever you need it | Work even when they’re sick |
| Mistakes are okay | Expect perfection of themselves |
| Be present, pay attention | Check their phone in meetings |
| Think outside the box | Get stuck in ruts, routines, and regressive thinking |
| Keep to the strategy | Chase the “hot” opportunity |
You might think this hypocrisy would frustrate employees, but in reality the employees learn to behave like the leader.
If the leader checks their phone in a meeting, then checking your phone in a meeting becomes acceptable behavior no matter what they tell you the rules are.
If the leader sends emails on weekends, then “don’t work on weekends” is really about how much—not whether—you work on weekends.
The person who ends up the most frustrated is the leader. They keep telling employees to behave different, but the employees never seem to get the message.
Leadership is partly about the words you say, but it’s even more about the way you act.
People will follow the leader.
You’re a leader. Act like one.
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