Click here for the TL;DR

Empathetic managers who avoid holding their employees accountable can cause their own downfall due to the false consensus effect, the illusion of knowledge, insufficient communication, and believing that accountability is incompatible with empathy. When a people-first manager tries to protect their employees during high-stress times, accountability may start flowing around that manager, resulting in the manager losing control of the work… or, worse, losing their job.

I am a big fan of empathetic, people-first leadership. Keep your people engaged, and they will reward you with high performance and exceptional outcomes. It’s an approach to leadership which has served me incredibly well over the last four decades.

Except when it hasn’t.

Three specific times come to mind. The common thread was that in each of those cases, my boss was under intense pressure from their boss, and they passed that pressure down the hierarchy to me.

As an empathetic, people-first manager, my nature is to shield my people from that pressure, to provide a buffer so they don’t get derailed by it. So that’s what I tried to do. I told them I was getting pressure from above, but I did not turn up the heat on them personally.

It did not go well in these cases.

Expectations Don’t Match Reality

Yes, I did expect it to go well. I thought that because I’d had success with my approach and style in the past, it would also work when the heat was turned way up.

What I expected from my boss: My pushback would be seen as level-headed, even-tempered discernment in a stressful time. I understood the challenge, my people were working on it, and there was no need to panic or overreact.

What I got from my boss: My pushback was seen as adversarial bordering on insubordinate. They thought I either did not understand or did not care about the pressure they were under. Instead of partnering with me on solutions, they took over to actively manage the situation.

What I expected from my team: My protection would be valued and rewarded with even higher levels of dedication. I would be recognized as a leader who cared about them and entrusted them with solving the problems.

What I got from my team: What I thought was me protecting them was entirely invisible to them. When my boss took over and got personally involved, it seemed to my team like I had stopped protecting them. Suddenly their skip-level was all up in their business, and it seemed I wasn’t doing anything to stop it. They felt abandoned. They felt I had failed them.

Four Lessons From Failure

In all three situations, things did not get better when my boss got personally involved. Things got worse. For the team, for me, and for the project.

For a long time after, I thought that was because my bosses’ management styles were all wrong. In my view, they came in spraying gasoline on a small, controllable fire and turned it into a much bigger and more destructive fire. While that assessment is not wrong, it is incomplete.

I learned many lessons from those three situations. Here are the most important:

1. We are all subject to the false consensus effect

The false consensus effect is a human tendency to believe that everyone thinks the same way you do. This is one way assumptions cause miscommunication.

I assumed my bosses would all agree that when pressure came from above, the right thing to do would be to acknowledge the pressure and get to work on solutions. My bosses, however, had a different way of thinking. In their mind, when pressure came from above, the right thing to do would be to pass that increased pressure onto the people below them.

I assumed the dedicated, concentrated progress of the team toward solutions would be seen as a strong tactical response. What they needed to see, however, was frenetic energy being poured into increased status meetings, with rapid updates and expanded work hours in an all-hands-on-deck crisis response. To them, that was an indication of appropriate action being taken.

Because I focused on methodical, deliberate identification of solutions, my actions looked like inaction to my bosses. What they wanted to see from me felt like a huge waste of effort and a major distraction.

2. The illusion of knowledge leads to bad decisions

The illusion of knowledge is a cognitive bias wherein we feel like we understand how something works much better than we actually do. No manager can fully understand every process and tool in use by their team, but because we mostly understand how all our employees’ functions fit together, we feel like we understand the details of what each employee does.

It’s the same with most objects we use daily: Because we know how to operate the thing, we think we understand how it works. When we have to explain exactly how it works, however, we realize we don’t understand very much at all. Take an everyday object and try it for yourself: A toaster’s pop-up mechanism, for example, or how pressing “start” gets your car’s motor running.

As managers, we may generally understand the inputs and outputs of our employees, but if we had to take their place and actually generate those outputs, we would immediately run into brick walls and knowledge chasms.

My bosses felt like they understood the work my team did. They didn’t really, though. As a result, they made arbitrary decisions in the heat of the moment, most of which caused additional confusion and disruption. This of course resulted in a flurry of frenetic meetings and status updates as the team responded to these counterproductive decisions.

Ironically, that frenetic energy made the bosses feel that finally something was being done! They did not understand, however, that all that doing was not actually solving the underlying problems.

3. A lack of knowledge is not always the manager’s fault

Another lesson I took from these three cases was that I did not communicate sufficiently all the things my team was doing to resolve the problems that were causing the increased pressure from above.

I find this is common in high achievers who are also pleasers. We work hard to achieve results while hiding “how the sausage is made.” No one wants to be thought of as a complainer, right? (False consensus effect again!) Besides, the boss doesn’t have time to understand everything we do. Better to just get it done and not be seen as a self-promoting braggart.

It has taken a long time to see this pattern in my own behavior, though I can easily see it in others. High-achieving pleasers keep their head down, do great work, take deep pride in what they accomplish, and keep it all secret. Then they wonder why they get passed over for promotions and even sometimes get bad performance reviews.

Pleasers assume that people will notice. But people don’t, and it’s not their fault. Had I been able to understand how my boss’ illusion of knowledge was interacting with the false consensus effect, I would have communicated more robustly both before and during the crisis.

That is, I would have given some frenetic energy to crisis-response meetings and demanded additional status updates from the team, on the things the team was working on. This might not have changed the ultimate outcomes, but at least then I could have shaped the work toward what I knew would be more beneficial and productive.

4. Accountability happens through you or around you… but accountability happens

Empathetic, people-first managers (like me) can be over-protective of our people. Being protective is good. Being over-protective is bad.

Results-oriented managers can also overdo it in the other direction. I’ve worked for some results-oriented managers who, in the words of a colleague, “got results but left a lot of bodies in their wake.”

The zone of success lies between the two. It’s a blend that melds accountability with empathy. It prioritizes results and engagement.

In the two situations that went especially sideways, I worked for an overly results-oriented boss. The kind that gets results but leaves a lot of bodies in his wake.

I didn’t want my team to be those bodies, so I doubled down on my protective tendencies. What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that the accountability my boss was demanding would fall on them in one way or another. Either it would flow through me, or it would flow around me.

For accountability to flow through me would require me to rely on skills and talents I was not especially strong in. Command, competition, and discipline are among my bottom StrengthsFinder results. These things feel uncomfortable and foreign. They feel wrong. So I avoided them, believing instead that I was “protecting” my team by not doing those things.

When accountability did not flow through me, however, my bosses made sure it flowed around me. In one case, the boss started running all project meetings and micromanaging my employees. In another, my boss literally took the project away from me and gave it to another manager. In both those cases, it marked the beginning of the end of my time at the company.

Multidimensionality is Key

The summary of all this is that although you should base your leadership style in your strengths, you also need to know when those strengths and that style may be leading to your downfall.

In times of great stress and under extreme pressure, we tend to double down on the things that have made us successful. This is often the exact wrong approach at these times because everyone else will also be doubling down on their own strengths. This ratchets up underlying tensions that seem trivial in non-stress times. Often to the point of irreconcilable conflict.

Being able—and willing—to adjust your style in those times is a superpower every leader needs to develop. It’s not easy and often feels extremely uncomfortable, but it’s work absolutely worth doing.

What Stress is Vexing You Right Now?

This doesn’t just apply to business leaders. It happens in families, in social groups, and anywhere people interact where stress occurs. What stress are you facing, and how are other people causing that stress to turn into unforced errors or self-inflicted problems? Let’s talk it through.

I help people make the most of every day. I help people live creatively, lead confidently, and care courageously. I am no wiser or smarter than the ancient gurus and sages, but I am a skilled and experienced practitioner of synthesizing all that wisdom into a version that is most useful to the person sitting across from me. That’s a skill based on innate talent, perpetual study, thousands of hours of practice, and a long, deep, rich life of diverse experiences.

If you want to tap into that and let life wash over you, grab time on my calendar. Let’s talk.

Book us for Your Workshop

We would love to do our workshops for your team, staff, conference, or other group. We can build a custom workshop for your needs, on topics from nonprofit board development to powerful communications to overcoming burnout.

Over the past several months, our two most popular workshops have been

• Overcoming Compassion Fatigue
  Compassion fatigue and burnout can affect everyone. We help individuals become more resilient and capable of avoiding and overcoming compassion fatigue. We help teams improve their culture and habits to reduce burnout. And we help leaders learn what causes burnout and compassion fatigue and how they can protect their teams from it while giving them the support they need.
• Flourishing Through Caregiving
  Caregiving is one of the hardest things any person can be called on to do, but it can also be filled with beauty, meaning, and purpose. Without getting sanctimonious or leaning on toxic positivity, we help individuals and families take on a caregiving responsibility without unnecessarily sacrificing their careers, their own health, their relationships, or their identity along the way. Centered around our Three Cs of Caregiving, this workshop covers aspects of project management, clear communication, team culture, personal resilience, and learning to be in control of your emotions instead of governed by them.

For more information, drop me a line with what you’re interested in, or just book an exploratory call on my calendar now.

Other Things to Do

Download a free chapter from one of my books. Or just buy the whole book now. You probably will after reading the free chapter anyway, so why wait?