People Watch What You Do

A few years ago, I was walking my son to school on a particularly icy morning. The pavements were slippery, I was nervous about falling, so as we walked I found myself holding onto the fence for reassurance. A little further along, I turned around and saw my five-year-old son doing the same thing. He was holding onto the fence too.

I remember feeling shocked, my immediate thought was that he didn't need to.

He was small, so there was less distance for him to fall, and his shoes had much better grip than mine. More importantly, he wasn't holding onto the fence because he had independently decided that this was the safest way to walk. He was doing it because I was doing it.  He was watching me, he respects me – I am his teacher, so of course he looked to me for direction.

It was such a small moment, but it stayed with me because it captures something fundamental about how we learn from other people.

We learn from what they demonstrate, and nowhere is that more important than in leadership.

The leadership message beneath the words

Most leaders have a good idea of what they want their organisation to feel like. They want people to communicate openly, take responsibility, speak up when something isn't right, learn from mistakes, embrace change and feel confident enough to challenge decisions when necessary. These intentions are often reflected in organisational values, leadership expectations, policies and development programmes.

There is another set of messages being communicated all the time. They aren't written down, nor usually discussed in leadership meetings and leaders may not even realise they are sending them: they are communicated through behaviour.

• A leader who says that feedback is welcome but becomes visibly defensive when challenged is teaching people something about feedback.

• ·A leader who talks about wellbeing but sends emails late at night and consistently works through every break is teaching people something about availability and boundaries.

• A leader who asks people to take responsibility but steps in and takes over whenever something becomes difficult is teaching people something about autonomy.

• A leader who says that mistakes should be used as opportunities to learn but reacts harshly when something goes wrong is teaching people something about psychological safety.

The words may say one thing, but the experience says another.  When those two things conflict, people tend to believe the experience. What becomes normal becomes culture

This is where leadership and culture become so closely connected. Culture can sometimes feel like something large and difficult to define — something belonging to the whole organisation, but culture is also being created in hundreds of small interactions. It is created in the way a manager responds to a difficult question.

In whether someone feels able to say, “I'm not sure.”, in what happens when someone raises a concern. Whether disagreement is welcomed or quietly discouraged and how leaders speak about people when they aren't in the room. Does accountability mean blame or responsibility? Over time, these repeated experiences create patterns. These patterns become expectations, expectations become behaviours, and behaviours become culture.

This is why leadership development cannot simply be about giving leaders more knowledge. A leader can know everything they are supposed to say and still create a very different experience through the way they behave. The more interesting work is often in understanding the gap between what we believe we are communicating and what other people are actually experiencing. The things we don't notice

The challenge is that many of these behaviours are not deliberate, most leaders aren't consciously thinking, I want my team to be afraid to challenge me.

·         They may simply be under pressure.

·         They may be trying to protect the organisation.

·         They may believe they are helping by stepping in.

·         They may have learned their own leadership behaviours from people they worked with earlier in their careers.

·         They may be responding to a difficult situation in the only way that feels familiar.

This is why self-awareness matters so much, not as another leadership competency to tick off, but as an ongoing willingness to stop and ask:

·         What am I bringing into this situation?

·         What might people be experiencing from me that I don't intend?

·         What behaviours am I rewarding, even unintentionally?

·         What have people learned they need to do in order to work successfully around me?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question:

What have I made normal?

Sometimes the things we are most frustrated by in our teams are behaviours that have been reinforced, tolerated or modelled by leadership over time.

Leadership is more visible than we think

The story of my son on that icy pavement is a simple one, but that is perhaps why it has stayed with me. He wasn't trying to copy me, he wasn't analysing my behaviour, he certainly wasn't making a conscious decision about leadership. He simply looked at what I was doing and followed my example.

Adults in organisations may be more sophisticated, but the principle remains. People notice.

• what leaders do when things are difficult

• how leaders behave under pressure

• what happens when someone disagrees

• whether leaders listen or simply wait to respond

• whether the values on the wall appear in everyday decisions

• Most importantly, they notice whether the person leading the organisation is prepared to hold themselves to the same standards they expect from everyone else.

This doesn't mean leaders have to get everything right. In fact, perhaps one of the most powerful things a leader can model is the willingness to get something wrong, acknowledge it and do something differently.

“I got that wrong.”

“I hadn't considered it from that perspective.”

“I need to listen to this more carefully.”

“I'm not sure, but let's work it out.”

Those moments don't diminish leadership, they can strengthen it, they show people that leadership isn't about having all the answers, it’s about being willing to look, listen, learn and take responsibility for the impact we have.

So, what are you showing people?

Leadership is often discussed in terms of what we need to communicate to our teams.

But perhaps we need to spend just as much time thinking about what our behaviour is communicating for us, because every leader is modelling something.

The question is whether we are conscious of what it is.

• You might be asking your team to be more open while demonstrating caution.

• You might be asking them to take responsibility while continuing to rescue them from difficult situations.

• You might be asking them to embrace change while holding tightly to the way things have always been done.

• Or you might be modelling something entirely different.

o   Curiosity.

o   Courage.

o   Accountability.

o   Calmness.

o   Reflection.

•  The willingness to

o    have a difficult conversation.

o   to change your mind.

o   to say, “I don't know.”

These are the moments from which culture is built, and perhaps that is why meaningful leadership development must begin with the leader themselves.

Not with “What do I need to tell my team?” but with “What am I showing them?”

Because better cultures don't begin with better words, they begin when the people leading them are willing to look honestly at their own behaviour.

Better conversations create better cultures.