The leadership trap that looks like passion.

The leadership trap that looks like passion

Someone once told me I was one of the most passionate people they'd worked with. I took it as a compliment for years, until I noticed what they were actually describing was how fast I reacted the moment I was challenged. This week I'm looking at the third trap in the September series, the one that doesn't look like a flaw at all, it looks like commitment, and what it actually costs you when your team learns which topics aren't safe to raise.

Key takeaways:

• This is the Child default, not childish, just the part of us that takes things personally and needs to be seen as right, especially under pressure
• It's the hardest trap in this series to catch because it doesn't feel like reacting from the inside, it feels like protecting the standard you care about
• Three signs you're in it: your chest tightens before you've heard the whole point, you're forming your defence while the other person is still talking, and meetings start to feel like something to manage instead of something to think in
• The real cost isn't the moment itself, it's that your team learns fast which truths are safe to bring you, and the hard ones quietly stop reaching you at all
• The shift: an actual half second pause, then one question instead of one answer, "what makes you say that" or "what are you seeing that I'm not." It buys you space to think and tells the other person the conversation is still open

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/EuCWJ-zQ9z0 

Read the blog: https://www.edgeofpossibilities.com.au/blog/respond-instead-of-react-under-pressure 

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 Full transcript

Someone once told me that I was one of the most passionate people they had worked with. I took it as a compliment for years. It took me a long time to notice that what they were actually describing was how quickly I reacted when I was challenged. My voice got a bit louder, my explanation got a bit longer, and I needed the room to see I was right before we could move on to the next thing.

That is the third trap in this series, and it's the hardest one to catch, because it doesn't look like a flaw. It looks like commitment. Weeks one and two were both about doing too much: rescuing, then correcting. This one's different. This one is about reacting instead of leading.

Psychologically, this is the Child default that you hear me talking about. Not childish, just the part of us that takes things personally and needs to be seen as right, especially when we're under pressure.

Here's what it actually looks like in a leader. Someone challenges a decision, and instead of getting curious, we get defensive. We start justifying before we've even heard the challenge. Someone raises a problem and it lands as criticism of us, not information about the work. We explain our reasoning at length when a simple question would have done, because somewhere underneath it, we need them to agree that we were right.

And here's the thing about authority: it doesn't collapse all at once, it drifts, and it drifts fastest exactly in this moment, the moment someone's watching to see how we handle it when we're challenged.

There are three signs we know we're in it. See if any of these feel familiar for you. The first one: you feel your chest tighten before you've even heard the whole point. You're already forming the defence while the other person is still talking. Or meetings start to feel like something to manage, not something to think in.

Here's the cost. Your team learns fast which topics are safe to raise with you and which ones aren't, and the hard truths, the ones we actually need to hear, quietly stop reaching us at all.

So what does it look like to lead from a calm place under exactly the same pressure? It starts with simply a pause, not a performance of calm, an actual half second before we respond. In that half second, we just need to ask one question instead of giving one answer. What makes you say that? Tell me more. What are you seeing that I'm missing, or that I'm not seeing?

That single move does two things. It buys us space to actually think, and it tells the other person the conversation is still open, it's not already decided. Separate the person from the problem, out loud if you need to. This isn't about whether I'm right, it's about whether we're getting this right.

You don't have to stop caring to do this well. Passion was never the problem. Reacting from it, instead of leading through it, was.

So, have you been getting caught in this one too? Not rescuing, not correcting, but needing to be right the moment you're challenged?