Lancelot’s supervisor
Would you want to supervise Sir Lancelot? You know Lancelot, the knight from Arthurian legend who cannot be beaten in battle, and who (at least initially) seems to have no vice, and never makes a mistake? If there ever is someone who did an incredible job of looking good, it’s Lancelot.
On the one hand, supervising Lancelot could feel like you just won the lottery. You’ve got a superhero who will help your team scale the highest mountains, defeat dragons, and who has limitless energy. Lancelot just doles out excellence all day and all night long. Seemingly he’s an efficiency-machine who does great work and who is loved by everybody for his devotion to task.
On the other hand, Lancelot NEVER asks for help. Why? Because he doesn’t seem to need it. Given this, what exactly is your role as his supervisor? And what does his annual review look like? I can imagine it now: “Lancelot, for the 5th year in a row I have only positive, five-star feedback for you and can’t see that changing anytime soon.” But where is the opportunity for learning – for Lancelot or for you?
Of course, the rest of the team loves how Lancelot executes perfectly to help the team reach its goals. However, beyond the appreciation of his skills there’s something missing. Lancelot never goes out for drinks with colleagues or shares stories about his challenges. Even though he’s a mega-high-performer, no one really knows Lancelot, and that often leads to perceptions and judgements that either decrease trust in him or prevent it being built in the first place.
Authenticity and trust
You might see similarities between Lancelot and someone you supervise, or even yourself. So what? You might argue that Lancelot was being authentic – he really didn’t need help for much of his professional career. But beneath all his competencies, he was struggling with challenges that in the end broke the unity of his “team” of knights. It turns out that the same tendencies Lancelot had of never sharing his struggles and never asking for help also erodes trust on a team.
One IT Director, a coaching client I worked with could have easily been Lancelot’s stunt-double, and I’ll refer to him here as “Lance”. Lance had Olympian abilities, juggled endless projects, and seemed to find success everywhere. His team was a motivated model of excellence at the organization, and even Lance’s manager found little but praise for him. However, Lance’s challenge came when his VP asked for updates and all he ever shared were successes.
Lance thought he was exhibiting a “can do” attitude, and didn’t want to “bother” the VP with challenges that Lance would likely troubleshoot on his own. To Lance, this was being respectful of the VP’s time. Fast forward, and Lance has just received feedback from a 360-performance assessment that has pointed out that several people on the team question his authenticity. Lance is confused and angry at this feedback. He believes he shares authentically about others’ work, and is honest about his appraisal without pulling punches. Through coaching conversations, we uncovered that Lance never really admitted his challenges to anyone, never asked for help, and rarely proactively welcomed feedback. Inwardly, he felt he was “knocking it out of the park”. Outwardly, there were those who questioned whether they were getting the whole story.
If you are really ‘knocking everything out of the park’, it’s time for a new park.
During job interviews a common question is “what would you learn in this role?”. If we have a long list of items in response to this, we’re likely not qualified. However, if we have almost nothing on our list, we’re over-qualified. Both situations will likely lead to a bad match for the individual and the organization.
In this case, while it appeared that Lance was over-qualified, he was actually learning a lot in his IT Director role. He was delivering great work via his team leadership, as well as his own growth of presentation and influence skills. What he didn’t deliver was a sense of how he was challenged, and correspondingly what he was learning or needed help with learning. This led others to question his authenticity, which in hindsight Lance realized was an accurate perception and also likely hurting his efforts to build trust and influence senior leadership. In short, the glorious Lance had no humanizing warts.
The Candor-man can
At this point in our coaching conversations, Lance began two new practices that were to prove transformational. First, he committed to voicing at least one task-related challenge he was facing in any one-on-one meetings with his team, his manager as well as senior leadership and asked for ideas from them to help solve these problems. He quickly found that in addition to receiving helpful ideas, the level of trust around him was increasing fast.
Second, he committed to identify at least one personal leadership development goal that he would openly share with all those around him, and to consistently ask others for their feedback about how they perceived his growth in this area. Those around him began to notice and appreciate his increased candor and commented on it frequently. To his surprise, showing the very human imperfection he had once hidden actually raised the esteem his team held him in.
As you might imagine, Lance continued to “knock it out of the park” together with his team. And now with increased authenticity, trust and influence, he began to seriously look towards promotion and what the “next park” would look like for him. In conclusion, warts win again.
