When you’re the boss – becoming the grown-up in your team

As I sit, I’m keeping one eye on the clock – I’ll be dashing out of the door in 40 minutes or so to sing Carmina Burana at the Barbican concert hall in London this evening.

I have fond memories of this piece from my early days with the London Symphony Chorus.  Back then it was a staple in our schedule – Richard Hickox used to start the year with this crowd puller, which has been used by any number of advertisers over the years for its great tunes.  Popularity didn’t stand in the way of high standards – Richard was famous for rehearsing relentlessly.  I remember rehearsing the semi chorus sections until the pianissimi were unfeasibly quiet as well as tutti rehearsals that ran to the last minute of our allocated rehearsal time – if not a little longer.  In those days, Richard would also give us a final ‘pep talk’ before the concert to remind us of the spirit of the piece and encourage us to sing well.  We were told this was a great piece, and we believed it.  We were prepared to make it a great performance, and we did.

Now, given that I joined the chorus in 1986 (or was it 1987?) you could certainly accuse me of a touch of nostalgia.  Those were the days.  But something else is also on my mind.  Recently, I was struck when a client of mine told me how disconcerting it had been for her to discover just how much weight members of her team placed on all sorts of comments she made.  The implication for her was this:  she was setting the tone for her team without even realising it.  If she expressed frustration about her boss’s latest initiative within earshot of her team she was sending the signal that it wasn’t something to be taken seriously.  If she responded to a mistake by one of her team members before she processed her initial emotions – well, the rebuke she made might cut deep for her team member and the effect would stay long after she’d dealt with the issues arising and got over her initial concerns.  It came as a shock to her to realise the impact of her comments.

My client was discovering the symbolic importance of her role as a leader.  The fact that she held this role, rather than anything about her in particular, meant that people looked to her for – well, a lead.  Effectively, she had become for her team members a kind of ‘parent at work’.  Her team members were projecting onto her all kind of expectations of what such a ‘parent’ should be.  One of their expectations was that she would know best so they took her views seriously.  (And in case you find this idea rather fanciful or my client’s experience an exception, you might like to dive into the research which shows that a leader has a significant impact on the climate in a team and that this, in turn, affects performance.  Try Goleman’s The New Leaders for an easily accessible read or Litwin and Stringer’s Motivation and Organizational Climate to dive deeper into the statistics).

What implications does all this have for my client?  Already she had become conscious of the impact of her comments.  She knew she had to choose her comments more carefully.  This is what is called ‘framing’ in the field of NLP (or neuro-linguistic programming) and it does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s about the frame you put around something you talk about.  The boss’s new initiative?  Well, it could be ‘just one more mad idea from the boss to keep us from our day jobs’ or it could be ‘a way to accelerate our progress towards our sales target’.  And if you can’t see the benefit of an initiative from the boss – well, you might want to thrash that out with your boss before you start talking to your team or at least to process your emotions.  In a sense, it’s this processing that makes you the ‘parent’ or the ‘grown-up’ in the team.

And Carmina Burana?  ‘That tired old piece’ or ‘a piece that continues to stimulate the senses and capture the imagination’.  In case you’d like to decide for yourself, click here to listen to an extract.  Meantime, I’m off to sing.    

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *