Common Goal Leadership

I know I have been guilty of it. You’re stuck with a terrible boss at some level of your organization and they send out an email with some direction they want to take. Already as you open the email you’re thinking about what to write to your friends about how awful this idea is going to be.

Then it hits you.

This idea that your terrible boss has is actually pretty good. It’s better than good. You think they can actually drive the team in a positive new direction with this plan. And you hate to admit it.

Bad leaders can be bad because they are untrained, don’t care, incompetent, or (what I believe is most often the case) they aren’t driving the team in a unified direction. But this article isn’t about how to turn those bad leaders into good ones. Because in some cases, that just can’t happen. Instead, it’s how you can positively interact with those misguided leaders.

Here are three things you can do when faced with poor leaders.

Reinforcing the Positive Behavior

I worked under a supervisor who was a long-standing leader in my organization. She knew her way around the administrative policy. She had been around long enough that she was able to successfully network with the right people to solve problems. What made her a bad leader was she was incompetent in her role and she couldn’t make a firm decision. 

Our team fulfilled a very technical aspect of the larger organization and she did not understand it. That wasn’t her fault and she recognized that shortfall. To compensate, she leaned on the team to voice their own opinions in this area. That would have been a strength if I did not recognize it for the next weakness manifesting itself.

She was easily swayed. If higher HQ leaned on her, she leaned on the team. And if the team pushed back against the HQ direction, she bent the other way and grated against HQ. The same was true in smaller personnel issues on the team. It was hard to get a ruling on a matter because if someone had the loudest voice, they were apt to win. This led to people raising their voices instead of seeking a common direction.

I often read her missives with a critical eye but one day I realized she had a brain wave. I immediately called her and told her how positive her idea was and tried to strengthen her resolve to stick with the direction she chose. It wasn’t necessarily that I was now trying to be the convincing voice, but that her idea had genuinely been her own and I wanted her to know that she should take ownership and pride.

Solidifying Your Own Goal

If you have a leader who doesn’t guide the team towards a clearly defined goal, loads of mishaps and costly mistakes are bound to ensue. People will be inefficient, projects will be haphazard, and bosses will criticize employees who don’t understand what they should be doing.

Unfortunately, it isn’t up to you to define the organization’s goal. You would quickly come into conflict on multiple levels. Instead, you need to identify your own individual goal. It isn’t ideal. It isn’t the best way to do business. But you need to sit down and strategize what your team’s goal MIGHT be, then what your own role within that team would be.

Once you have that, you can effectively drive forward. You may even drag some others into your wake. If you find yourself standing in front of the man (or woman) and being told to realign, well, that’s good! It means you are closer to identifying what the team’s goal is!

Demonstrating Good Leadership

I was working as an effective leader on a team. We had quality leadership and a clearly defined goal. Things were humming along nicely. The problem was me. 

I got called into the boss one afternoon and she told me that since I was highly valued, people would view my opinion as canon. If I gossiped or criticized, it would encourage infighting and conflict. Others who had smaller roles had the margins to joke about various subjects, she said, but the higher up you go, the less leeway you have.

It was a valuable lesson, and one I will not soon forget. Captain Miller, Tom Hanks’ character in Saving Private Ryan, remarks to the squad he is leading, “Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer… I don’t gripe to you.” It’s the same lesson in a different shell. 

Maybe you’re not the leader of the team, but consider your voice. Consider its weight.

When I led my own team, there were often people who thought dominating a conversation was the way to convince others (I had taken over from the poor leader in the first example!). I sat down with some of the heavyweights. These were high performers who had a lot of established respect. I wanted them to help check each other. I told them as much in the annual performance check-ins.

“When John gets critical of Debbie, I need your help. You have a strong voice. Others may not be able to contradict John, but you can. Step in. You are a proverbial hippo and can drive our team in a positive direction.”

I got my team moving towards the goal I wanted and when one strong voice stepped out of line, I had the others ready to step in and corral the misstep back on track.

Perhaps you don’t have the power to remove a bad leader. But not every decision that person makes is automatically a bad one. Conversely, good leaders aren’t immune to bad decisions. The real nugget here is that the same three tools can be used for a good leader who may have lost her way.

What can you do in your team to help drive them in a positive direction, even if you can’t set that goal yourself?