#03 We Lead From Our Wounds

Last month I caught myself mid-sentence, explaining to my team why I was explaining something to my team. Second-order over-explaining.

I stopped, genuinely confused about where that habit even came from. A face and a name came attached.

Turns out most leadership advice works like that. Someone hands you a rule to live by, and if you dig a few layers down, it's usually scar tissue from the past.

Three Weeks 

During one of my first internships, I was tasked with predicting which employees were about to quit. Interesting topic. Except, one small problem. 

I wasn’t made aware of this topic for 3 weeks. I asked every single day. "Come back later," she'd say, in the tone of someone who has never once regretted saying that.

End of week 3 was the project check-in with my manager’s manager. Every other intern from my batch already had two weeks of work to show by then. 

On the morning of my progress review, three weeks in, she finally handed me the topic and then I walked straight into a meeting where he tore into me for having "done nothing." I hadn't been given the chance to do anything. I chose not to explain the situation to him. 

This isn't a rare species, by the way. You've probably worked with a version of her yourself, the manager who treats context as a scavenger hunt. Or the one who says "figure it out" and genuinely believes that's mentorship. Withholding information rarely comes from malice. It's usually just someone who was never given a reason to think it mattered. 

I don't carry a grudge about it anymore, time is generally decent at sanding those down. But now I run my own team now I see myself walking someone through the reasoning behind a decision they didn't even ask about. "I always give context" isn't a leadership principle I picked up from a book. It's a woman I haven't spoken to in over a decade, shaping how I operate. Every. Single. Day.

Oh wait, there is more!

Hold on...  There's more to the story!

I built the actual model, an algorithm to flag who was likely to quit and when. Tested it against people who'd already left, then ran it live on five random employees as a final check. It landed a correct call on a fifteen-year veteran nobody expected to leave. I told my colleague this. A few months later, he handed in his resignation. 

The same colleague called me to give me the news. The model worked! It WORKED! Like properly worked! 

Months after I'd moved on, the same colleague called to tell me my manager had presented the whole thing as her own insight and been promoted for it. 

I don't remember most of the years I got properly credited for my work. I remember this one in painful, embarrassing detail.

What is leadership style, anyway?

Nobody actually builds a leadership style from scratch. Most of us just inherit one, straight from the person we swore we'd never turn into. 

And that's not automatically a bad thing. Some of my better instincts came from exactly this kind of injury. 

Here's a small exercise, if you want one. Next time you feel unreasonably strongly about doing something a very specific way, pause and picture the one manager who'd be furious if you did the opposite. If a face shows up immediately, that's a wound talking, and that's fine, wounds have earned the right to an opinion. 

Just make sure you're the one deciding whether to listen to it this time, not just handing it the mic by default. If nothing comes up and you genuinely just shrug, that one's actually yours. Keep it.

Fair warning, don't run this test on your marriage. 

Until next time.