Changing your behaviour: getting out of Boss Mode

Photo credit: Sam Pak via Unsplash

Two of the most difficult transitions I have had to make in my career have been due to changes in my perception of what it means to be a leader.

The first came when I moved from a management role to a leadership role. This transition is rarely recognised and often poorly understood, especially in specialist fields such as technology. Notoriously, great technologists are frequently left to flounder when they are promoted to become managers. It’s not surprising that there is even less support when they cross the fuzzy boundary from management to leadership.

It’s disconcerting, therefore, when it slowly dawns on you that, as you become a leader, people are looking to you for direction not just on what to do, and how to do it, but also on why they should be doing it at all. You come to realise that purpose, direction and culture, things which you previously inherited, or which seemed to grow around you organically, are in your hands.

It is natural, therefore, for new leaders to feel that they must develop confidence and certainty. They might not know what they are doing, but they are reluctant to reveal that to others. Imposter syndrome seems to come with the job, and it feels as if your bluff may be called at any moment. It is tempting to fake it until you make it, to act as if you have confidence and certainty, until they become habits.

It is small wonder that many leaders become simultaneously rigid and fragile: fearful of seeming to need advice, and hostile when challenged.

Sometimes this leads them to encounter the second transition, and the second challenge. For most of my career, I’ve had the privilege of leading teams of specialists, experts whose job it is to know more than me, or anybody else, about their field. These can be challenging teams to lead, as their members are full of opinions, confident in their expertise - and rarely agree with each other.

For too long, especially in my early years of  leadership, I assumed that my role was to preside over this intellectual chaos by being firm and directive, by corralling the team and lining them up behind a direction. I assumed that I needed to have the final say in all disputes, and that I needed to become some kind of super-expert, chasing the impossible goal of knowing more than anybody else.

My experience may be limited to expert, technical teams, but I think that most leaders have similar experiences: that the pressure of people seeking direction and purpose leads them to feel that they need to be the boss - with all that implies.

The transition came for me when I reflected on which meetings went well and which meetings went badly. Meetings, of course, are not the sum total of leading, but they are essential parts of the organisational metabolism. And what I noticed was that the least effective meetings were those when I did most of the speaking, claimed authority and attempted to answer all the questions, and the most effective meetings were those when I provided a platform for the experts in the team, supported them when things got tricky, and asked questions more than I answered them. It made me realise that, while it was my job to set strategy, culture and purpose, part of that strategy, culture and purpose was creating space for smart people to do their best work.

I cannot claim to always be true to this model of leadership, but I try, and also try to spot when I fall back into ‘boss mode’.

I believe that this second transition is particularly important for people who aspire to be enterprise AI leaders. Until now, leaders often believed that they understood the mechanics and operations of their organisations, because they spent their career learning them. I believe that understanding is often an illusion, because the mechanics and operations of organisations are built out of technology which most leaders don’t understand. That illusion has been challenged by multiple waves of disruptive technology - and AI may be the wave that shatters it.

This means that many leaders are now attempting to transform their organisations using forces which did not exist when they started their careers, technologies which are still young, and methods which no-one has invented. They will need to hire specialists, and create environments that enable those specialists to flourish. They will need to give space to their existing leadership team to share ideas and express concerns.

The traditional authoritative, confident, certain ‘boss mode’ has supposedly been out of fashion for some time. But leaders frequently let themselves be pushed back into it by their expectations and the expectations of others: I know that I have.

If we are to become enterprise AI leaders, it is time to discard boss mode, and to let humility and curiosity into the Boardroom.